New Site – Progress

If you’ve been to Hackety McCrackety lately you’ve noticed…. not much. I’ve been really terrible about updating the site. Lots of stuff is happening, but I realized the platform (Drupal) just made it too hard to update the site. So, as much as I LOVE Drupal, I had to go with something that worked… and worked well for blogging.

Enter this new WordPress site. I’ve used both Drupal and WordPress for a while and while (again) I love Drupal, WordPress makes a blog easy.

Hopefully I’ll be updating this and the other sites a lot more now. Here’s hoping.

Crashplan – Do YOU have a plan for a crash? [Archive]

After my last post I’ve finally had some time to work with CrashPlan and my new backups situation. I must admit, I’m REALLY liking the new setup. After jumping from the burning Mozy ship, I wanted to support a company that valued it’s users, promised unlimited backups, and had some good software. Oh, and Linux support for down the road. I’m not currently using Linux on my primary (I know, I know) but I do want the option. Crashplan does all this. Continue reading →

The Mozy Debacle – from the perspective of a “Rotten Apple” [Archive]

I’ve been a Mozy user for a few years now. Their unlimited backup plan was a big draw for me and their software made it pretty easy to backup the data that I wanted to. The best part was a flat rate for an unlimited back plan. Perfect! In fact, I did a LOT of research before I signed up to insure there were no hidden costs or upper limits to the amount of data I could back up. And it’s not like I have an excessive amount of data to protect. My current load is about 160GB. I backup my movie files to an external drive, saving bandwidth for more important files like pictures and documents and my music (can’t live without the music)! The beauty of an unlimited backup plan is you don’t really have to worry about your backups. And that’s what Mozy was offering.
The problem is, Mozy has changed their pricing structure. And they did it pretty much over night. 3 days ago MozyTweeted about the “newly announced plans” detailing the change in their service. The worst part of the whole mess was that there was no warning (for users with accounts renewing on Feb 1 or 2 they really had no chance. Many woke up to canceled accounts) and Mozy attempting to blame their USERS for the fiasco. In a brilliant quote for PC Mag writer Michael Muchmore, Mozy vice president of product marketing said that

“three out of four of its customers’ accounts stay well below 50GB, a minority of rotten apples who take the ‘unlimited’ at face value have spoiled it for the rest of the bunch by uploading terabytes of digital video, photos, and music.”

You’ve got to be kidding me! Mozy is actually blaming their USERS for USING the service and causing these issues! My wife reminded me of the AOL mess years ago when they got upset that their users were on the internet too much and asked them to get off. AOL never recovered. Mozy is quite possibly looking at a repeat of that event. Only time will tell.
My backup costs tripled in the last three days thanks to Mozy. As for me, I’m already transferring all my data to Crashplan. If you agree and think Mozy has violated the trust of their users, you should do the same.
Goodbye Mozy,
from a “Rotten Apple”

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ADMIN: Please note – this article has been reposted from the old blog. The comments from that post are copied over here. Please feel free to comment further below. Continue reading →

Archos Fun [Archive]

Super stoked for the new Archos Gen 8 firmware update. The latest version out as of a few days ago is 2.1.3 and brings some really stellar bug fixes. So far my favorite has to be the 64MB swap and better sleep management. Another awesome addition for those running the Google Market hack is the addition of an Android ID. For apps that require a device to identify and authenticate with the Android Market, the new firmware will allow that to happen. This means the stellar Spark 360 app now works on my Archos 70 IT. Rock on.
If you haven’t update yet, just do a wipe (Android only, leave your files) and check it out. I think you’ll be stoked.
Archos.com download page

UPDATE: There seems to be some confusion as to the version number. The device is showing 2.1.3 where some forum posts reference 2.1.03. Archos changelog confirms the version number of 2.1.3.

Amazing Technology [Archive]

I posted this on another blog a while ago and while in the process of shutting it down, decided to repost this over here.
The amazing new technology from Pranav Mistry. See how the world will change under this brilliant mind and feel free to comment below. Continue reading →

Archos Tablet Case [Archive]

For my graduation (I’m a part of the fourth year of Convergence – a pastoral training program from CB Northwest) my wife made me a case for my Archos 70 IT as a graduation present. I happen to really like it.

Continue reading →

Archos 70 Internet Tablet review [Archive]

It’s been a fun couple of weeks.
My 8 GB Archos 70 Internet Tablet arrived and it’s everything I could imagine and probably a little bit more. For now I’ll be just doing a rough overview and looking into the future of hacking with this device at a later time.
The specs on the unit are pretty decent considering the price was only $274 direct from Archos.com. It features an ARM Cortex A8 at 1 GHz with DSP and 3D OpenGL ES 2.0 which makes 3D games look great on it’s WVGA 800 x 480 7” screen. My two favorite aspects are the e-reading and movie playback functions. E-reading both epub (in the Aldiko Android application) and comic books (with the Android Comic Viewer available in the Android Market) on the go is great. And movie playback is wonderful.
The device is shipping with Android 2.1 with an expected release date of “late November” for the Android 2.2 firmware update on the Archos website. Continue reading →

New Toy coming soon! [Archive]

Well, I’m kind of a sucker for new gadgets. And when I get my mind on one, it’s pretty consuming. I think Darren Kitchen of Hak5 fame has it right when he calls it “technolust.”
Archos released their next major Android Tablet today, the Archos 70 Internet Tablet. This 7″ beauty comes loaded with Android 2.2, a capacitive touch screen, 8 GB (or even a 250GB model coming soon) of internal storage and a plethora of audio and video playback options. Continue reading →

BlackMod and all the Rooted Goodness that is Android [Archive]

I’ve really, really gotten to love the new ROMs from #teamdouche coming out right now. They’re released via Cyanogen on http://www.cyanogenmod.com. I played around with the nightlies for the better part of August and September, but recently have settled on a gem of a workup from jaybob413. You see, jaybob413 has taken the pure bliss of the CM 6 nightlies and wound it into pure silkiness. Patching the little issue with the camera (check out the CM forums for more about that) Continue reading →

Subsonic Media Server [Archive]

Check out http://www.subsonic.org for one killer way to get music from your desktop to your Android phone no matter where you are (Wifi and 3G supported).
Right now I’m listening to The Darkness streaming from my Windows PC (Linux and Mac supported too).
Grab the program and app and start enjoying your music when you want to, where you want to.