Super Duper!

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Last summer I replaced the 160GB HDD in my MacBook with a 500GB drive. In the process I put the old drive in a new external enclosure and planned to use it to backup my home folder. Until now, that never really happened, but a few weeks ago when I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard I decided it would be a good time to finally get my backups going.

I already had a pretty good idea that I wanted to go with Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper!. I had already had some experience with CCC from my job last summer, but I had read an article on Daring Fireball about backup and he used Super Duper!. I decided to checkout Super Duper! first since I hadn’t really looked into it much before.

It turns out that you can download Super Duper! for free, but there is also a paid version that unlocks some more features. For the most basic backups either program works great.

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My Mac

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So I’ve been using a Mac for about 18 months now and since I’m doing a clean install of OSX Snow Leopard, I figured I would go through the apps that I use on a daily and maybe not-so-daily basis.

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Apple 2010 Logo Refresh

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My idea for a 2010 redesign

So it’s been a few years since we’ve seen a new logo for apple and I think it’s time for a refresh. The monochrome logo has been effective, but it seems as though the plain white “glassy” logo is becoming too cliche. I’d love to see them bring back a new 2010 version of the rainbow logo.

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My URL Shortener

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For some reason I’ve wanted to create my own URL shortener just for my stuff for some time now. It’s finally here: the jbe.me URL shortener. Now, I’m the only one that can use the service; it’s only for my links, but when you see a jbe.me URL you at least know it will link to something I’ve done.

It was super simple to setup.

First of all, I had to buy the jbe.me domain name ( think J B dot ME ). Unfortunatly jb.me is not a valid domain, I’m sure someone much more important than I will grab it. Anyway, jbe.me was the next best thing.

One I had the domain I installed the YOURLS (You Own URL Shortener) script at that location. It’s a series of scripts that talks to a MySQL database with some pretty cool bookmarklets and an API. The API was key for the next step: the Twitter Tools extension. As many people know, I use twitter tools to post new blog entries to my twitter profile. Since I want to get as much of my URL-shortening as possible done through the jbe.me shortener now I needed to get twitter tools to use the new system. Twitter Tools has it’s own api that will let you create a shortener for any service that you could think of with some hooks that it install for WordPress. Then I threw a plugin together using the YOURLS API and now when I publish a post, Twitter Tools uses the jbe.me shortener to shorten the URLs. Pretty Cool.

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