Free Cult of Mac ebook!

I’d always been curious about the book Cult of Mac. The reviews and even the cover were very exciting, but I wasn’t sure if I’d like it enough to buy it. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the publisher No Starch Press has decided to give away the PDF version of the book.Now I can sample it on my smartphone first!

Harry Potter movies dissected

With the fifth Harry Potter movie out this week, and the final Harry Potter book launched next week, it’s only fitting that we take stock of just how much Harry Potter movies have evolved since the Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone in 2001.

See this video analysis on New York Times. 

Opening a door with a credit card

While I’ve always seen it being done on TV and in the movies (even on supposedly modern locked doors!), I’ve never actually been able to open a single door using a credit card.

That’s why I’m glad that someone’s finally posted a tutorial on how to do it properly!

How to open a door with a credit card

All look the same?

Chinese, Japanese, Korean: What’s the difference? Do they all look the same, or are they very distinct? Despite having lived in multi-racial Singapore for three decades now, sometimes (and embarrassingly) I can’t always tell them apart.

See if you have better luck at this site’s tests:

AllLookSame

RAID-1 backups with Clark Connect

After listening to another friend’s “my-backup-drive-died-and-I-lost-everything” story, I decided to set up RAID-1 mirroring for my own backup drive. Essentially, 2 drives are set to “mirror” each other so that when one fails, the data is still available on the surviving drive. Moreover, when a replacement drive is installed, it’ll also start mirroring the data on the surviving drive. Cool huh?

Initially, I contemplated getting a RAID-1 capable NAS (network attached storage) device. But the cheapest I could fine, the Thecus N2100 cost just below S$700 – an amount I wasn’t really willing so spare. So I explored software alternatives, to be used on the old AMD Duron 800MHz PC that used to be my dad’s main machine.

FreeNAS seemed very promising, but at this early stage of its development, it doesn’t seen to have mature software RAID-1 recovery tols (and I’m still too cheap to buy a hardware RAID controller).

Finally, I settled on ClarkConnect which is  also available for free use at home. Thanks to these guides on configuring partitioning and RAID and setting up Windows file sharing, I quickly had a functional RAID-1 (2x 200GB) networked backup machine serving up a single “public access” shared folder, and a password-protected folder for my personal files.

Also found a very nice thread on the newbie-friendly ClarkConnect forums on how to rebuild the RAID-1 array with a new replacement hard drive when one of the drives fail.

ClarkConnect is also capable of many more – perhaps when I am more free at the end of the school term I’ll be doing more exploration of its other features.