treasures from the interwebs – colorful world

While surfing and searching geeky stuff I came across this fantastic site call tag galaxy.

It looks quite boring when you start it but shows its geek factor soon enough. Start by entering a tag of your choice, and the software shows you (in the form of planets) what other tags are connected to your choice.

Click on any planet to add this tag to your selection, I haven’t tested the maximum of tags, it probably ends when you’ve run out of possible connections.

When you think you’re done, click on the planet in the middle and the software starts adding pictures from flickr, compliant to the selected tags, and adds them to an object shaped as a globe.

They didn’t issue a warning “Addictive”, though I think they should have.

I started out with some obvious selections like sunset, which gave me this:

Next was something for my girlfriend:

And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you can create your own rainbow-world, by playing with the tags lgbt, pride, lesbian and others :-)

  or going by colors – red, yellow, pink, orange etc.

 

Wonderful idea :-)

tech talk

Yesterday felt like xmas in summer.

The reason for that was not really funny and gave me a fright on Saturday and much work on Sunday. Saturday morning I realized that the NAS wasn't running, at first I wasn't that surprised cause there was a power outage on Friday evening, and because those happen frequently and sometimes repeatedly I've programmed all computers not to reboot when the power comes back.

After rebooting though the NAS still wasn't available and that's when the trouble started. The system said "no disk" and G said "oh no, where's my data?!" Most the files we need to use both were stored on that disk. The rest – pictures, movies and music where just backupped there for easier access.

The rest of the weekend turned out to be very technical. Removing HDD from NAS, inserting it into PC, understanding the file format and finding a program to make the disk readable.

I learned everything I never wanted to know about ext3 partitions but all that counts was that I was able to recover all of the data. Because those programs couldn't find any errors on the disk, but the NAS was still insisting that the disk was broken, I decided that it was in the fact the NAS that was broken and quickly got G to agree to buy a new one asap.

I found one from Linksys but a visit to their forums convinced me to wait some more time to get their newest media hub. It's very tempting, but has only been available for a couple of months and is still suffering from minor problems.

We headed out to a huge electronics store yesterday morning, and though I had in mind to get a NAS with two HDD's I settled on a model with only one (Buffalo Link Station 1 TB). Those models which allowed the installation of several HDD's didn't have the media-options. I decided to go with more functionality and need to rethink and seriously setup a backup-system for the rest of our data.

The rest of what we bought falls into the category "do you really need that?"e.g. yet another satellite receiver, a power cable for an internal SATA-disk, and many many dvd's that were on sale. Oh and a case for G's iPhone, cause the one I ordered was to be delivered around mid june. Yesterday evening I received an e-mail that it has been shipped :-)

After the exhausting shopping we both had our first Subway-Sandwich – yummy :-)