Received this a day or two ago from pingmag, a jap based site covering all things japanese design related. Any of you out there with the slightest interest in computing history will probably appreciate the pictures from a book they are highlighting.

Check them out at pingmag. and at the authors site.

I’m not planning on making a habit of posting stuff like this, but the images were too striking not to pass around…

As I mentioned a few days ago I aggregated all my digital photos into one place recently. One part of the task involved connecting a bunch of hard drives one at a time and scanning them for the files I wanted. While this wasn’t a problem for the old Windows disks I had lying around, I was stumped for an answer to the Linux disks for a while.

A long time ago I used a tool called Explore2fs that let me get at linux disks from windows, but that was then, and it was fairly primitive, so I went in search of something more up to date…

Which was when I discovered Ext2 IFS (catchy name) which is an altogether slicker bit of software. It works in the background giving you access to linux partitions through any bit of windows software. They just look like standard windows disks (C: D: E: etc…) Clever stuff, and just what I needed.

On the odd occasion I do want to see carefully targeted messages from some of the companies that I deal with, yet at the same time don’t want to be bothered for evermore or run the risk of having my address passed around to other companies, I take advantage of disposable email…

Spamgourmet.com is my provider of choice for this service (There are plenty of others just a search away, but I can only vouch for the one I’ve been using for years.) The home page isn’t exactly web2.0 but it does the job…

Once you’ve created an account that points at your main mail address, you’re free to use any email address of the form:-

<unique-identifier.x.username>@spamgourmet.com

Where x is the maximum number of emails you want to receive from that unique address.

You can hand these out to anyone safe in the knowledge that once the sender hits the allotted number of allowed messages at the individual address, Spamgourmet will eat any further ones without troubling you. Handy, huh?

After checking thru the logs for the site, I noticed a few of the articles were attracting a small but steady trickle of visitors. This is probably due to the titles being close to a couple of fairly common searches. In light of this I’m rewriting the two that get the most hits.

The main reason for this is vanity. I don’t want visitors clicking on a link to this site from a search engine and then discovering that they’ve wasted their time. When people arrive here I want them to find what they’re looking for, I want this site to be of use to them.

Seeing as one of the posts is only one sentence long it shouldn’t be too difficult to knock it in to shape. Basically it needs to be the article you would expect to see from reading the title.

So the aim for all future articles is to be useful and informative. Oh yes, and pay close attention to the titles to make them catchy and relevant. (There’s more to this blogging malarky than meets the eye…)

I’ve been looking for some easy solution to the problem of storing sensitive data securely for quite a while now and think I may have found the solution with Wiki on a Stick. Everyone knows what a wiki is, like Wikipedia, it’s a collection of pages that can be edited from the pages themselves.

Here comes the science… Wiki on a Stick takes this concept a step further by putting the wiki and everything it needs to function into a single self modifying HTML file. Add to this the option to save the page contents with some fairly hardcore encryption and you have a pretty ingenious tool.

The best thing about this single file wiki is that only needs access to a browser to be viewed or edited. As the name inplies you can drop the file on a USB stick and carry your personal encrypted wiki with you wherever you go. Neat, huh?