Techbax

Useful tip for Chrome users:

For many years I used a combination of Outlook for business emails and Yahoo for personal emails. I was pretty happy with the combination, and it fulfilled most of my email needs, especially when the Yahoo web interface get an overhaul and became more like Outlook with AJAX drag and drop functionality etc.

As a keen photographer, I have a treasure trove of data that I would be distraught to loose, so data backup is of prime importance - especially knowing how unreliable hard drives can be (even server grade drives). A couple of years ago I was getting fed up with having to back up to an external hard drive and to DVDs (to take off site), so I decided to look at an online solution.

After a lot of Googling and reading reviews and forums, I settled on a service called Mozy. I signed up for the free 2GB service and installed their client app. It took a little while to configure, as I wanted to tweak everything to my exact requirements, but once everything was in place Mozy sat quietly in my system tray backing up my files whenever my PC was not in use. I soon filled up my free storage, so it was a no-brainer to get out my credit card and sign up for the full service!

Since then I have had peace of mind,that whenever I upload photos and movies onto my PC, I know that the Mozy client will kick in and soon be backing up my encrypted data to their secure storage. I still backup to my external drive, and make the odd DVD, but I'm not constantly worrying that I'm not up to date with my backups. I have also installed Mozy on my father's PC, and so no longer have to worry about his lack of backups either! 

So far Mozy has been extremely reliable, and I've never had any problems or network issues. Recently I had to move Mozy to a different PC (you pay per PC you install the client on) and the client app was clever enough to work out what data had already been uploaded, and so didn't upload it again. The client app allows you complete control over what you back up, how often it is backed up and the bandwidth/processing used. 

If you require the kind of backup that allows you to recover a certain version of a document on a certain day, or recover a file you deleted a year ago (deleted files are kept for 30 day) - then Mozy is probably not for you. However for a disaster recovery situation it's spot on!

As an IT professional I've seen the misery that can be caused by data loss, so please, please go and do some research on online storage providers and sign up with the one that fits your needs best. I'd recommend Mozy as it's been robust, error free and unobtrusive, but there are lots of other services out there to choose from...   

In an interesting article on Techradar (http://bit.ly/5PZSoc), Garry Marshall raises the idea of getting ISPs to subsidise Spotify subscriptions instead of having the expense of trying to implement the unworkable 'three strikes' system being proposed by the UK government. As a huge Spotify fan, part of me likes the idea of having my ISP pay for my Spotify service. However as an even bigger fan of competition and not being forced to pay for services I don't necessarily want, I'm not entirely comfortable with this proposal - though surely anything is better than the three strikes idea.

Just noticed that Amazon are selling the Squeezebox Boom at a discount again: http://bit.ly/84csJ4 *

I love my Boom - the sound quality is absolutely amazing for such a small box. I can stream my music from my PC, or via the web... I can even control it via an app on my Android phone (I believe the same is true of the iPhone). It's not all perfect - controlling the settings via the small screen can be a bit tricky, but all-in-all a piece of tech joy!!

*=affiliate link.

6 months ago I decided to depart from my usual 'feature phone' upgrade path with Vodafone, and upgrade to a smartphone - in this case an HTC Magic running Google's Android OS.  Having got to know my phone over the last half year, I though I'd write a quick review - not only of the phone itself, but about the impact of having a smartphone over a 'bog standard' feature phone.

ChromeOS should we be excited?

In my day job working for a small IT consultancy, I often come across corporate IT systems still using Internet Explorer 6 as the default browser.

When we recommend upgrading, we often get the response that some of their most used sites only work with IE6. These sites tend to be goverment departments (e.g the UK land registry was one), and so we shrug our sholders and move on.

Yesterday we had a request to our helpdesk from an IT department to assist in helping diagnose why a user was unable to access a particular government site (this time the UK  gambling commission). After some quick diagnosis we discovered that the site did not work with IE6, but worked happily with IE7 and 8. HURRAY!! We now had a senior employee who needed a newer version of IE. A company upgrade plan is now being drawn up. Shame we couldn't get them to go for Firefox or Chrome.... but hopefully we are seeing the end of the hateful IE6!

As a committed Firefox fan of many years, the launch of Google Chrome only registered as a small blip on my tech radar. I always like to see competition (who wants to see the stagnation of the IE6 years again) and another browser was fine by me, though I couldn’t really get excited about it. 

However, soon after the (highly anticipated) release of Firefox 3.5, I started to get a number of annoying problems (mainly  crashes and slowdowns) both on my work and home PCs. For the first time ever Firefox was beginning to annoy me... so I decided to install Chrome and give it a whirl. 

It was not quite love at first sight (mainly because it takes a bit of getting used to the uncluttered screen and combined URL/Search bar) but my god was it fast!! I quickly updated to the beta channel (to provide cross pc bookmark synchronisation) and then to the cutting edge developer version (which improved the speed even more and provided for basic extension support). I was hooked! 

There are a few things I still prefer about Firefox – mainly the sheer number of extensions, but Chrome is quickly catching up in functionality. Once the extensions support filters down to the stable version and developers start writing them then I will be a complete Chrome convert! I still find some sites that don’t render properly in Chrome, but these are a rarity, and the idea of having a separate box for search and URL now seems very old fashioned. I’m still hoping that the next versions of Firefox include some speed improvements, but until then Chrome is my default.