Blog Backup. Why I continue to stick with blogger – WERBLOG – Back from the Dead. With blogger I get a little disaster recovery capability – if my server explodes tomorrow, the content is up in blogger servers, and if blogger goes toes up tomorrow, the content is on my server. If i move to MT or Radio, then I have to take on a backup burden too, and experience has shown that I suck at backup (like many people).

TCPView. Rob turned me onto TCPView, a nice windows UI that is the moral equivalent of netstat -o.

Hard Disks+Broadband vs DVDs. Joshua wonders why people bother with trying to burn DVDs. I had a similar experience recently. I had to get a copy of a video to someone. After capturing it from my camera, I went thru the trouble of trying to get it back on a DVD, worrying about +R/-R formats, hoping the DVD would work in their player, etc. And then had an aha moment and just jammed the video in 4-5 different encodings on my website. Worked great. Leave the DVD burning to someone who wants to screw around with DVD compat issues.

Shared Browsing. I have been using the Application Sharing feature of MSN Messenger a lot recently. It is a great homework and college app tool, we can sit together and look at online apps, or at various homework searches. But there are some things I hate about it. A, it is such overkill. Tons of code loads and then the entire app window gets scraped, rendered into some protocol, and sent remotely, where a ton of code on the other machine receives and rerenders. B, it is so squirelly. All kinds of paint problems on the receiving end – Windows just doesn’t seem that happy with this crazy idea. C, the interface is absolutely unintelligible. I only understand it because, well, I used to manage the team. My kids think it is the goofiest software. I can’t even imagine explaining it to my dad.

I’d like a simpler, lighter-weight solution. The data I really need to pass between machines is just the URL, cookie data, and some SSL data i think. Looking for solutions on the web – ezWebCar -- hmm doesn’t handle ssl, maybe for good reasons. But makes it useless for college apps. Talisma has a product which handles SSL but seems enterprise focused. There are other enterprise focused solutions floating around too like Wicom. Then there are classroom focused solutions like webwisdom. But way heavier than I need.

Maybe I should go lower-tech and just use a combo of KVM boxes and splitters to share the screen. Probably would be more robust than all the software solutions.

Mechanical Engineering. A compendium of the ways to translate rotational motion into linear motion. Super helpful for Halloween. I need the similar compendium now for converting motion in one direction into motion in another direction, and multiplication of motion.

Fake flames. I have some little fake flame effects but here are some nice 4’-6’ size fake flamers – at HollywoodDJ and at Chauvet [PDF].

Script Sandbox. I really need some sort of sandbox for my server scripts. Some environment that I can run PHP/Perl/etc scripts in for a month or so before I let them have full access to my system. Some way to carefully track their disk usage, net usage for errors and for deviant behaviour. I need to start searching for such a thing.

Multiple PCs in the Home. Something I am starting to wonder about lately – I originally thought that the emergence of multi-PC homes would be a huge boon for Microsoft. And in the short term it is. But long term I wonder. The more PCs I have in my home, the more driven I am to get data off the PCs and get it centralized on servers. With a clean self-descriptive data format so that the data is usable from any PC. And get devices off individual PCs and get them on the net so they are usable from anywhere. And move to very lightweight apps that are easy to deploy and manage on all the PCs. And move to cheap apps since I can’t afford Office licenses for all my machines. In the long run, it seems like this will all play more to appliance vendors, to other device providers, and to alternative app providers, more than it will play to Microsoft.

Public Officials and Email. Maybe all public communication needs to happen in a blog or wiki – Judge rules council e-mails broke law

DYMO LabelWriter 330 Turbo. Used the DYMO LabelWriter 330 Turbo to generate all our mailing labels this Christmas. Very solid unit, very happy with.

Atlas Office in Seattle Closing. A sign of the stress in the VC market – Atlas Venture slashes size of fund, cuts staff

Color Scheme Designer. Might be worth trying to figure out color schemes for pages since I have no abilities in this domain – download page at myWebAttack. OK I tried it. Pretty cheesy software. Not clear that it is smarter than I am by far on color choices.

Haloscan comments. I need to grok this – seems valuable – phil ringnalda dot com: Robust, accessible HaloScan comment links

Privacy Rings and Selective Privacy. Dead on – pseudorandom – a crying need.