this blog is girtby.net

Must. See. Movies.

Here is someone’s list of must-see movies (via Kottke). If you see them all you can apparently call yourself “movie literate”. I’ve seen some of them.

Star Wars in ASCII ... and IPv6

I’m rather shamed to admit that the following was the final straw that pushed me into deploying IPv6 on my home network.

This is from ASCII Star Wars, which you can see for yourself by telneting to towel.blinkenlights.nl. And after you’ve basked in ASCII goodness, read on for the IPv6 experience.

Bankers are Funny

Here is section 3.1 of the Usual Terms and Conditions (UTC) for Consumer Mortgage Lending, from the Commonwealth Bank:

You Can Hug Your Children With Nuclear Power

Global warming is a depressing problem. Not just because there are large numbers of clueless “skeptics” who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, but mostly because there doesn’t seem to be any sustainable solutions even on the horizon.

drive.com.au Stalled

Sometimes you have to ask yourself “who do they think they’re fooling?”

Nokia N70

Lets get this out of the way first. The new Nokia N70 phone is no iPod.

By that I mean that the N70 is not as polished (literally or figuratively), easy to use, or just as beautiful as the Apple product. Which is not to say that it’s ugly or anything, just that the bar is set pretty high for the toys-that-fit-into-my-pocket category. I think also Nokia would like to see themselves in the same category as Apple, and to be honest they’re not there yet.

Is it a fair comparison? Well obviously if you need a phone the iPod isn’t going to cut it. And (as we shall see) the N70 is far from an ideal music player. However I’m viewing the iPod as the current champion of industrial design, and Nokia’s creation as the challenger.

I bought this phone on the Three network, and I’ll defer commentary about the service to another post. For now, let’s just concentrate on the phone itself.

Bear in mind that I am not a mobile phone geek. My last phone was a Sony Ericsson T68i, purchased over 4 years ago (obviously I didn’t abuse it enough). 4 years is an eternity in mobile phone land, and much has changed in the meantime. Back then it was: “why would I want a camera in my phone?”. Now I’m all: “I need 2 megapixels, minimum”.

So if you want a thorough review of the N70 written by someone who is up-to-date on latest mobile phone technology, try my friends at gsmarena. For a non-phone-geek take, read on.

Google Never Lies

Wow. You don’t get more authoritative than Google. Number one hit, no less!

You Only Have to Backup the Stuff You Want to Keep

Backups are probably the least exciting topic in computing. And they are surprisingly hard to do right. So that’s why everyone, including me, makes a half-arsed attempt but ultimately relies on the notion that disaster will never strike.

Most of us can afford to be complacent about backups, mainly because we don’t generate important stuff that needs to be backed up regularly. Hence the occasional evening with a DVD burner and a spindle of blanks is probably perfectly adequate for some people.

Other people do need up-to-date backups. Even losing a week’s worth of data is devastating. As for losing it all? If you just have to go digging through a dumpster to recover your stuff, you should consider yourself lucky.

The huge storage capacity of today’s hard drives are a massive challenge for a backup regime, and the prevailing wisdom seems to be that the only devices suitable for backing up these monsters are more hard drives. I think this is a perfectly valid solution but for me I went with an old-school tape drive. Here’s why.

Ultimate Boot CD 4 (The) Win

Trying to sort out the mess that is my backup <airquote>strategy</airquote>, I recently bought a DDS-4 tape drive off eBay. Here’s the exciting story of how I got it working.

Threat Modelling

In the past I’ve rambled on about the Virtual Furniture Police and how corporations can severely but needlessly impact the productivity of their staff, with a variety of reasons given. Security is probably the main justification used for imposing such restrictive policies, and deserves some closer scrutiny.