An Un-Passive Web

• Justin Blanton | Use Dropbox to sync MarsEdit across multiple machines
  
  
• Mars Edit: Syncing Local Drafts on two or more computers | Nina Stawski

When we join together in the Internet.

easier YouTube download

GoogleSystems excellent bookmarklet generates an mp4 download link for YouTube videos.

Industry does not secure data

I age myself to say Brian Livingston has been around a long time. Here's Livingston's explanation to his subscribers, sad I think, about crash recovery.

Livingston fittingly titles it Public Deprived:

Thankfully, we're a bit fanatical about backups here. Not only does our server make a nightly backup, which is stored deep beneath a mountain somewhere. It also communicates in real-time with a replication server that we keep far away from the Web server.

As it was programmed to do, our replication server had preserved every single transaction that had been committed to our database. That included a subscription by some lucky person just seconds before the 12:10 a.m. disk crash.

To get our server back to normal, all we had to do was swap in three spare drives (yes, we had them on hand), reinstall our operating system and code, and repopulate our database from the replication machine.

Believe me, all this takes more than 60 minutes. Several WS staffers worked day and night Oct. 13 and 14 to restore our server and bring you today's articles. We're ba-a-a-ck!

Being down for 48 hours was a living hell,

Thirty years I laugh and laugh. Tears included.

I hereby declare the PC industry failed at its beginning and fails now to give a shit about our data. Where would we find several workers to recover our lost data? Most of us remain in living hell because after many years there's similar and poor solutions protecting our data.

computer with a key

Encrypt-Stick [about $40] allows you to create secure vaults on your PC and uses a USB flash drive as the key. To access your documents on the PC the system needs both the special encrypted USB flash and a password so if you lose your laptop, the files on your hard drive can’t be read.

why encrypt?

From PCWorld: The growing use of encryption software... has led Microsoft to develop a set of tools that law enforcement agents can use to get around the software.

Force Google Search Options

Google's new Search Options, i.e. Recent Results, do not appear on the left by default.

To make Google's Search Options permanent, the parameter name is 'tbo' and the switch is '1'.

Jason at Lifehacker figured out you can simply add a space and &tbo=1 to the end of the Google search URL.

But what about embedded search in Firefox 3.5?

In the comments, gigitek figured out how to edit c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\google.xml. Add the line in red using Notepad or any clean .xml editor, not your word processor.

param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"
param name="ie" value="utf-8"
param name="oe" value="utf-8"
param name="aq" value="t"
param name="tbo" value="1"

But there's another procedure in order to force Firefox to use your new google.xml file.

1. Close Firefox
2. Delete google.xml
3. Open Firefox without the google.xml file
4. Close Firefox
5. Save your customized google.xml file
6. Open Firefox

If all goes berserk, search for a replacement google.xml provided at mozilla.com and try again.

Surfing Safely

From simple desktop hygiene, er, surfing safety, to complex hash signatures, here's a firm synopsis of passwords.

Vanilla broadband speeds

Broadband speed claims:

So it's not so much that they're lying -- it's really more that they're speaking sweet nothings, which is perfectly legal (and disingenuous).

Us geeks know that network performance isn't a scalar (math) quantity. Bigger numbers don't mean shit. It's the matrix of bandwidth (in bytes), latency (in milliseconds), packet loss (a percentage), all averaged over a long enough time-frame (hour, day, week, month, or billing cycle) to account for all systemic variables (bandwidth caps, network load averages, etc) is what matters.