Automating My Backups with CrashPlan and VaultPress

May 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

This is the first¹ in a new series of monthly posts I’ll be doing in which I describe how I am trying to automate all of the repetitive tasks in my life, in order to free up time for the creative work. A big reason I can do this type of automation is because I have gone completely paperless. I also have a background at a software developer, which helps when coding is required. I expect these posts will touch all aspects of personal automation in my life. I am starting with those repeatable tasks that are relatively easy to automate and offer additional bonuses and incentives as well. I expect to publish these posts on the 3rd Friday of every month; Friday, because the weekend is often the time I use to implement these automations and folks reading along can use the upcoming weekend to do the same.

Part of my reason for automating the repetitive tasks in my life is to free up that time for other things: creative work, time with my family, more time to read. But part of the reason is that when repetitive tasks are automated, you don’t have to think about them and that can be a weight off your shoulders. I’ve just finished one such important automation: my data backups.

Actually, my backups had been mostly automatic before. What I did was change my backup services. I am now using CrashPlan for my computer backups and VaultPress for my website and blog backups. Both of these are cloud-based backup services, meaning my data is stored securely in the cloud. For backups, this is a good thing. It means that my backed up data is separate from the place it is used, so if that place goes away (e.g., if my house is blown away in a storm) my data is still safe.

Why I chose CrashPlan for my cloud backups

Previous, I’d used iDrive for my cloud backups. The service was fine and worked well, but there were some limitations. The biggest limitation was storage space. For $149/year, I could store up 500 GB of data with iDrive. I could backup up to 5 machines. With CrashPlan+ Family plan, I pay the same amount of money, $149/year, but I get some important benefits:

There is no limit to how much data I can backup. This is a very important point. In considering backup services, I was not thinking about how much data I have to back up today but how much I’ll need to back up 3-, 5-, even 10 years from now. There is plenty of room to grow.
I can backup up to 10 computers. Again, I was thinking about the future. We have three computers right now, two of which are backed up through CrashPlan. But we also have 2 small children and I imagine that they will eventually have computers. The plan I have will allow us to expand our backup clients as necessary into the foreseeable future.
The software can handle local and cloud backups. Some people are less comfortable with their data in the cloud. CrashPlan allows you to backup your data to the cloud, but you can also back it up to other computers (or drives attached to computers). In fact, you can do both and CrashPlan handles it all so you don’t have to think about it.
The software provides proactive notifications if backups fail for a certain number of days. If one of my machines is not backed up after a certain number of days, I will be notified. This is perfect because my default position is: I don’t have to think about it, which is part of the point of automation.
I can initiate backups and restore data remotely. I don’t have to be in my house or even on the computer to which I want to restore data or initiate a backup. I can do it from another computer, or from my iPhone or iPad.

Continue reading →

Notes

Technically, it is probably the second, since I already wrote a post on how I’ve automated my password management, but I need to start officially somewhere and it might as well be here. ↩

My Trends in Reading Media Format

May 17, 2013 | 3 Comments

Yesterday, I got to thinking about how much I’ve taken to the audiobook format. I’ve transformed from someone who was once certain the format would never work for him, to a huge consumer of audiobooks. The clear advantage–the realization that I could read more in the same amount of time–was a big motivator. But I’ve also come to enjoy the performance dimension of the readings. My recent re-read of Stephen King’s It and 11/22/63 have demonstrated to me just how good such performance readings can be.

Since I have data on my reading going back to 1996, I thought it might be interesting to plot my reading over time, breaking it down by the media format of the book. To keep things simple, I divided this into three categories:

Paper: all formats of paper books.
E-book: all formats of electronic books.
Audiobooks: those books I’ve listened to via Audible.

Aggregating the data by year (so that I don’t overwhelm anyone), here is what I get:

From 1996 through 2008–a period of 13 years inclusive–I read nothing by paper books. Then, beginning in 2009, I began reading e-book. Halfway through that year (right around the time the Little Man was born) I got a Kindle. A year later, in 2010, half the books I read were e-books. The trend reversed somewhat in 2001, when the bulk of my reading for the year were the old issues of Astounding Science Fiction. Last year, e-books once again made up half of my reading. It wasn’t until February of this year that I started listening to audiobooks, but already they make up the vast majority of my reading for the year.

Note, also that while we are only 5/12ths of the way through the year, I’ve already read nearly half of what I read on my best year. I suspect that 2013 will set a new record in books-read, in large part thanks to audiobooks, which allow me to read when I am doing other things–something I couldn’t easily do with either paper or e-books.

If we breakdown the time period from 2009 (when I started reading e-books) through the present by month, you can see a little more detail:

Note that we are only about halfway through May so that last data point is incomplete. I will also point out that in April, I listened to Stephen King’s It for the bulk of the second half of the month. That is a 44 hour book and since I didn’t finish it until May, it goes in the May column instead of April. Finally, there should be one paper book in the April column, but I forgot to add it to my list before running the data.

See that blue trend (audiobooks) over the last three months? Given my experience so far, I expect that trend to continue. I expect the green (paper) to fade out almost (but not quite) entirely, and the red (e-books) to shrink somewhat, replaced by audiobooks. I will be interesting to recreate this chart a year from now and see how close I am in my predictions.

I Review The Human Division by John Scalzi at InterGalactic Medicine Show

May 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

My latest book review column is now online at InterGalactic Medicine Show. In this month’s column, I review John Scalzi‘s wonderful new novel, The Human Division. I also review a new piece of nonfiction about a science fiction pioneer. The Man from Mars by Fred Nadis is a fascinating biography of Ray Palmer.

You can read both reviews over at the InterGalactic Medicine Show website.

Updates to Blog, Plus New Features!

May 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Most of the updates to the blog theme that I mentioned yesterday are now complete. I am still tweaking a few minor things here and there, but they are minor and probably not noticeably by most folks. For those interested, what follows is a summary of the changes I made as well as some of the new features you’ll get because of these changes.

Changed WordPress theme to Twentytwelve

I use a self-installed version of WordPress to run this site. For a long time, I have been using the SubtleFlux theme, which I customized for my own needs. There are two problems with that theme:

It had not been maintained for more than two years. It still works for me, but because it hasn’t been maintained…
It does not support many of the features available in the current release of WordPress.

Yesterday I switched to the Twentytwelve theme, which comes out of the box with WordPress. It is a simple, two-column theme, close in basic structure to SubtleFlux, which was important because I wanted the overall look-and-feel of the site to remain the same. Much of the time I spent on this update was tweaking the stylesheets for Twentytwelve to get the site to look pretty much the same as it looked before. You’ll notice some minor differences in look and feel, but overall, it should look the same.

New features for comments

One of the benefits of the new theme is that it has the hooks that allow commenters to optionally use various social media credentials when leaving comments on the site. When you go to leave a comment now, in addition to just providing your email address, you can also choose to use your WordPress, Twitter, or Facebook persona to comment. The new comment screen looks something like this:

Infinite scrolling is enabled

When you scroll to the bottom of the main page, the next set of 7 or so posts will automatically be loaded so that you do not have to click the “Previous posts” button. This happens automatically when you reach the bottom of the page.

For analytics purposes, I’ve configured Google Analytics to consider each load of additional posts as an additional page visit (this was a convenient option available in the settings).

WordPress “Like” button added to “sharing” section of post

The new theme allows me to enable the WordPress version of “liking” a post to the sharing section of the post. It will appear as follows (circled in red):

Dropdown options on menu bar

The new theme also enabled the dropdown option on the main menu bar. Some (but not all) of the items on the menu bar have sub-items. If you hover over that main item (Miscellaneous, for instance) you will see a popup menu with additional options, making some of the pages a little easier to access:

As I said, I still have some minor tweaks to make, but the bulk of the changes are now complete and the features listed above are all enabled. The biggest tweak I still have to make is displaying the post categories and tags. I’m working on a different way of doing that and it requires a little more tweaking of the style sheet, so for now, they are not visible as part of the post.

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

Upcoming Theme Changes to the Blog

May 15, 2013 | 1 Comment

I have been using the SubtleFlux theme for a long time now. I like the look and feel of the theme, which I have customized quite a bit. That said, the SubtleFlux theme is no longer actively supported and doesn’t support some of the newer functions built into WordPress. So, over the next week or so, I’ll be moving to a new theme. Ultimately, the look and feel should remain the same. The new theme will simply allow me to take advantage of some additional functionality.

That said, you may see some things change here temporarily as I install the new theme, and then apply my customizations to get it to look as much like the current theme as possible. Just a heads-up that the changes should be temporary. I’ll let you know when the work is done¹

Notes

Strictly speaking, I should do the work on a test version of the site first, but I don’t have a test version. I am working on creating one, but my time is limited and I’m more anxious to update the theme at this point. ↩

My Thrice-Daily Walks

May 15, 2013 | 3 Comments

Back in March 2012, I started taking a walk at 10 am every morning. It was right about the time I got my first FitBit device and the walk served several purposes. It allowed me to get in some exercise. It broke up my morning so that I wasn’t stuck in my office writing code or sitting in meetings all day long. It allowed me to clear my head. I was very diligent about this walk, going regardless of the weather conditions. In the winter, this was a little more difficult especially when it was cold, windy, and rainy, but I still would get out when I could.

Then, in February of this year, I became an Audible subscriber and started listening to books while I walked. My walk is not long, just a mile. It goes around the block on which my office building sits and generally takes me 15-20 minutes. But I loved the fact that I could spend that time walking and listening to a book.

My walk has evolved since then. In late February or early March, I started repeating the walk at 2 pm, getting it in twice a day. Then, as the weather warmed up and improved, I added lunchtime as well. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been walking three times each day, at 10am, noon and 2pm. Sometimes, at lunch, I’ll walk around the block twice. These three walks pretty much ensure that I’ll hit my 10,000 step goal each day. Usually, my FitBit Flex buzzes (letting me know I’ve reached my goal) just before the end of my 2 pm walk. They’ve also had the side effect of breaking up my day into more manageable chunks: 7:30 – 10 am; 10 am – noon; noon – 2pm; and 2pm – the end of my workday.

I’ve grown fond of these walks that on days where I work from home, I miss them. Indeed, I’ve been feeling slightly under the weather the last couple of days. When I woke up this morning, I felt downright rotten, and ordinarily would have considered staying home. But I didn’t want to miss my walks, so I came into the office. (I also have a bunch of meetings this morning that I would have had to reschedule.)

At this point, the walks are the only real regular exercise that I get, and I think it is good that I’ve managed to make them serve so many useful purposes at once. I really look forward to them each day I come in. And sometimes, when the sun is particularly warm on that first walk of the morning, I take it a little bit slower than usual, just so I have a little more time to soak up that sunshine.

Going Paperless: Digitize Your Devices and Appliances for Easy Access to Information

May 14, 2013 | 9 Comments

I had occasion to call my cable company for some technical support over the weekend. They’d sent me a new cable modem and the last step of the process was to activate the modem. You could do this online or call the number. Unfortunately, the activation didn’t work when I tried it online, so I had to call. This was complicated, however, by the fact that I was watching both kids that evening and both seemed to require my attention. I couldn’t be running all over the house looking up serial numbers for the support people. Fortunately, I’ve “digitized” information about all of my devices and appliances and when the tech support person asked me the serial number and model number of the cable modem, I simply looked it up in Evernote. No need to go downstairs with the kids screaming around me.

Digitizing Devices and Appliances

Last year I talked about how I used Evernote, Skitch and Penultimate to create a digital version of my house in Evernote. The purpose of this was to have access to information about my house at my fingertips when it proved most convenient. For instance, if I was at the hardware store and needed to know if something was too wide to fit in the stairwell, I could look up my note that showed how wide the stairwell was. If I was looking for a new bookshelf to match my old ones, and needed to know how tall those bookshelves were, I could look up the information in a note without having to run home and measurement.

Not long after that, I started capturing information about my devices and appliances in Evernote. I found that I was often asked about a model number or serial number if I had a question. So what I did was go around the house, snapping photos of the information panels of various appliances and devices. I then emailed the photos to my Evernote email address. Finally, I used Skitch to markup the photos (if necessary) and filed the notes in my Digital House notebooks. Or, put more succinctly:

Snap a photo of the information panel on the device or appliance.
Email the photo to your Evernote email address.
File, tag, and markup the note as necessary.

Of course, you could also create a note and type in the information, but I like the photo for two main reasons:

It is fast and easy.
Typing in the information, I might make a typo in the serial or model number, which could complicate matters when I actually need the information.

Here is an example of the note for the microwave oven that came with the house: