A co-worker recently introduced me to this small useful little utility that I thought I would share with you.  It’s called BtProx, and can be found here: http://btprox.sourceforge.net/

“It locks on one of your Bluetooth devices which are paired to the the machine. When you walk away from the computer the device is disconnected and the computer is locked after timeout.”

Works with my iPhone with Windows 7.  Not yet sure how much of an impact this will have with my phone’s battery life, but hey, its useful and darn right cool!!

When you want to search for a song or artist on Google you can type the following. It may be helpful:

intitle:"index.of" (mp3|mp4|aac|wav|rm) maureen.mcgovern -html -htm -php -asp -cf –jsp

ORANGE:  Find these file types (i.e.: files with these extensions at the end, these listed are common music files)

RED:  This is the artist name, or song name with a period in place of space

BLUE:  Exclude these file types

You may also add these commands when searching to give different results:

Site:.edu intitle:”index of” pdf

This command for example will search for any websites which end with .edu (usually this would be for University sites, in this example) which have files in PDF format.

Recently I managed to purchase a new Seagate BlackArmor NAS 420 at work; What an amazing little machine!  For those of you who are not familiar with a NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliance, it is simply an external hard disk storage device connected on a network share.  Out of the box, the device has its own internal operating system which allow you to configure at will; allowing you to control whether or not to allow FTP connections or other internal connections for users on your network.  The 4 terabytes model purchased has two 2TB disks on a RAID configuration, sufficient for our needs.

We put it through the test recently by attempting a computer backup of two MacBook Pros.  At first it was a little daunting to set up as myself nor my colleagues are familiar enough with the Mac OS or file system; but through digging around we found the following instructions helpful to allow us to mount the network storage device and to use Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s Time Machine to do full or incremental backups of our laptops.  I hope this is useful to those who come to read:

STEP 0: Mount Your Drive using GO > Connect To Server and typing in : smb://192.168.1.10 (this assumes your NAS device has an IP assigned through your router to this address.  Please fill in your own address as you wish based on your own settings)

STEP 1: Open the ‘Terminal’ window [command key + spacebar, then type terminal to find it, then open it], and create a SPARSEBUNDLE using the following command:

hdiutil create -size $SIZE -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -layout SPUD -volname "$NAME OF YOUR TIMEMACHINE DRIVE" $YOURMAC.sparsebundle

$SIZE:  Enter numbers with a suffix g for Gigabytes (Example: 500g)

$NAME OF TIMEMACHINE:  This name is the volume name once Time Machine has completed the backup

$MAC : You can find this in the System Profiler

For non-techie people out there this means you replace the instance of each variable item above with your own details - It may look something like this:

hdiutil create -size 600g -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -layout SPUD -volname "Alex's Time Machine Backup" 0023b0f3884c.sparsebundle

STEP 2:  While in the Terminal window, copy the SPARSEBUNDLE to your desired network share drive using the following command:

cp -r $MAC.sparsebundle /Volumes/$USER/

$USER: Can be found in the top description bar when you click on your mounted drive on STEP 0

A real example may look like this:

cp -r 0026b0e3844c.sparsebundle /Volumes/alex/

STEP 3:  By default the Mac OS/X does not allow for read and write on the network share.  To change this you must run this command also in the Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now you’re ready to select this drive through Time Machine to create a backup of your Apple computer.

[A word of thanks goes out to my co-worker Shaz for helping to list the steps]

It sounds so ‘militant’, ‘political’ and just plain ‘Revolutionary’ – the Data Liberation Front is one site you may want to look and familiarize yourself with if you do any web development. It’s anything but ‘militant or political’ – it’s Google’s own way of trying to be transparent in allowing you to move data in or out of Google’s many projects/services.  One item of importance specific to us is the Google Calendar and syncing methods which are explained here: http://www.dataliberation.org/google/calendar

A little web humour:

http://www.cracked.com/photoshop_90_the-world-tomorrow-if-internet-disappeared-today/

Hi there!  This is my first blog post to 'posterous'.  This is a photo of myself (Alex) and Marie-Claude during our recent trip to Lake Huron (Aug 12th 2009).