Backups and redundancy are always important when dealing with data you’re not willing to loose overnight when your hard drives decide it’s time to meet their maker. Usually Seagate or Western Digital in my case, not that I’m complaining *knocks on wood*. Mistakes also happen and you’re bound to eventually delete or somehow damage important data on your hard drive.

Time Machine is a piece of software introduced by Apple when Leopard was launched, it allows us to set up an external or network drive as a backup drive and it backs up data from any given point in time onwards allowing us as well to go “back in time” to any given point in the backups.

Recently I’ve been dabbling a lot with Ubuntu and those of you who know my nerd side know already I’ve googled the hell out of it trying to maximize and/or improve stuff and I’ve come across several interesting articles I’d like to share with whoever reads this. I could just post some links, but that wouldn’t be fun and some of the links might be taken down leaving me without any source of information in case I want to repeat the process.

On with the interesting part, setting up Ubuntu 10.04 as a Time Machine network drive.

I recently mentioned the only thing bugging me about my recent Ubuntu incursion was that my gfx card (Geforce GTS 250) wasn’t supported by nvclock so I couldn’t set it’s fan speed to whatever I want it to ending up with a serious decibel issue right next to me.

Turns out nvidia’s driver itself is able to do so, though it’s an unsupported feature and thus it’s not as easy as 1 2 3 to activate it. The Coolbits option in our xorg.conf comes into place, allowing us to overclock and/or change several features directly in the driver’s settings panel. Now, I never did overclock anything and I seriously doubt I ever will since I really don’t like to reduce the life expectancy of any given piece of hardware, but being able to reduce that HORRIBLE NOISE when I’m idling in my desktop surfing the web or chatting with friends is a blessing. I always keep an eye on temperatures and obviously I won’t lock the fan speed when playing games and such so I think it should be just fine.

On to the goods, nvidia’s config options available here state the following:

This post will mostly serve as a self reminder of stuff I installed on the Ubuntu box in case I for whatever reason need to reinstall everything again. It will always be a work in progress thing.

• VLC
• Dropbox
• Gimp – Too bad Gimpshop is badly maintained, I kinda like the idea.
• CheckGmail
• gFTP
• jDownloader – Install via ppa repository instructions found here.
• Pidgin – Pidgin OTR installed through the repositories as well.
• Skype
• RedNotebook
• NetBeans
• Conky
• Conky-colors

More will be added given enough time. Can’t remember what’s the name of the packages containing restricted codecs, extra themes and some other stuff.

Found the following articles to be of use.

http://www.webupd8.org/2009/05/how-to-install-and-configure-conky.html

http://www.joewein.net/blog/2009/11/28/fix-windows-as-default-boot-on-ubuntu-9-10-with-grub2-loader/

So I’m back from Leiria, had a blast over there and I wish I could go there more often. Maybe even live there. Good times with good friends.

Sometimes I start thinking I’d really like to move away from Lisbon and Leiria looks like a perfect target. I’d be really tempted to move there if I had a somewhat ok(ish) job offer.

Moved to Ubuntu 10.04 on the Desktop, figured since I&#8217;ve been doing all my gaming on the Xbox I don&#8217;t really need Windows though I really enjoyed Win7. The only thing bugging me is that <a href="http://www.linuxhardware.org/nvclock/" target="_blank">nvclock</a> still doesn&#8217;t support my 250GTS nvidia card and I can&#8217;t slow down the card&#8217;s fan like in Win7 with some program I can&#8217;t remember the name of. Temperatures still remain acceptable while not gaming and at least my computer doesn&#8217;t sound like it&#8217;s about to take off. Network and file sharing worked right out of the box with the mac since it was already set up for a SMB network, that was a nice surprise following the struggle to get the mac working together with Win7.

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8:08PM and the sun is about to set and I really wish I could be back at Old Beach, this perfect little coffee house(?) slash bar right next to the beach open 24h a day in S. Pedro de Moel drinking a ‘Piña somethingicantremember’ milkshake and having a chat.

Been playing a lot of Forza Motorsport 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Alan Wake on the Xbox though I haven&#8217;t touched it the past few days since the nerd in me keeps wanting to fiddle around with Ubuntu and make it <em>just the way I like it</em>.

Went a couple of times to this bar where I live with a couple of friends. Never been there in my life before though it’s right in front of this gym I used to go to. My friends don’t even live here and they’re the ones that took me there, funny.

Also, I need a better wifi router. This one keeps dropping wifi. Gotta talk with a friend of mine who can possibly make me a good deal on a better router.

That’s it for now. Cheers.

PS: My current webhost is HORRIBLY SLOW.

PPS: Current desktop screenshot <a href="http://ncatarino.net/photos?g2_itemId=318" target="_self">here</a>.

Grabbed it on a 10€ deal. Makes me think some games are really made for consoles. On the PC it kinda sucks but on the 360 it’s the most awesome thing ever. Also got Gears of War 2 for 5€. www.game.co.uk is teh r0x0rz.

One of the perks I love the most when using OS X is using Control + Space or any other key combo to run Quicksilver or Spotlight or any other app that lets me run a program simply by typing the first initial letters of it’s name and pressing enter or opening the browser and googling the word I type. I really missed that while running Windows but it has come to my attention that it’s possible to do so with a little app from our buddies at Google. It’s called Google Quick Search Box for Internet Explorer. Yes, Internet Explorer. Don’t worry, it’ll let you launch queries on Firefox or any other browser.

I had some initial trouble installing it but nothing a quick online search didn’t solve. Here’s the method I used to install it properly:

1. Remove any previous installation of the toolbar in the control panel.
2. Download Google Update here and select just the toolbar on the check boxes. You can do this in any browser, I did it on Firefox.
3. Close all browsers, run the installer and let it do it’s thing.
4. Right click the search box and make sure it’s using your browser of choice in the options.
5. ???
6. Profit!

It uses a default Control + Space key combo to launch and it’s pure heaven in Windows 7 for anyone who wants an even more close(ish) OS X experience, with the taskbar buttons and such. It almost feels like we’re using a mac. Almost.

…and sometimes I really forget how beautiful it is. Can hardly wait for their gig next month.

[][1]

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[1]: http://ncatarino.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/leiriaflyer.jpg