Motoring Alliance, top left, if you couldn’t tell

(but I still don’t like the thickness and quality of Cooper Flags badges as much as those from Motoring Badges (note left edge of Motoring Alliance badge above, where the sticker started to peel off the magnet backing when I tried to peel off the protective sheet)

Nice badge from Motoring Alliance … though it didn’t quite make it to my “favorites area”

(click for bigger)

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.

Not a very big concern (certainly not like the Toyota recall!) – but maybe Audi can fix my “Audi advanced key”, since in the cold weather it no longer senses me and unlocks the car … I have to go through the awful drudgery of pressing a button on the remote!

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

I downloaded and tried it this morning. First, it plays a much too loud at 8am sound EVERY time it loads but then second, I was pleased that it knew my GP VIN# (GPs have unusual VINs, different to all other MINIs) – and it even displays a GP image on the map!

As you see, it shows a number of local “hotspots”; there’s local dealerships MINI of Peabody and Herb Chambers MINI of Boston, and an assorted list of other places – but no MINIs!

There’s also what seems to be a bug (or maybe a wierd feature?); as you zoom out, instead of getting more and more places listed, you just get ones further away – no use at all for seeing what might be on some route you’re planning!

I decided instead to look down in Florida, where GPMINI actually is – and here I found some MINIs!

There’s even an upcoming event down there (do I need to book flights for next weekend?):

I did try to create an event for MINIsOnTop; the first time the app crashed as I finished creating it (the third crash in 5 minutes of testing), and the second time the event disappeared off the map moments after showing up. Maybe the events are vetted before showing – or maybe the app is just a bit buggy and unreliable.
Either way, it’s not so useful yet …

What you (and I) can’t read is the information about tires written between “Dear Ian Cull” and “Tire Tips”:
Aside from your engine, your tires are the hardest working components on your car. Make sure to get the most out of your tires by having a 4-wheel alignment performed @ Orlando Mini. An alignment is recommended every 12-15,000 miles or annually. Benefits of an alignment are minimized tire wear, better fuel mileage, increased road handling and a sense of security of knowing that your alignment was performed by a factory trained technician on a state-of-the art laser alignment machine.

Is this secret only in Safari, or only in Gmail, I wonder …
(can’t see it in Chrome/Gmail either)

To see more (15f. and frozen river), visit MargaretAndIan

1-1/2 years ago, I got an iPhone; shortly after that, I got my Macbook Pro. While the Macbook Pro was mostly an expensive toy and little more than a photo editor / iTunes repository and web browser, I did use it sometimes for work tasks when I was away. Enough to learn that running Windows is feasible when necessary.

Now, with the 27″ iMac, I’ve chosen to replace my #1 PC at work with a Mac (PC’s #2-#5 remain PC for now); this week I’ve been setting up the Mac to “play nice” at the office, and configuring it to run Windows programs, resulting in …

The screenshot shows Apple Finder and Windows Explorer both viewing the documents directory, our PCB design program which runs fine, and Apple and Windows versions of command line (CMD / DOS prompt, and Terminal). You can click the image for full size 2560×1440.

I knew that the Apple iMac would be capable of running the Windows programs I need (PCB design, and code development in C, assembler for Freescale and Microchip parts, and Visual Basic Windows and DOS versions for customer and in-house test programs!); but I wasn’t sure what solution would be best – I’ve used Parallels on my Macbook Pro, but decided to test VMware Fusion and VirtualBox as well.

My test was to do something I do many times a day; compile the source code of our GP400 product (some 60K of compiled code for the Freescale HCS12X), and load it in to the processor ready to debug (using a USB debugger). On my current work PC#1, this timed 38s.

I liked VMware Fusion the most; it installs nicely, with a small menu on the top that gives access to Windows programs and the Start Menu, even when VMware isn’t running. It opens tidily and works well. Loading Windows XP from cold took 30s, and the compile/debug test time was 28s.

Parallels isn’t as tidy as VMware; it offers perhaps too many different screen modes and while “crystal” mode” gives a menu in the top bar, it opens not to a tidy list of Windows programs, but to a menu where you have to click “Start Menu” to call up the Windows Start Menu in Windows style. While in “crystal” you have to ALT-click to get to Parallels to adjust anything (while VMware puts it all in the one menu).
Parallels also isn’t as good at opening tidily; it does a lot of Windows screen resizing as it loads. It offers many “bells and whistles” (such as Maclook that makes the Windows look Mac-like), but it feels a bit less professional than VMware – maybe deliberately, if it’s targetted more to home users.
However, Parallels blazed the timing test, at just 22s (after taking 22s to load Windows XP)!

Finally VirtualBox, which offers the significant benefit of zero cost! It also offers few extras, which results in the fastest click-to-load time (Windows XP is up in 21s).
However from there, VirtualBox suffers – it’s especially slow at USB; while I was able to access the debugger, and a USB serial cable, communications over USB is very slow. The compile/debug timing test came in at 54s, twice as slow as the competition.
VirtualBox also is poor at graphics support – on my Macbook Pro I had tested it too, and it couldn’t run most Windows games. Finally, both VMware and Parallels can share Documents/Desktop etc between Mac and Windows, which VirtualBox can’t do.

Oh, not finally, since I did also temporarily set up and test BootCamp – it took 20s to do the compile/debug (fastest of all, not surprising really); however BootCamp quickly lost it’s mind and crashed, and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out why. Also in the typical Windows way, it takes 10s or so before Windows finds the Magic Mouse.

In conclusion, as you likely noticed in the screenshots, I purchased Parallels V5; all three virtual Windows solutions work, and seemed reliable; while I liked VMware, the speed that Parallels offered was hard to argue with – basically running at within 10% of the theoretical maximum of BootCamp.

Some time, I’ll have to look at native Apple code development – see if it’s possible to do the RS232 communications programs we use on PCs; but meantime, the Apple is the best Windows machine I have!