The Temple of Bague

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer (DS)

John — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:37:49 +0000

Another run through. Picked up my shiny +4 katana from the warehouse and give it yet another upgrade then dropped it off in preparation for some future über run. I’m on the mountaintop again, after getting past the incredibly annoying evil soldier. Best way to deal with him, as it happens, is to have a stock of arrows handy so you ca get his ghost before it possesses anything. The rice-changers were, as ever, really annoying.

Guhh….

John — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:13:48 +0000

$COW-ORKER: John, my phone’s not working. I was speaking to someone and it went dead.

Me: Is it plugged in?

$COW-ORKER: Of course it’s plugged in. I was speaking to someone on it!

Me: But is it plugged in?

$COW-ORKER: Well obviously it’s plugged in because I was able to make a call before it went dead!

Me: But is it currently plugged in?

$COW-ORKER: The phone is clearly faulty.

Me: The phone isn’t plugged in.

Time Machine

John — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:10:35 +0000

Well, as most of you will know already, I got a nice shiny MacBook a week or two ago. I haven’t really said much on here because I tend to turn into a dribbling fanatic when talking about macs, and it upsets my PC-bound wife. But I have to talk about Time Machine. I’ve no choice.

The thing is, disks are big these days, and between keeping all my documents and finances on the computer, having years worth of photos and music, and all the time that goes into getting it set up just right, the fear of losing hardware constantly niggles away at the back of my mind.

Not any more, though. I’ve mentioned, way back in the distant past, the way I’m always impressed by the fact that a Mac, as delivered, already has 99% of the stuff you’re ever likely to need already installed. Well, Time Machine takes it one step further than that. It’s a backup program - the kind you really have to spend quite a bit of money on in windowsland.

It works like this. You connect an external USB hard drive. It asks you if you want to use it for Time Machine. You say yes. Your backup needs are now met.

What it does is this - it does a full system backup. Then every hour or so it does an incremental. It then does a weekly and a monthly. By default, it will keep the last week’s worth of hourly backups, several months of weekly backups, and monthly backups for as long as there’s available disk space. Once disk space runs low, it’ll remove the oldest Monthly backup.

But that all just happens behind the scenes. If you don’t have your external drive connected - if you’re out and about, for example, it’ll just do the backup next time you connect it.

You can then click the Time Machine icon on the dock and get a swirly swooshy view of your machine at any point in time since the backups started. Travel back to the date you want, browse the filesystem to find the file you want and click restore. Done. This even works in applications - start Apple Mail, click Time Machine and browse your inbox or deleted items from $wayback.

A nice touch is that full system recovery can also be carried out. Boot of the OSX installer DVD, select “Time Machine Restore” and poof! off it goes.

It’s just lovely.

ESX needs a Mac client.

John — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:40:14 +0000

Or at the very least a platform independant one. I have a few ESX servers at work, running all kinds of virtual machines, but in order to administer the server I need to use the Vmware Infrastructure client - which is windows only. Which is annoying.

It’s hard to bear

John — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:53:54 +0000

Well, the barbeque is on for the third night in a row. Cajun chicken, this time (with a couple of snags on the side). The weather’s been lovely for the last couple of days, despite what the weathermen keep trying to tell me.

What I need to do, though, is find somewhere that’ll sell me a solid plate - griddles are fine and well, but you just can’t do onions on em and using a sideburner and pan is just wrong.