You may have noticed that my last 3 posts were about free software. I like free stuff. Everyone likes free stuff. Why talk about free stuff? A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need.

I took the plunge and decided to upgrade to Mac OS 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard this weekend. Here’s how it went… Initially I made sure I had two full cloned and boot-able backups that I made with CCC. After this I actually tried booting off them just to make sure. Having backups before such a major upgrade is a mandatory step for all people whom undertake any OS upgrade. Secondly I decided on the upgrade path.

I am coming back to earth with my posts, and thinking about Google. They are growing by acquiring technology and companies. They release new products like the Java/Linux based Android (Is linking to google news about Google considered irony?!). How long before Google exceed Microsoft? I remember when their shares where $100. Then months ago I was discussing with friends that $600 was an amazing price to reach. Then weeks ago was amazed that each share had grown from $600 to $670.

With my recent loss, I had thought about, and seen other people, decentralising data. Luckily I’ve already got an email and RSS feed backup in place. As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two. Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader.

Last Friday at work my Mac (OS X 10.4) laptop HDD died. After the purchase of an extra external HDD and some custom recovery software, Data Rescue II, I tried to recover as much as I could. The bad news is the Hard drive had not just gotten corrupted, but failed. After an attempt to clone it to a second drive for analysis, and during my recovery attempt it developed the click of death.

I’m a twitter user, and this morning came across an enterprising web-site called Melbourne Transport. They use the twitter handle @MelbTransport to publish line and train alerts for Melbourne’s Connex train services. This appears to be the outcome of someones frustration with the dreadful SMS alerts services that Connex provide. Connex have their own SMS alert system, which states “From Monday to Friday, between 6am and 8pm, we provide instant text messaging to mobile phones with up-to-the-minute information on any train that is more than 15 minutes off schedule”.

Telstra recently upgraded their mobile broadband speeds to give “… typical speeds of 550kbps to 3Mbps, bursting up to 6Mbps in CBD, metro and other areas with our BigPond wireless devices on a Super G Fast plan” While I applaud the expanded infrastructure their pricing makes it useless. Take a look at their business pricing for wireless data: Price per month Data allowance Excess cost per MB $5 5 MB $1.

So many people have written long and excellent examples of an internet application layer filtering solution. However, what if you need a quick and simple internet filtering solution? Want to block out all the garbage for the younger generation? Look no further than Dansguardian. I’ll assume you love OpenBSD as well, and have the following in place: OpenBSD running as your router, multi-homed the same machine running pf the same machine with squid installed and working as a transparent proxy Packet filtering is online, your internet access works from the router and from an internal host with your squid working transparently wget installed Download the latest beta from dansguardian.

It is really amaing what a “branded” piece of computer equipment can do compared to its 1/2 price no-name competitor. 3 Years ago I purchased a 400W PSU. It suited the PC system fine, but when I got my new Leadtek Geforce 7 series card, it had a molex power connector on it which required dedicated power direct from the PSU. The bus power is just not up to speed o supply this Graphics Beast to drive all those pixels.