Category Archives: Technology

Electronics and releated stuff

New SSD Drives

Two Intel 320 series 160GB SSD drives that will be going into my PC this weekend in RAID 0 to replace my two existing Western Digital 640GB Black series drives in RAID 0. Should be quite the speed improvement!

I got them on sale for $155 each instead of the regular price of $285 each. Gotta love Cyber Monday weekend deals.

UPDATE: These things are amazingly fast!

My new SSD RAID:

For comparison, here is my old RAID:

Lastly, a normal Western Digital 2TB Green (energy saving) drive that is very commonly used for cheap (not fast) storage:

Crazy, huh?

Two Handy Sublime Text 2 Plugins

After using EditPlus for the better part of a decade, I made the switch to the totally awesome Sublime Text 2 text editor a few weeks back. One of the great things about Sublime is it’s support for plugins.

Two such plugins I’d like to recommend are SublimeBrackets and SublimeTagmatcher. Both improve how the highlighting of opening and closing items are handled.

By default, Sublime just underlines paired brackets. When you have a ton of code, this can be really hard to see. SublimeBrackets changes this to something more apparent:

Much better, right? I personally use the solid background green style.

SublimeTagmatcher does something similar but for HTML tags. When you have your cursor inside of an HTML tag, it will highlight both the current tag and it’s opening or closing counterpart. This is helpful for making sure you have the correct number of opening and closing tags.

Restoring “http://” To Your Firefox Address Bar

Lifehacker has a great article on how to stop Firefox from greying out everything but the domain name in your address bar. While I personally don’t mind it and infact think it’s a great anti-phishing feature for the average user, one thing I don’t like is the removal of the protocol, i.e. http://, from the beginning of the address bar. I know they’re trying to conserve space, but screen real estate is not something that I am lacking.

So here’s how to once again show the protocol in your Firefox address bar:

  1. Type about:config into your address bar to access a list of Firefox configuration options that are not exposed through a normal settings panel.
  2. Paste browser.urlbar.trimURLs into the search box to find the parameter we’re going to change.
  3. Right-click the row and select “Toggle” to change the value from true to false.
  4. Close the tab and go back to a normal tab, such as this blog post. You should now see the protocol in your address bar once again.

What Online Backup Service Do You Recommend?

About a month ago, I asked on Twitter for suggestions for online backup services as I’m tired of manually backing up and I never do it often enough. I was suggested Mozy, but I was also suggested a lot of alternatives. However I was leaving on a business trip basically the next day, so I never got around to reading the Tweets and they eventually slipped off my @mentions list.

So now I’m asking how I should have done it in the first place — on my blog. What online service do you use to backup your data? And before anyone suggests it, Dropbox is out of the running as it’s too expensive for actual backup (it’s great for sync though!).

Thanks!

Why Can’t Apple Make A Decent Windows Program?

Comon Apple, I get that Windows is a competing platform and you’d rather spend your time working on your own stuff, but if you’re going to force me to use iTunes with my iPhone, at least make iTunes not suck. I’ve ranted about iTunes before and while iTunes 10 seems more stable and less laggy so far, it’s still far from perfect.

I mean they can’t even manage to get the little things right. For example, their new logo has horrible transparency:

A simple thing to fix (look at all of the other icons there doing it just fine), but no, Apple had to not bother.