Today’s update of Apple’s Safari browser brings a new “reader” view, which seems to be available only sometimes, but with no website effort … I tried it on GBMINI.net; it wasn’t offered on the main page, or on the most recent post, but Safari did offer “reader view” on my last MINI Takes The States post. Here is the normal view:

Here is the same page in Safari 5 reader view:

Of course, there’s nothing I’ve done to the post – it’s a bit of a mystery how Safari chooses whether or not to offer the reader view. Which do you prefer?

A quick shout out of praise to Host Gator, where I now host all my websites … a little over a year ago I moved GBMINI.net to Hostgator, after first testing them with GPMINI.net. Recently, my other website MargaretAndIan.com was slowing badly on the old hosting, so I moved it (and MINIsOnTop to Hostgator too.

I’ve been noticing that M&I doesn’t respond as quickly as GBMINI – it’s much better than it was at Geekstorage, but it’s just not quite as snappy. A traceroute says there’s no routing issue, so I wondered if the hosting server for M&I was not as good as that for GBMINI.
Tonight, at 9pm, I sent a support note, asking if there was an issue. In under an hour I got a response, saying they’d checked, found no issue, and maybe it was a routing problem. Standard response no doubt.
At 10pm, I replied again, with traceroute data, and suggested the issue seemed to be possibly with the SQL server rather than with the web server itself.
Now, again in less than 45 minutes, I got this answer:
What seemed to be a issue was that the mysql tables were not optimized. I have optimized all tables for you and the site now loads in under 2 second relatively like the other site loads on the second server. If you still see any issues with this in the future and have had us enable ssh access you can run this command mysqlcheck -u iancull -p –optimize –all-databases this will scan and optimize all databases for your user.

And they’re right; M&I is more responsive now!
So apart from not knowing anything about mysql table optimization, I am just amazed that Hostgator support will go to such an extent of checking all this out, and identifying and fixing the issue. I’d have expected a simple “no, everything’s fine”, but I got much better!

With thanks to The Geocities-izer – click the preview image for more:

Just a quick note, confirming how hopeless this new Comcast “feature” is:

Comparing with last weeks post, apparently my data usage recently is ZERO! Apparently it’s possible to use 139GB in a month, 48GB in two weeks, but 0GB in a single week … amazing!

So, Comcast has introduced a “data usage meter”, and I find it rather suspicious!

Their FAQ makes such statements as:
The vast majority – more than 99% – of our customers will not be impacted by a 250 GB monthly bandwidth or data usage threshold … 250GB is far beyond the current median of data usage for a typical residential Internet customer in a month … median data usage by Comcast High-Speed Internet customers is approximately 2 – 4GB each month … 95% of service customers could increase their data usage many times over and still not be considered an excessive user …

But then their chart claims my January usage to be well past 50% of their limit! I wouldn’t mind if I torrent’ed heaps of movies, and ran SlingPlayer every day – but I don’t … of course Comcast provide no data statistics to back up their single number, so there’s no way to draw any conclusions from what they claim; I suppose I’ll need to look at traffic monitoring!

Anyone else with experience of this new Comcast feature?

A while back, MINI friend Robert sent me a couple new images to replace the GBMINI banner at the top of this website:

I actually preferred the one with checkers, but I couldn’t figure how to extend the checkers to the end of whatever width the browser is set to – so I picked the non-checker version!

Thanks, Robert

I happened to visit the actual MotoringFile website today to see if they’d got the latest MINI sales figures; my first reaction was along the lines of “EEK!” related to the formatting of that site (the bold and fat headline font disturbed me!):

But formatting is personal (yes, Robert, I’m thinking of you), so no doubt lots of MF folks like it …

My second reaction was “oh, lots of stories I don’t remember” … Turns out, the Google Reader feed I set up were using the MotoringFile Clippings feed which they appear to not support even though they offer the link – so it’s not had stories updated since mid last year!

Oh well, so I’ve updated the Google Reader feed and it now includes recent MotoringFile stories. I wonder how often a website feed breaks like that? I suppose to some extent, MotoringFile actually doesn’t want me to use the feed, since then I don’t see all their advertising – but I would have expected a broken feed link to give an error, rather than just give many month old data.
Having the non-clipped feed from MotoringFile is a bit disappointing, since they have a habit of blasting HUGE number of copied-from-press-release stuff into a post sometimes, but overall I prefer to read newer news even if it’s a bit of a flood.

Yes, nothing to do with MINIs; move along if you’re looking for GBMINI … unless you don’t have backups of all your computer data!

Ever since I accidentally deleted all my email a few years ago, and even more so since a hard drive failure on a PC I owned, I’ve been slightly paranoid about backups. Unjustified perhaps, since really nothing on my computer is life threatening to lose …

Music (40GB)
I guess it’s theoretically all “backed up” on my iPod (though attempting to move music from one computer to another from the iPod was very unsuccessful – worst, I could re-encode it all from the original CDs – but that would take weeks!

Photos (40GB)
Many of my photos, arguably the “more wanted” ones, exist here on GBMINI, or over on MargaretAndIan, but they aren’t full resolution – I’d prefer not to lose the originals!

Videos (45GB)
Mostly un-edited, so I could pull them back off the original DV tapes (so long as those tapes are not too degraded)

Documents (<<1GB)
Very little data space - but stuff that couldn't be re-created. Although I'm not sure how important the source code for a college project from the mid 80s, written in BCPL, is now ...

Mail (1GB)
I actually, arguably, don't have a backup for this - Gmail has the originals; though Apple Mail has an IMAP copy of everything, I'm not sure how easy it would be to restore to Gmail if the originals vanished! I imagine if the files disappeared from Gmail, then Apple Mail would mirror those deletions ...

I no longer trust hard drives, so while a Time Machine backup is very good, a drive failure in the Time Capsule would be bad – so I use Time Machine with a LaCie 2big Network RAID drive! This arguably gives me three copies of my data, the original on my Mac, and copies on each of the two drives in the LaCie …

The LaCie lives in the basement …

But that’s not enough! What if something happened to my home – I need an offsite backup too …

Up till now, I’ve been using Mozy for my offsite backups; it seems to be pretty reliable on both PCs and Macs, and is “unlimited” (it’s happily holding my 136GB of data right now):

But there’s one big downside to Mozy (and other online backup solutions like Jungle Disk, Syncplicity, …) – recovery time. There’s also the possibility that your online service might fold, but that seems unlikely at least for Mozy.
What if you need to recover files from your online backup? I did a test with Mozy earlier this week, requesting a restore of about 1/2GB of photos. First, you log in to Mozy, go to the restore screen and request the restore. Then you wait for an email – it took an hour to come, for my restore (I suspect it’ll be slower if you want more data restored). The actual download took about 20 minutes (much slower than my Cable Internet could deliver, so limited by Mozy).
So 1-1/2 hours isn’t too bad – but imagine how slow it would be to do a complete restore … Mozy offers a service to mail DVD copies, but it’ll take about a week and cost you, too.

Other options? Apart from Dropbox (recommended – excellent to keep copies on multiple computers as well as online, but expensive), I’ve recently stumbled on to CrashPlan; it’s like Mozy, but with a twist – you can backup to other computers you own, or to friends computers!

Here, you can see that computer PGTiMac1 (my office computer) is backing up to this (my home computer) – it’s not that fast, but that’s because the office only has slow DSL. But it will work, and there’s no annual cost.
What’s better still, on this computer, I can access and restore files from the PGTiMac1 backup – instantly! Then I could dump them to a USB stick and in half an hour they’d be back at work …

You can also agree with a friend to backup your computer to theirs, and theirs to yours – if you password the backup, they won’t be able to restore your files without the password, so you can be backup-safe
CrashPlan also offers the “traditional” online backup, including a good value $100/year package for “as many computers as you / your family owns” (better pricing than Mozy); but if you own a few computers, or know a few friends with high speed Internet, then check out CrashPlan for a zero cost offsite backup solution – I’m liking it so far

For a long time, I’ve visited GoMotoring a few times a day, to keep an eye on new MINI blog posts, recent forum discussions, etc. MotoringFile has a similar feature (the News Room), but for whatever reason I never remember to go there.

GoMotoring for a while now (since Robert’s last site update) has no working link to TwistyBitz, and a number of the other sites linked there are dead, or almost. Other MINI blogs are not listed (neither on GoMotoring nor the MotoringFile News Room).

DB has a great list of MINI blogs on his site, but of course no indication there of any updates; I also tried to maintain a list of MINI blogs that interest me, on my sidebar but again, they are only links with no way to see new posts unless you visit the site.

People have told me to use a “reader”; I tried Google Reader before but it didn’t work well for me – it swamped me with forum updates and made it impossible to see other MINI blogs. But I looked again this weekend – and found that it’s possible to categorize the feeds in Google Reader (maybe it always was, or maybe it’s new …)
So I was able to create a couple of Google Reader categories for me – “Forums” contains feeds from MINI forums such a NorthAmericanMotoring, MINI2, Motoring Underground and others – I also put MotoringFile in there since it posts pretty regularly and often has (to me) less interesting stuff.
A second Google Reader category (“Blogs”) contains all the MINI-related blogs I could find, after checking links from DB, my old links, and the Motoring Underground Yellow Pages; I included apparently inactive MINI blogs, but omitted those that were dead, or clearly not MINI related any more.

I also replaced my links section on the right of GBMINI, with code to “embed” the Google Reader feed list – so on the right now under “BLOG LINKS” and “FORUM LINKS” are all the links I put in to Google Reader – and at the bottom of each is a “View All” that takes you to a Google Reader page listing all recent activity in the relevant category.
Maybe not the greatest layout (there doesn’t seem to be much way to customize Google Reader), but certainly a nice easy way to check all recent MINI activity in just a couple of clicks. And I get to see activity on Robert’s site (such as the very important new GP shirts post!)

Feel free to visit View All Blog Links, or View All Forum Links – or let me know if there’s something really great that I have missed!

Today, Google Chrome failed me when trying to post my daily picture to MargaretAndIan (presumably some auto-update has broken it, since it was fine yesterday!)
So, I opened Safari to do the update (which worked fine), then continued my daily web wanderings to Gmail and the MINI websites – but I’ve not used Safari for ages (it’s still slower than Chrome), and I had to log in to every website.
When I got to MINI2, I was shocked – horrified even! This is the LOUD REDNESS that greeted me:

(click for bigger if you have sunglasses on!)

I can’t believe that MINI2′s owners think this is a good default color / layout for their site! It’s awful

I quickly logged in, which quietened it down to something more reasonable:

NorthAmericanMotoring isn’t much better – not logged in, it doesn’t have the awful redness, but on my 20″ screen I can’t see ANY forum text, the whole screen is covered in logos and adverts!

It’s no wonder people are leaving the old websites and setting up alternates (Total MINI, Motoring Alliance, Mass Motoring Club (and check out how fast that last site is!) … the sad downside is that all these sites are breaking up the MINI community (at least here in New England)