There has been significant advances in harddisk technology especially as far as their robustness and reliability are concerned. So, what’s there to worry about, right? Murphy’s Law. :)

Based on my own and others’ experience, these would just be some of the reasons why you would want to have a really good and reliable backup:

1. These robust, reliable, and nearly-shockproof harddisks still do fail.

   While these disks may be covered by warranty and easily replaced, once they conk out on you, your data may be gone forever. What warranty can cover that? Sometimes all it takes to make a man cry is an accidental but jarring drop on the floor resulting to a catastrophic hard disk crash.

2. Your laptop may be stolen.

   Laptops can be replaced as disks above but not your data, your precious data. A friend of mine got her Mac stolen from a half-open car window. Nothing stopped the thief from doing so despite the car being in motion. If she had a Time Machine backup, I wouldn’t have felt sorry for her. After all, she can always get a new Mac and restore her backup there. But she didn’t and now, she’s practically redoing everything. Has she learned something from that lesson? I hope so! :)

3. Merciless Acts of God.

   Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tsunamis. Yeah, this world is nearing its doom. But if you can have your data secure somewhere, you’ll have one less problem in your hands. :)

A Paranoid Advise

Disks are getting cheaper already. For general use, the more portable 2.5″ drives which just requires a single USB or FireWire port is always a good choice. While it may be pricey for some of us, just consider the peace of mind it’ll give you and that’ll be your ROI already. Some companies provide for their employees’ backup requirements but most likely than not, you’re on your own. Either way, it’s in your best interest to make sure that your data is well secure.

1. Use tools like Time Machine, Super Duper, or Carbon Copy Cloner.

   These tools are so advanced (actually, the tech is quite old, they just made the process simpler) that after making a full backup of your system, they are able to track the tiniest change (a new or recently editted file, etc) and back that up. They also allow you to back track on a timeline so you can easily restore that file or folder that you accidently deleted.

2. Backup periodically..

   At least, once when you get home from work, and once before you leave for work. That way, any work you do in and outside the office is safely backed up. If you’ve done a considerable amount of work in less time, feel free then to do a backup as necessary. Autosave sometimes just ain’t enough anymore.

3. Store your backup somewhere safe.

   I choose to keep my backup disk at home while it’s sometimes a better idea to store them in the office. If needed, keep multiple backups for paranoia’s sake and store them at a friend’s house across town. Just like your meds, these are better kept in a cool and dry place, away from rowdy children.

4. Keep your backup disk fresh

   Replace your backup disk every three to four years to ensure optimal disk health. These disks, like the ones you’re using on your laptop or workstation will die eventually. Make sure you have an alternative before that happens.

You see, I’m that type of person who carefully puts laptops on desks making sure there is no shock at all, and yet, I’ve had several close calls myself with disks being populated by bad blocks, and with disks which just died conveniently on me. There’s just too much to lose but doing backups definitely minimized the risks. For your sake, I hope you do, too. :)

One of the other neat things that del.icio.us can offer is of course, bookmarks sharing. With thousands of bookmarks being maintained by perhaps, millions of people, it’s a natural course to allow sharing. Of course, one has to be careful not to share confidential stuff with the rest of the world. Yes, there is an option to not share bookmarks. So, your work-related stuff and yeah, porn, is kept private unless you say so. When one bookmarks a URL, it even gives you the option to “suggest” it to a friend in your network, who may be interested in what you just found . It’s social-networking, bookmarks-style!

Another feature that’s not to be missed is tagging. With this, gone are the days when you just can’t decide which folder to place a bookmark on. Why put something in a folder or a category when its scope really cannot be pigeon-holed? And tags are one of the greatest things that ever happened and I couldn’t imagine i lived without it all these years. It’s also one of the fastest way to find information that’s been eluding you all this time. Besides, links that are in del.icio.us are bookmarked by discerning people. Google’s indexing is as great as its near-supernatural search results, but sometimes, nothing beats a human sorting through all the noise. Chances are, what you’re trying to look for has already been found and is bookmarked, tagged, and ready for your consumption! That’s User-Generated Content for you.

Lastly, del.icio.us, aside of course from AJAX being all over making it very easy to navigate through, RSS feeds are available to serve specific tags or your friends’ bookmarks. And that makes it easy for you to keep track of what your friends or colleagues have been browsing through. In my work, del.icio.us is an important tool in sharing stuff with my colleagues; all I have to do is suggest things and it will automatically turn up in their inboxes. It sure beats pasting links over IM or emails.

If you’re just about to sign up, you’ll ,of course, be given a choice to import your current bookmarks or you can always start fresh. And if you’re interested at all, for what its worth, my bookmarks are in http://del.icio.us/marco.cabazal. You can add me to your network, or simply subscribe to my RSS feeds using your favorite reader.

Cheerio!

There’s got to be a simpler way of doing this, right? Right. Here’s where syndication, more popularly in the form of RSS or Really Simple Syndication, come in. And the ability for a user to syndicate a section or sections of a news or blog site allows that user to read all the relevant content from a single point: the RSS feed aggregator or News Reader, which takes care of keeping track of news or blog items you have read or not read, leaving you with only the stuff that matters. This means you don’t have to visit Friends A, B, and C’s blogs all the time just to check whether they have posted new steamy articles about their prior nights, or their latest bouts with their bosses. Aggregators will do that work for you. In fact, I even use an aggregator to keep track of the new photos that are being uploaded by my friends in Flickr. If things can be listed and they have a corresponding RSS feed, all you have to do is subscribe to the feed and wait for the news/blog entries to pour in. All from the comfort of one software or browser.

Aggregators come in many forms. Some are desktop client software that you install on your computer, and some are online services. Since most feeds contain only the blurbs of the whole articles, one will most likely need to click on a feed link to see the rest of the story. This means one must be online while reading the feeds. And since I’m working on a premise that I’m indeed online, the obvious preference for me would be to use an online service like Google Reader, which for my taste is very easy to use. I like it simple and clean and Google Reader allows me to read news without any distraction. The less scrolls I do with my trackpad or mousewheel, the better. But preferences differ so you might wanna try both and some others as well until you find which you’re more comfortable settling with.

So how does one subscribe to a Feed? Well, a feed usually has a unique URL associated with it. Most sites indicate the feed URL by putting the RSS Icon right beside it. Copy that URL and tell your favorite aggregator that you want to subscribe to it. How one does that would depend on which aggregator is being used. In my case, Firefox (2.x) automatically detects Feed URLs in the websites that I visit and displays the RSS Icon in my browser’s Location bar (Figure 1). If I click on it, Firefox will give me a choice to select which feed to subscribe to and which aggregator to use, or one can select a default in the Feeds section of Firefox’s Preferences. Right out of install, BlogLines, Google Reader, and Yahoo come as standard choices. With Firefox having that option available sure does save a lot of time in subscribing. With or without it, however, one can still go to one’s online service and put in the desired URL in the subscription field without any problem.

Figure 1. the RSS Icon in the Location bar.

For simplicity’s sake, I didn’t mention other syndication standards (like ATOM) or the history behind all this. Chances are, it wouldn’t matter. Whether the feed is in RSS or ATOM format, your aggregator/news reader wouldn’t care less anyway. Just subscribe away! And some of the sites whose feeds I’m subscribed to are: Inquirer, The New York Times, BBC News, CNN, Forum Nokia, IBM DeveloperWorks, NetworkWorld, SlashDot, Friends’ del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr, and blogs, of course.

Feed sets from one software or service can also be easily exported from or imported to different readers. This feature comes as a standard in most readers and usually yield an outline or OPML file which can be shared between friends with similar interests. It also helps if you want to migrate from one service or software to another, or if you want to simply back them up in a safer place. Some online aggregators, like BlogLines, even has a slimmer WAP version which you can access using your mobile phone/PDA. Pretty neat when whiling your boredom away.

Once you’ve setup your feed reader/aggregator, I hope you don’t forget to subscribe to the feeds for my Articles and Photographs. And if you want to be updated of the discussions here, there’s the Comments feed.

Enjoy!

Essentials:

• Adium: an IM client like no other. Powered by libgaim! (Free)
• Aperture: Digital Asset Management for photos and more.
• Transmission: Cross-platform BitTorrent Client (Free)
• BluePhoneElite: Allows you to send and receive SMS (and calls) via your Mac.
• Chmox: A Windows CHM (Compiled HTML Help file) Reader. (Free)
• Firefox: Need I say more? (Free)
• Growl: A notification system for Mac OS X. It allows applications (like Adium, Skype, iTerm, VirtueDesktops, FlickrBooth, etc) that support Growl to send you notifications. (Free)
• HardwareGrowler: Its an application that sends Growl notifications when devices are connected or disconnected from your Mac. (Free)
• Little Snitch: Personal Firewall which alerts you if an app is trying to make an outbound connection. Great for containing Trojans or simply knowing where your apps are connecting to. A Must-Have!
• MacSaber: Turn your MacBook into a Light Saber! (Free)
• Merlin: MS Project-compatible poject management app
• OmniFocus: A professional-grade personal task management that supports GTD.
• OmniGraffle: Visio-compatible Diagramming Tool
• Senuti: Senuti is a simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer. (Free)
• SnapNDrag: Effortless Screen/Selection Capture (Free)
• TextExpander: It saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used strings and images.
• TNEF’s Enough: allows you to read and extract files from Microsoft TNEF (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format) stream files (win.dat, winmail.dat).
• Twitteriffic: one of the best Twitter clients out there. (Free)
• VLC: Multimedia Player (Free)
• WriteRoom: distraction-free writing software.

For Power Users:

• iTerm: Multi-tabbed terminal emulator ala-MultiGnomeTerminal (Free)
• MemoryCell: See how much memory each running app is consuming. (Free)
• Path Finder: A Finder replacement on steroids.
• ServiceScrubber: restructures the services menu, changes service keyboard shortcuts, and disables services. (Free/Donationware)
• Vim/Vi: The best Text Editor there is! (Free)
• VMware: Run Windows, Linux, etc simultaneously on your Mac. No need for BootCamp.

Dashboard Widgets. Since I’m not much of a fan of Dashboard, I make sure only a minimal list of widgets are running at one time. Here are my mostly-used ones:

• Calendar: The Built-in Calendar widget.
• CurrencyConverter: Err, Foreign Exchange Rate app, with auto rates update.
• Google Reader: displays the number of unread items in your feeds. (Free)
• iStat Pro: a comprehensive system monitoring tool. (Free)
• MailWidget: checks for new mail in the server without Apple Mail running. (Free)
• Todo: a lightweight and fast widget to manage tasks. (Free/Donationware)
• QuickCal: helps you create quick calendar events using natural language expressions (Free)
• Weather: The Build-in Weather widget. Do make sure you search for “Manila, Philippines” if you are indeed in the PH. Yes, there are other Manilas out there.