This weekend was filled with heavy alcohol, since I went to a whisky tasting. We only drank a ‘wee dram’ (2,5 cl) at a time, with some bread and water in between so we remained sober enough to listen to our sympathetic whisky expert who told us about malt, barrels and distilling.
After having Lacie, Maxtor, Iomega and most recently Netgear StorageCentral external storage fail on me, I am now the proud owner of a broken Western Digital My Book Pro II 1TB. I bought it less than a year ago and used it as a mirrored 500GB drive for my music, movies and images. It first failed 3 months ago (broken mirror) but after a full night of rebuilding it worked again. But now one of the drives has fallen victim to the infamous ‘click-of-death‘ and the drive would not show up anymore via USB nor Firewire. I disconnected the broken (SATA) disk, and then I could see the other one show up again as a lone 500GB drive. I quickly started copying to a 2 x 300GB FreeNAS system I had set up on an old Dell system (you don’t want to know how many old hard disks I have lying around). During the rescue operation the solo disk gave up twice, but by restarting the My Book device, it came back. So now I have an extra copy of all my data, most importantly my 80GB of photographs (quickly growing thanks to my Canon350D) and 120GB of iTunes music (mostly ripped CDs, not purchased, but still).
My friend Henry asked me to calculate on a napkin how much I spent on fuel per month. I have a greedy car, but I live close to the office. Still I was quite surprised by the number I got.
Met deze actie willen wij een statement maken: stilstand is achteruitgang. De toestand op de Belgische markt dient te veranderen. De gebruikers willen van de datalimieten af, meer concurrentie en betere tarieven voor hun breedband-internet.
Dag van de download
Wouldn’t this be a great idea: the Brussels public transport not mapped by MIVB‘s horribly unpractical route planner, but by Google’s Transit maps. You just need to get an export of the stops, the routes and the times, and they can be shown on Google Maps just like that. Where should we start looking for the source data? Then create agency.txt, stops.txt, routes.txt, trips.txt, stop_times.txt, calendar.txt and that’s it.
I get the question a lot, so I thought I might write a post about it as a ready-made answer to the next few.
