Jeff Atwood's recent data-loss story is a good reminder of why you should do off-site backups. But what if you just accidentally rm'ed a file, or saved over it's contents with bad data? It's a lot of work to do a full backup recovery of your entire system just to get back one file. Isn't there an easier way?

Local Snapshotting: not perfect, but super ...

Problem:

The MacBook Pro has ridiculously sharp edges. After using it for a hour my wrists had annoying (and painful) indentation lines on them. It doesn't bother everyone, but I'm not the only one.

Solution:

It's pretty easy to shave that ...

I have Verizon Avenue DSL, the worst ISP I've ever had, so I've gotten to learn a few tricks on how to troubleshoot my internet problems. Here are the steps:

Can you ping the outside world?

Try pinging a well-known IP address like 4.2.2.2

• In Windows: Click Start -> Run... -> cmd -> type "ping -n 50 4.2.2.2"
• In Linux/Mac: Open a Terminal and ...

I've just realized what's wrong with our government: it's run by politicians. Seriously though, hear me out. The qualities that make a good politician aren't the qualities that make an ideal government official.

Here are the traits that make a successful politian:

→ Electability

Because of our media-based election system, you can't get into office unless you have a good on-camera personality, have the gift of gab, and are ...

If you're like me, you have a bunch of mp3s (that you legitmately obtained from your CD's - ahem) in a neatly organized directory tree on your hard drive. And it's a breeze to navigate, play, backup, and share.
Now you've got an iPod and/or a Mac, and you want to take the plunge and use iTunes - but your puny little file-based UNIX-loving brain can't ...

Note: I'm not a doctor, zealot, or trying to sell anything - I'm just a regular guy summarizing all the research I did on this topic.
There seems to be a lot of controversy about what kind of water people should be drinking and cooking their food with:

• tap water
• natural "spring" or "rain" water
• filtered, reverse-osmosis, or other cleansed/purified/low-mineral water
• distilled water

The controversy is about the good ...

Imagine you are sitting in front of a machine named "home" that has a keyboard, mouse, display, and is running an X server. Now you open a terminal and ssh to a machine called "remote" (which doesn't need to have an X server running), and run a program like "firefox" which pops a window in your screen. How does this all work?


First, let's clear up the client/server ...