MrDigital's Adventures in Computing

OK, I've been waiting for my chance to try out Dropbox from the first moment I saw their presentation video on their website. I got my beta invitation a few days ago and I've been actively playing with it since.

I'm in love with this system.  I've used services such as Foldershare in the past, but just haven't been very happy with it overall.  I have multiple Macs and the Foldershare client hasn't been updated since...forever and it just doesn't work very well on my new iMac at home. 

Dropbox runs awesome on both my Intel iMac and my G4 powered iBook as well as running very smooth on both my Windows XP and Windows Vista boxes, even Vista 64 has no issues.  They really are not kidding when they say that their system is fast.  Obviously when adding a new computer to sync it has to download everything off the system intially but just doing your day to day stuff is extremely quick and not really even noticable that it's doing anything.

I actually don't have anything negative to say at all about Dropbox right now.  The beta accounts are limited to 2GB of storage in your Dropbox but they said that they will have larger paid plans later.  I just hope they are reasonably priced because I want to continue to use this after beta and might need more than 2GB by then.

Here is a screenshot of the little Dropbox icon running in the system tray on Vista x64


I don't have access to my home Mac right now but it's the same icon in the top bar.

When you right click you get a small menu:


When you Open my Dropbx you get the folder list of files you have there, like so:

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I just got my Dropbox private beta invite.  I will start evaluation very soon and write more details later.

Apple today released version 10.5.4 of Leopard.  Some of the improvements included this time around include stuff for Airport, iCal, Safari and Spaces.  Of course, there are always a bunch of other fixes too.

You can get all the details at the following official site:

About the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update

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I'm a sucker for punishment it seems, though I'm always looking for the latest new piece of software or ways to improve my site somehow.  I really need to start updating more frequently.  Maybe I'll try making it a point to make a new entry every week...  We'll see how that goes. :)

So anyway.  I've moved the system to the Movable Type platform.  This is a pretty nice system and I do like what it has, and I've wanted to implement the Disqus comment system.

Backups seem to be all the rage now. One of Apple's biggest new features of their new Leopard operation system for the Mac is Time Machine. An automatic and seamless (and awesome) backup program that allows you to go back in time to recover files and other stuff that may have been deleted. It even allows a full system restore if you lose your entire hard drive, and you're always lose an hour's work at most if you have to recover anything.

This evening I'll speak a little about Time Machine but look at some Linux and Windows alternatives too.

First, Time Machine. You can check this link for the whole spiel, but basically it allows you to plug in an external hard drive and use it to backup your entire system, all your photos, music, everything. Then it's a simple matter of clicking the little Time Machine program in the dock to recover files. If you know what you're missing you can even put that in as a search. Pretty cool stuff. It's amazing how easy and automatic it all is and completely seamless to the user and I feel that's really important.

OK, now I'll just briefly mention a Linux solution for this. It's called Flyback. It's a relatively new project for linux and it's inspired by Time Machine. You can find it at this link with full instruction on installation and usage.

For Windows, well. I'm not really sure of an "easy" way. Windows has built in software to do backups, but nothing with the simplicity of Time Machine or even Flyback. Vista makes it a little better, but I still don't recommend Vista to users. At least not yet. In Vista it uses Volume Shadow Copy to keep versions of your files and if you also use the Vista backup utility to an external drive then you can restore files from those also through the Windows Explorer (My Computer, etc). I'm going to need to look into some of the Windows options that might be easy for users. I personally use a piece of software called GoodSync to make a copy of important folders such as My Documents etc to an external hard drive. I also use Mozy (links on this page) to keep a backup of really important Windows files.

I was looking through my old posts here and thought I'd give an update on what online backup systems I was still using. I'm have to admit I'm still using Mozy Online Backup. It works great, it's all automatic and I don't have to wonder if my super important files are safe or not. I don't think online only backup is the way to go though, it is just another measure to be safe. If you don't have a readily available external hard drive handy though, it's a great way to get started.

I did a bunch of testing this evening between the new VirtualBox 1.5 and VMware server and found something interesting.

Virtualbox seems nice, but networking in it is a pain in the arse!  I can only get Windows guests to properly network and then it's only through NAT (hiding behind your host PC's IP address).  Various Linux guest images that I have (ArchLinux, Debian) find the network adapters, and can get DHCP assigned IP addresses but will NOT go out to the Internet to finish installing/etc.  That's pretty useless.  Trying to bridge (make the virtual network card like another physical computer on the network) is a joke with VirtualBox.  It does not work "out of the box" and the howtos are long and really turn me off.  Maybe my attention span is to short but I didn't feel like doing all those instructions to make it work when VMware "just works".

First point about VMware.  Any kind of networking functions you need to do work right out of the box, no problem whatsoever.  Need NAT?  OK.  Need bridging?  No problem.  It simply does what it's supposed to.  Innotek has catching up to do in this regard, big time.

Then I started using the same linux images that I had (ArchLinux and Debian, I wanted my tests to be the same systems) and found VMware server to be much, much faster on the Linux systems.  We're talking minutes.  Booting ArchLinux to get to a point you can start going through the install steps took my system about 3-5 minutes (I didn't use a stopwatch).  Using the same ISO file in VMware it took, oh maybe 30 seconds to get to the same place.  Debian was also slow in VirtualBox, but the video refresh was slower in VMware, which didn't effect how quickly the machine ran.  (remember, nothing is even installed on any virtual hard disks yet!  My linux installs can't go out to the Internet using VirtualBox, remember?)

VMware however looses points on having an Integrated seamless desktop.  It's pretty sweet being able to have a windows taskbar/start button at the bottom of my linux screen but be out of the way otherwise.  VMware has catching up to do here.

Windows guests seemed to perform approximately the same.  Fairly quick install, load time and response times on both VirtualBox and VMware.  This goes for both Windows XP and Vista.

One other difference I found, but not directly testable here.  VMare supports running 64bit guests if your 64bit CPU supports that particular function.  Virtualbox I don't believe will run 64bit guests at all.  Period.  This is unverified though and I must test for myself at work though since my new tower does support the vmware 64bit guest function.

More testing will be performed on a 64bit system when possible.

Wow, that was long.  Hope that gives you some insight...

This is my first post about any game on this blog so I hope it's worthwhile.

I had been following a new game for quite a while now and it finally came out yesterday and I had the opportunity to pick up a copy. This game is known as Bioshock (as if you couldn't tell that from the title of this post). This has been labeled as a "shooter" game but it's really so much more than that.

Bioshock comes from the creators of System Shock 2 which has somewhat of a cult following and it was definitely a very very creepy game. Super atmosphere etc. Bioshock delivers on all of that so far. The setting is in an underwater city built by a man that didn't fit in any current society of the 40s and 50s. He built a city that wasn't constrained by such trivial things such as morality or ethics. When you arrive to the city you can tell right away that something terrible has happened and now your caught in it too. I won't reveal any of the actual story I've learned so far but I can tell you that you will have to make "moral" choices at some point and this will begin to take you down certain roads whichever way you go.

The sound in Bioshock is perfect. If you stand in a safe place and crank up your sound you can hear the creaking of the water pressure, the running water somewhere off in the distance and maybe some electricity sparking nearby. It's fantastic. Voice work is also top notch from what I've heard and you also find these really cool little voice recordings all over the place which help reveal little bits of the story as you adventure forth.

Graphically the game is quite impressive. I'm running it on the Xbox 360 in High Definition since my gaming PC is not quite up to par anymore so that's what my system is right now. :) Anyway the whole things looks great. When the game first started I sat a couple minutes in the water before I realized I wasn't watching a cinematic anymore and that I could control the camera! :)

There are many what some would call RPG elements in the game, similar to SS2 and games such as Deus Ex. You can upgrade your character, your weapons and some physical abilities. Weaponry is a mix between "Plasmids" which are genetic alterations so you can do things like Telekinesis, fire from your fingers, electricity etc. You'll find these and more scattered about the city and can be changed out and such at various places on the levels. Conventional weapons are standard 1940s and 50s era weaponry. Pistol, "Tommy Gun" Machinegun and shotguns. I find myself switching between plasmids and weapons often as you can do things sort of like combos. Shock a bad guy then whack him with a wrench etc.

I have really enjoyed the time spent in the game thus far. Lets put it this way, I wrote this small post during my lunch and I can't wait to get off work today so I can immerse myself in the city of Rapture once again.

Link!

Here is a link to another blog that lists several very nice applications for Linux with instructions specifically for Ubuntu. Some of the applications are easier installed through Automatix but you can do it this way too. Some of the apps are not really what I'd recommend installing either but it's still worth checking out. I really should compile my own list soon. I'll add that to my to do list. :)

***UNFINISHED***

OK, third product. I will warn you now though. I haven't finished a good review of the product yet, only been able to review the local LAN backups and such. Once I get a friend to be a guinea pig for me I will update this with my results there.
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CrashPlan is a product that allows you to do on-site and off-site backups to location you trust. The problem some people have with many online backup services is they can't walk over to that company's data center and say "That's my backup". CrashPlan tries to fix this by allowing you to backup your data to a friend's computer at their house. This also helps with getting your data back faster in the case of an emergency so you don't have to wait for your internet connection to download stuff. This also solves the problem with privacy because any data sent to a backup is scrambled and encrypted before it leaves your computer so your best friend can't paruse any pr0n you're backing up nor look at your bank information. :)

In turn, you can become a backup buddy for your friend. He can backup his stuff to your computer. Sounds like a great system to me. My local network backups to/from some of my PCs and Macs have worked fine. I haven't yet been able to test backups to a real off-site location but if it works like FolderShare it should be a snap.

You can try the software fully featured free for 30 Days and after that you must buy the software. It's a one time license of $20 per PC you are backing up FROM. It would cost your backup friend NOTHING to keep accepting your backups. It would only cost them $20 if they want to backup also.

Check the site, watch the tour and see what you think. Sounds good and with backing up to friends you don't have to worry about size limitations and cost per month. You only have to be concerned with how much space you're taking up on your friends hard drive :)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. You can back up to as many friends as you can talk into installing the software. Redundancy!

I will update this post once I can test out this friend stuff and get some results.

***UNFINISHED***