Debra McLaren – the saga continues

I decided to move to Flickr for my photo hosting. I like that my photos are available for download at full resolution and some of my shots of the kittens are already popular with the cat-loving folks. However I don’t know why Flickr randomly uploads photos and won’t allow you to sort sets automatically. This looks like a job for API calls, a souped-up spreadsheet and a lot of patience. The initial spreadsheet was a few days of fiddly work, but worked perfectly. I then released it to the general public and the fun and games started. When I say the public it was actually one user who helped me. It turned out that he was an Internet Explorer user and the API call results he was pasting into the spreadsheet contained all sorts of crazy hyperlinks and chr(160)s. Last night I finally got it fixed so that it would accept data from either browser but then IE couldn’t cope with the size of the output list. Looks like another convert to Firefox! If anyone else would like a copy of the spreadsheet please email me at debra.mclaren at gmail.com.

I found to my immense disgust that I had lost a random third of my music files somewhere in the shift from my old hard drive to the Maxtor, to the WD to the FreeAgent Pro and I didn’t have it backed up anywhere. Since I regularly preach on the importance of backups I thought it was about time I got myself organised. I decided against Carbonite because my data lives on an external drive that Carbonite won’t backup. I eventually went with Mozy because of unlimited backups and good price. Since my initial backup is about 95GB it will take over 2 months. However there won’t be much change after that so subsequent backups should be bearable.

I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent drive today. The drive is 160GB so will hold all my music and pictures. Ceedo allows me to save my passwords to a local version of Firefox. It’s about time I used my own storage instead of school based devices. The drive takes up 2 USB ports which is not great but overall seems to be a good solution.