powdahound.com

The new JungleDisk beta is a big improvement over their current version. The backup features have been greatly improved and now that I’ve fixed my issue with Explorer locking up I can use it like almost like normal drive.

I’m still backing up my music and photos to a local NAS box, but I’m very impressed with the direction JungleDisk is going and will probably start to use it more (especially once the command line version is more mature and well documented).

Also, for $1/mo you can get JungleDisk Plus which gives you web access, resumable uploads, and partial file uploads. Very cool!

My site is now hosted on a VPS provided by VPSLink.com. It’s nice having the flexibility to run services like Subversion and Cacti as well as manage my own Apache configuration.

Their admin interface is really clean and fast, and they have tons of OSes to choose from. Check them out if you’re in the market for a host.

Two guys created an awesome scheduling website for SXSW attendees to store quickly view panels and create a schedule. I wonder if they plan to expand it to support other conferences in the future (probably).

Here’s my schedule: http://sched.org/sxsw2008/garret

For the past 6 months I’ve been using JungleDisk to back up most of my important files on Amazon S3. It has a great auto-backup feature which keeps me from worrying about data loss. Like many people, I never thought about data loss until after I lost an entire drive (which I’m still keeping in case I become rich enough to blow $2k to have it restored).

Amazon S3 is also incredibly cheap:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per gigabyte-month of storage used
• $0.10/0.18 per gigabyte of data uploaded/downloaded.
• $0.01 per 1,000 upload or 10,000 download requests
• Remember that you only pay for what you use! If you have 1.2 GB of data stored, you only pay 18 cents! If you only have 100MB that’s only 2 cents!

It gives me some strange satisfaction to receive my monthly 10¢ bill from Amazon. :)

The only problem I have with the setup is that Windows Explorer ALWAYS locks up when browsing my JungleDisk drive. I’m assuming it’s not a problem with JungleDisk since it works fine on my Mac.

Anyway, the Amazon S3 & JungleDisk combo is certainly worth checking out. It’s so ridiculously cheap for the amount of pain and trouble it can prevent!

For the past two months I’ve been logging my mileage on MyMileMarker.com and am happy with the results it provides (given the amount of effort on my part). Every time I fill up I just take out my phone (they have a mobile version) and log the current odometer mileage, gallons required to fill up the tank, and price per gallon. I’d always calculated my MPG in my head after filling up but I find it a lot more interesting to have the data recorded and displayed in pretty graphs (see below).

Although my car’s mileage still sucks, it was nice to see it go up by about 2mpg after changing my air filter — a $12 part that took me about five minutes to replace.

Of course there’s no way for them to verify that the numbers people enter are accurate, but I’d really like to see how my car performs compared to other Volvo V40s out there. Maybe they’re already working on this, but I haven’t seen them push any updates to the site in quite a while now.