iPigs

As the result of so many spammers, I have removed online registration as an option. Send mail to stymaster at ipigs dot org requesting an account if you want to post a comment.

iPigs started some time back as a group of OS X users (including some ex-NeXT users) who were running OS X in Japan. The slogan "Say hello to iPig. Think messy." came when I looked at my desk.

Apollo Hosting have removed the mailing list functionality without letting me know (though they claim to have sent messages to me). Grrr....

What's the point of owning a blog if you don't use it to show off sometimes? So here we are - a look at my latest endeavor - a self-published novel.

Beneath Gray Skies is set in the Confederacy of the 1920s, and is now available for purchase or download.

Read more at the book's site.

I was browsing in my local Yamada Denki when I saw a cheap USB stick for sale. And when I say "cheap", I mean cheap. This was a mini Sony USB thumb drive, about the size of a thumbnail - 1GB for a whopping ¥298 (that's just under three hundred, not a misprint).

I've found the answer, I think. It's Toodledo - a stupid name, but far from a stupid solution.

There's a free download which puts a very handy ToDo database on your iPhone/touch - it can be categorized in 2 dimensions (they call them Tags and Categories) as well as date and priority.

Nice easy interface, corresponding neatly to to the iPhone interface guidelines. 

Microsoft have done it again. When I opened Word recently, a panel came up and said that a particular font (which had been reported as corrupt previously, and I had replaced via Time Machine) had been corrupted. So I click, and the panel goes away. Then another panel comes up, referring to another font. And another... and another.

Well, I am not 100% happy with this Jack In The Box product - I can't say it's overpriced at the price I paid, but I'm not using it as much as I expected, and not in the way I expected. The answer may well be a Drobo - now they have FireWire + USB interfaces, I feel a lot happier about the idea.

I can recycle my 1TB SATA drives (there's nothing on there that I haven't got somewhere else) and hopefully the thing will bwe future-proof.

Not my own local disk space this time, but the disk space on this server that the iPigs live on.

The volume where they keep the database this thing runs on ran out of space yesterday. Basically, everything turned to pig food, and there was very little I could do to make it work at all (I kept getting weird errors on other domains, and the whole day was extremely frustrating, especially as the Live Chat with the tech support team was down as well).

Digital cameras, video and the like all take up disk space, and I'm running out (I remember laughing at a man who tried to sell me a 4GB disk for a laptop, thinking it was far too big).  Anyway, I decided it was time to go for NAS (Network Attached Storage), which would be future-proof should I decide to update my computers, and preferably with RAID 1 (mirroring capability). If we're talking about large amounts of data, I don't want the hassle of backing them up, and so hardware RAID is the answer.