Category Archives: Howto

Local Backups are Great

I use SuperDuper! to make daily backups to my local hard drive. Remote backup is important, but it’s always nice to have an easily-accessible way to recover from a hard drive disaster, especially when you need to fix the situation quickly. Your Backup Device Choosing the right hard drive to use for your local backup … (Continue reading →)


Automated Backups with Tarsnap

I remember reading about Tarsnap a couple of years ago, back when it was only an idea. I wasn’t too convinced about using a service that was in beta to back up my data, but I recently rediscovered that it had graduated to a full-blown product and signed up immediately. Tarsnap is an encrypted backup … (Continue reading →)


Pastebin From The Command-line

Pastebin.com is a utility for sharing snippets of text with anyone. The service is simple: go to pastebin.com, paste your text, click submit, and share the link. It’s useful for sharing time-saving snippets with you team, or for an impromptu, informal code review of changes that for one reason or another haven’t been committed yet … (Continue reading →)


I Love Weather

UPDATE: It seems that Yahoo! has changed their weather URL formats, which breaks the script that fetches the weather image. In order to fix it, go to Yahoo! Weather and enter your desired location. Once you have the correct page loaded, replace the URL in the script with this new one. The script should start … (Continue reading →)


New Beginnings

I recently started working at Mailtrust in Blacksburg, VA. Mailtrust is a division of Rackspace, a company that has been experiencing some astounding growth recently. One of the companies that Rackspace recently acquired is Slicehost. Last week, I decided to sign up for Slicehost hosting and move my website to this new server. I also … (Continue reading →)