Outlook PST is backup-hostile

Backup is important. We all know that. Of course I backup! Except that sometimes I don't.

My external hard disk crashed a few weeks ago. Literally crashed - it will, unprotected, from about 1 meter high. It contained several years worth of my digital photos.

Of course I had it backed up, only not recently… recovering the damage was a prohibitively
expensive and unpleasant experience.

I've gotten much better at backing up since then. I've looked at several different backup solutions, and end up settling for SyncBackSE, which is backing up the data to a low-cost NAS storage. Which is probably a reasonable solution.

But the solution I'd really like to use is one of these online backup solutions, like Carobonite or others. I don't want my backup to reside on my home network. I don't want to worry about setting it up and maintaining it. I'd love to have my stuff accessible when I'm not connected to my home network. And online backup solutions can do all that.

And the number one reason I can't do that this is Microsoft Outlook and its monolithic PST file. I am hooked on Microsoft's Outlook, I've been using it for years and I love its features and smooth integration. But Outlook stores its data in a single binary file, which can get rather large.

My 3.85 Gigabyte will take years (alright, not years, but a very very long time) to backup over an Internet connection. But worse then that - every new email that I receive or send, or any other minor change will cause this file to be marked as "needing backup", and the entire 3.85 GB will need to be re-transferred.

I will be switching to another desktop email solution the moment I find one that (a) allows me to read, write and search my emails, calendar information, contacts and tasks when I'm offline and (b) uses a more sensible and backup-friendly storage scheme.

Toys for men

When I first tried Gillette's new Fusion blade, I loved it so much that I felt an urge to tell someone about it. And then I forgot :)

But when I saw this question on Yedda, I knew I have to answer it:

Changing from Mach3 to Fusion

I'm considering changing from Mach3 to Fusion.

Has anyone tried it yet? Is it really better than Mach3 ?

Topics: men, fusion, shaving, razors, gillette, mach3

Asked by ekuiro on February 12, 2007

View the entire discussion on Yedda

And here is my answer:

Changing from Mach3 to Fusion

Well, having "upgraded" in the past from Gillette Sensor to the Sensor Excel, and then to the Mach 3, and being very happy with the Mach 3, I promised myself that this time I will not give in to Gillette's marketing blitz and will refrain from moving to the Fusion.

Surprisingly enough, I failed, and found myself grabbing it just before approaching the checkout at the drugstore. Oh well. A man gotta have his gadgets.

Having used it for a few days now though, I am glad I did this! The Fusion is actually very good. The blades are excellent and result in a smoother shave, the plastics around them feel much better, and the vibration thingie is significantly stronger then before.

The coolest thing though is the extra blade at the back, which lets you explore facial angles where no blade has been before :

Topics: men, fusion, shaving, razors, gillette, mach3

Answered by Yaniv on February 13, 2007

View the entire discussion on Yedda

Technorati Tags: Yedda Gillette Fusion Gillette+Fusion

Blogger labels and Technorati tags

Several weeks ago I've upgraded my blog from the old blogger interface to the new one. It was quite painful at the time, but hey, how can I not try a new toy.

The new blogger interface supports tags labels. The labels are even marked with the Rel-Tag microformat.

Too bad that the migration process did not migrate my Technorati tags (which are also marked with Rel-Tag) to Google labels. It would have been a considerate move on Google's part, especially when they took their time adding this now-standard rel-tag support.

So, I went and manually edited the older posts, copying the Technorati tags to that nice comfy Labels box.

And now Blogger is republishing my entire feed.

Oh well. Sorry for the mess!

"28% of Net users tag" ?

David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (and one of my favorite RSS feeds) points on Joho the Blog to a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report, by Lee Rainie, and summarizes it with the title "28% of Net users tag".

Back when we started Yedda, the choice to go with free form tagging was a non-trivial one. Tagging was not yet mainstream, and the concept often met objections from early testers.

Still, we chose to go with free form tagging because we strongly believed that this is the only approach that can support the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of human interests & knowledge.

However, we quickly noticed that the word "tag" often resulted in a "huh?" blank stare, so one compromise that we did make is renaming it from "Tags" to "Topics" – surprisingly enough (or not), this choice had an immediate positive impact on people's acceptance of this approach.

"28% of Net users tag" sounds great. It sounds very mainstream, and it makes me feel good about our choice. But further reading reveals that the actual question that was asked is:

Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post

Well, categorization is very different from tagging. In fact, the word is often used to describe a process that, while having the same objective, is quite the opposite of free form tagging. (Well, in Wikipedia-speak, the term categorization applies to both activities. But you get my drift. I assume that the people who answered this question did not consult with Wikipedia first).

So, while the fact that %28 of Net users actually make the effort to add that meta-data to their content and to other people content (be it in the form of categories or of free-form tags) is great, I don't think it can be summarized with "28% of Net users tag".

It'd be interesting to see a similar report focusing on free form tagging. Pew?

Technorati Tags: Tagging David+Weinberger Yedda

Flickr Machine Tags

Flickr recently announced a new feature called "machine tags". From their announcement:

"Machine tags" is the technical term for the extra hamsters we've added to the Flickr servers to formalize how these sorts of tags are treated. I've included a "Ceci n'est pas un FAQ" below with all the details.

Machine tags follow a lightweight format:

namespace:predice=value

The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to ('geo', 'flickr', etc.) The predicate is name of the property for a namespace ('latitude', 'user', etc.) The value is, well, the value.

Like tags, there are no rules for machine tags beyond the syntax to specify the parts of a machine tag

Tags that follow this format are automatically grouped under "machine tags" in the Flickr user interface, and can be hidden or shown by the user.

Machine tags, while not having a name, have been around for a while, their usage driven by people's urge to organize tags and give them specific semantics - and then, to build applications on top of this, assuming this specific semantics. I've discussed this a while ago, when I was younger. Back then, I suggested the name "applitags" for this feature, and suggested a slightly different format for differentiating Machine Tags (or applitags) from People Tags:

x:namespace.tag[=value]

I do wish the Flickr folks would have gone a step further and formalized the namespacing issue as well, as this would have made software built on top of Machine Tags more reliable. Still, this is an important move, coming from one of the tags-trend-setting players.

Are we re-building XML from the ground up all over again though?

Technorati Tags: flickr Machine+Tags applitags XML tagging

Wishood - make them, grant them, exchange them.

Wishood wants to help you fulfill your wishes. It's one of those simple, pure ideas. Wishes - make them, grant them, exchange them.

I've seen earlier versions of Wishood, but this one, with the cool Wisherizers is a significant step forward.

Wishood is young, and these folks still have some more work to do (say, when will I be able to embed my wish list in my blog?). But it's slick, fun, and hey - what better way is there to start off 2007 then by making someone's wish come true?

Check them out, or read a more thorough review over at Go2Web2.

Technoarti tags: startup web2.0 wishood

5 things & 5 taps

People are people are people. Just put in place an open-ended platform, the basic means for communication and as few rules as possible, and they quickly turn it into one of the oldest form of human interaction – a game!

You can see this happening all over the place, with Flickr being a prime example. There are so many different "games" taking place on Flickr at any given time, usually involving tagging and groups. These games spread informally, through one person virtually tapping the virtual shoulder of another, usually accompanied with a link that explains what the game is about. The game entry barriers are very low – tag your own stuff or someone else, post a comment with a pre-agreed template, etc.

Now there is a game spreading through the blogosphere, and my shoulder has been tapped by the wonderful Deborah Schultz. And in the spirit of the game, I will now proceed to tell you five things you may not know about me, and then tap the virtual shoulders of five other bloggers:

1. I often forget my own phone number, but I remember the value of PI up to the 8 decimal digit. Go figure.
2. I am not good with backups of my personal stuff. This just cost me $2300 (hard disk recovery fees) last week.
3. I love what I do. But if I couldn't do what I do, I'd want to be an architect.
4. By the time I finish reading the time from an analog watch, it's usually already at least 1 or 2 minutes past the time I started trying to read it.
5. I love good movies - or any movie, no matter how bad it is, that contains anything that can be labeled Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

Tap time:

Tara Hunt, Eszter Hargittai, Derek Anderson, Kaliya Hamlin, Uri Baruchin

Technorati tags: DerekAnderson EszterHargittai KaliyaHamlin TaraHunt UriBaruchin blog-tag