Created a brand new home page

During the last couple of weeks I've decided to beef up on current web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and such. I figured a great test case for my new skills would be to remake my own web page and I just put it live this morning. The new page has a hopefully much more contemporary design, uses responsive design and it is a single page web application (Except for the blog part which is still hosted by Blogger).

I also included a few newer photos and updated my about page with things that happened in the last decade. I also took time to update my resume which also hadn't been updated for the last decade. I also have some really cool interactive stuff going on in the resume section. Check it out and tell me what you think.

How I digitized my life

As a follow up to the previous post explaining why it's a good idea to digitize your life I figured I would follow that up with how I've digitized my life.

• Mail - I just use Google Mail. It's simply the best solution out there as far as I can tell. I now have over 100k emails archived and I can search all of it in the blink of an eye. You just can beat it. Also if you signed up for extra storage before they introduced Google Drive they provided you with 20GB of storage that is shared over all the Google services (Google Drive, Picasa, Google+, Mail, Docs etc...)for $5 a year. As long as you are grand fathered in it seems that you get to keep that price which is quite simply unbeatable.
• Photos - I use Google+ and Picasa. These are basically just two different interfaces to the same underlying service. First of all since Google already knows everything about me already since they have all my mails I don't think them having my photos will reveal much more about me. It allows me to download full resolution versions of the photos and it also allows you easy access to download the entire blob of all your photos as an archive should I ever want to leave. Finally with the combination of the two online interfaces, the Android Google+ app and the desktop Picasa application any kind of administration of my thousands of photos are always a snap. Finally for the love of god get a phone with a decent camera if you use your phone camera a lot!
• Computer Backups - As I mentioned in my preivous post I use Crashplan. They are very cheap, have a Linux, OSX & Windows clients and provides unlimited storage (I currently back up around 10TB of storage to them). They also provide backup sets with different priorities so that your important stuff is always up to date if somehow it gets a bit behind on the backup.
• Password Management - I use Lastpass. It is a really nice solution that also integrates right into the browser even on Android. It is also completely "trust no one" where no unencrypted data ever leaves your system (Lastpass themselves are not able to look at your data at any point during them providing you their service). It's free except for when you want to use it on mobile devices and then I think they charge something like $12 per year. If you are interested in a technical deep dive into how Lastpass works check out this Security Now episode.
• Books - This is a tricky one because no matter what you chose you will be locked into one vendor and switching to another one will most likely mean that you will no longer have access to your old books. I decided to go with the Amazon Kindle. The reason being that first of all they are really good at being available on any conceivable platform. Doesn't matter if it is PC, Android, iOS, Metro or whatever else you can think of. Chances are there is a Kindle application for it. Their app is also really good on any platform and Amazon seems unlikely to go away anytime soon. They also seem to have the largest catalog of books compared to any of their competitors from what I've seen. Finally their dedicated hardware is dirt cheap and really, really good!
• International Calling - I use either Google Voice or Skype. Skype I use mainly for it's video calling which is really neat. Google Voice though is a really cool service that integrates seamlessly into your Android phone and provides you free texting to any US phone number and also ridiculously cheap international calling (Way cheaper than Skype when calling real numbers).
• Address Book I use the one provided by Google. It integrates nicely with GMail, Android & Google Voice. It also works fine with iOS devices for those so inclined.
• Cloud Storage I use Google Drive. They have all the features I need and with the $5/year for 25GB deal I have nobody will be able to touch them on price. Also this service haven't suffered any of the embarrassing security issues that Dropbox have been plagued with.
• Blogging - I use Blogger for blogging. It's a nice platform that is still actively developed and since I use Google for my photos it integrates nicely with Blogger. I also find it a lot easier to use than for instance WordPress.
• Online Presence - I use About.me to catalog all the services that I use and which you can get hold of me on.
• Music, TV & Movies - I've actually rolled my own. It is based on XBMC and Google Jukebox and has been an ongoing project that I first started working on all the way back in 1995. The one feature that this system has that no other service I have seen has is a unique listening history analysis that is used to generate random play lists based on music that I am currently in to. That is what is used to generate my monthly media charts. It all runs off of a server that I have that runs dual redundancy RAID-6 and for the really important stuff runs mirroring on top of that.
• Mobile Music - Here I have also rolled my own. Currently I only support Android since that is what I use. It supports both streaming and offline playing with delayed syncing of listening history to my home system and also allows me to stream or play offline all my podcasts, lectures and audio books. I currently don't support streaming my TV & movies, but I am plan on adding that soon.
• Music Recommendations - I use Last.FM. I have set up my own music system to "scrobble" to Last.FM so that it will give me recommendations on new music based on what I am currently listening to on my own music system. Every once in a while I also listen to Pandora, but it is getting less and less as I am moving over to Last.FM.
• News Reading - I use Google Reader. This is just a basic RSS reader, but it has a ready nice interface and it's basically the only way I currently read stuff online. I hardly never just open a website and browse it's contents unless I am looking for something specific anymore.
• Project Management - For my private projects I use Pivotal Tracker. It's an awesome service in general and as long as there is only one collaborator it is free.
• Revision handling - For source code I use Git in combination with BitBucket. I recently upgraded to this from Subversion and it is so much better, even if in my case I don't have a distributed environment and only have one contributor to my projects.
• Service Backups - I need these since I don't trust any of the cloud services that I use (Not because they are bad, just because I am paranoid). I have backups of all my important services using Backupify except for Lastpass and Google Drive. They had some problems when I got started with the sheer size of my GMail account, but the problems seem to have been worked out now. Depending on the size of what you want backed up they are either free or relatively cheap.
• Health & Fitness - First off I have a WiFi enabled Withings Body Scale that automatically graphs your weight and body fat on a web page as you weigh yourself on it. It also has ton of apps to show it (My TV even has an app that can show it). I then use Endomondo to most of my exercise although I am evaluating possibly switching over to RunKeeper. Both services have really nice smart phone apps and they also both integrate with my scale so you can graph your weight and exercise in the same chart. I've also considered using a Bodybugg. It seems really cool but I don't want to sit down and start counting the calories in everything I eat (I also don't really care for having another monthly fee).
• Personal Finances - I use Mint which is a really nice and easy to use service that allows you to see how much money you are spending and earning and even though I have quite complicated finances I haven't found a single US financial institution that I use that they don't support. It also allows you to set up a budget and has tons of other features that I am not using. Even better the service is completely free. Another nice site is Credit Karma that will give you your credit score as often as you like for free. Also the site Quizzle will give you your complete credit report twice a year for free with no credit card required. Finally I do my taxes using the online version of TurboTax.
• Online Automation - Something that is becoming more important as there are more and more services you might want to have a presence on for instance Google+, Facebook and Twitter. In my case whenever I post something on my blog I want it to show up everywhere. For this I use the really cool site IFTTT which stands for If This Then That. It's just a simple way of setting up triggers and actions that should happen when they are triggered.

One common thread you might notice is how I have basically signed my life away to Google. This is true, but even if all of Google went down tomorrow due to my service backup I would still keep all of my data even if it would be a serious pain in the ass trying to set everything back up again. The key is that there should never be a single point of failure that can cause any loss of data except for the very recent stuff not yet duplicated.

Also you might notice that Facebook is not in the list for anything. I obviously use Facebook, but because of their tendency to try their best to lock you and your data in I don't really trust it with anything really important. I just don't trust that the data will be there in 20 years from now and they don't provide me with any easy functionality for getting the raw data out of it in case I would need to at some point. Photo's being a perfect example where as far as I know there is no way to get the photo back in the original resolution at all after being posted even for the person who posted the photo.

Also one thing that is important is that you actively use your services so that if something happens to a service you try to move to a new service as fast as possible. Usually there is some sort of migration solution available if a service is sunset, but the longer you wait the less likely it is that this is still available and working if you don't jump on it as soon as possible.

Digitizing your life to protect the things you treasure

Digitizing your life can actually help you protect the things in your life you think is important. I've often found myself to be a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to "going digital". Doesn't really matter in what way you mean this. For music I went digital around 1995, photography 1998, movies around 2000, TV around 2003 and finally books around 2007. I also started archiving all the emails I sent in 1998 and finally all the emails I receive in 2009. There are several advantages to having the things in your life that are important in digital form compared to keeping a book shelf with CD:s, DVD:s, photo albums.

First of all I always have access to everything important wherever I am. I can look at all the photos I've ever taken whenever I want to. Listen to all my music, have access to tons of books I've purchased, look up any correspondence I've had. All I need is my phone and some cell phone coverage. Especially for books this is extremely nice since bringing a couple of books when you travel can fill up your carry on pretty fast.

Assuming you take proper precautions there is no single point of failure that can rob you of your memories. If you have physical items it is hard and expensive to ensure you have two copies of everything and it takes a lot of space to store it. In digital form having backups is virtually free these days. Currently few things less than the entire fall of civilization as we know it would cause me to lose any of my stuff while anything physical I have is in constant danger of even just a simple robbery, earthquake, forest fire or flooding. I use Crashplan to make a full backup of everything I have in digital form that is important. It is very affordable and has a lot of really neat features. I also recommend using some sort of RAID if possible on any kind of server you use (I use RAID6 with dual redundancy). You should probably if possible try to avoid using single external drives to store important stuff since the way these drives are usually moved around seem to cause them to fail more often than regular drives.

Most physical items except for mail, photo albums and books need some sort of technology to play it and lets face it, that hardware is not going to be around forever. Does anybody even have a cassette tape player, VCR or vinyl record player? I don't, and I lost a lot of both music, movies and TV shows with their passing. That said the same problem exists with going digital though unless you take precautions. For instance anything proprietary will most likely not be around in the long run. I seriously doubt that you will be able to play anything you buy today on iTunes in 50 years as an example. However if you keep to open formats or make sure you strip away any DRM from anything you buy you should probably be fine. As long as there is an open source implementation to play the format you can be pretty sure it will still be playable while there is anybody still using it. As an example you can still play SID music (Commodore 64 game soundtracks), I doubt anybody has used that format in the last 20 years.

If you use any internet services (Photos is a good example of where this makes a lot of sense) you definitely have a problem of obsolescence there too but you can mitigate this danger by making sure that you first of all choose a service that allows you to easily export all your data in case you wish to move it. Also make sure you have a backup of your data. As an example I use Google+/Picasa to do all my photos and then use Backupify to back them up in case something goes wrong. A service that you absolutely should not use to handle your photos is Facebook. With this service there is no way to get your photos back in original size after you have posted it. Also you have their questionable track record on privacy to consider.

Going to start being a bit more active online

I'm doing an experiment with my online presence. I'm going to try to be a bit more active with my blog (Last post was in 2009 which is ridiculous). I don't think it will be that big of a change for me given that I was already usually emailing links I found interesting to people. I will just post them here instead from now on until I get tired of it.

Also as part of this I've spend a little while to set up so that whenever I post something on my blog here it should also be posted to Facebook, Twitter and also Google+. I've also added some connections to also share my media center automatically generated top-list with the world (Although I'm sure nobody cares).

All of this is handled by using some clever magic on IFTTT.com, a really cool site for automating stuff happening to you online. IFTTT is short for If This Then That and basically it allows you to define triggers and then an action that should be performed if triggered. As an example I have a rule for when I post here it should also duplicate that post on Facebook & Twitter.

Spent an hour rewiring my main server

I've had tons of raid failures in my main server the last couple of months (All in all 6 disks I think that have failed fairly recently). I yesterday realized that perhaps the problem was the way I had run the wires inside the box. Once I opened it I realized I had squeezed the SATA wired together with power cables that had pretty high amps (After all they were powering 17 disks and a bunch of fans). What basically happened was that with alarming regularity I hat the drives time out and just completely lock up until I rebooted (Causing them to have been failed from the RAID by that time). Then after a reboot they usually worked fine for a a couple of days until it happened again.

It was also fairly obvious that certain hotswap slots were more prone to fail in this way than others. So basically now I have rewired the box so that the power cables go over the top of the fans in the middle of the box and the SATA cables go below it and so far it seems to work out fine. For the first time in ages I am running with completely synced raids in all my servers.

[pallas]$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6]
md0 : active raid6 sda1[0] sdg1[15] sdm1[14] sdo1[13] sdp1[12] sdl1[11] sdk1[10] sdj1[9]
                   sdi1[8] sdh1[7] sdn1[6] sdf1[5] sde1[4] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
      6837375104 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [16/16] [UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU]

unused devices: 
[cadiz]$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6]
md0 : active raid6 sdp1[6] hdc1[0] sdq1[22] sdr1[21] sdo1[20] sdn1[19] sdm1[18] sdl1[17]
                   sdk1[16] sdj1[15] sdt1[14] sdi1[13] sde1[12] sdf1[11] sdg1[10] sdh1[9]
                   sdd1[8] sdc1[7] sds1[5] sdu1[4] sdb1[3] sda1[2] hda1[1]
      5128113984 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [23/23] [UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU]

unused devices: 
[valdez]$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6]
md1 : active raid6 hda2[0] sda2[9] sdc2[8] sdb2[7] sdd2[6] sdh2[5] sde2[4] sdf2[3] sdg2[2]
                   hdb2[1]
      1789768704 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [10/10] [UUUUUUUUUU]

md0 : active raid6 sdg1[0] sda1[6] sdc1[5] sdb1[4] sdd1[3] sdh1[2] sdf1[1]
      102373440 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [7/7] [UUUUUUU]

unused devices: 

I leave it up to the reader to figure out the total size of that read from that readout. Running with degraded raids is one of the few things that can really stress me out because I know if I lost the stuff I have on those servers it would be impossible to replace.

To end with a quote (This time by myself): Peace of mind is a synced raid

Started a work related blog

Started a blog for just work related stuff. It's at http://toad.henrik.org/ if someone is interested. I moved some recent postings from this blog to there. I figured the work stuff might be interesting for some users of Toad, but these people will probably not care where I go on vacation and other stuff I put here.

Switched to a new blogging software

I've switched the blogging software to Blogger. I've just completed the integration into my original homepage (Including the homepage news section) which was a bit tricky.

If you are subscribing to any feeds there is a new URL http://blog.henrik.org/feeds/posts/default. The new feed is Atom instead of RSS by default, but there is an RSS feed available as well.

One good news in this change is that I've enabled commenting again because hopefully with Blogger they will worry about the problem of spamming in comments and it's not something that I have to deal with myself as much as before.

Finally posting new stories on Blogger is a lot easier than with my old software (Where the only way of posting anything was to write it in HTML) so hopefully I'll be posting more often than before.

I've also tweaked the photos section so that it doesn't use SSL and thus will not give you a weird invalid certificate error message whenever you look at something. The SSL version is still available, but now a none secure version at http://home.henrik.org:7654/ is also available.

Random site house keeping

First of all some photos from my first trip to Mexico. As an explanation for me looking so bored and tired I went there for just one day and I left the same day as Henrik and Maria left for the airport so we had a big bash the day before I even left for Mexico.

Next are some pictures from my first Charger game, courtesy of Joe also.

There were also some more random pictures here and there too, but I don't even remember them.

I also upgraded the application that runs the photo album. The new one first looks a lot better and the "Random Image" on the left is awesome I think, at least when I have been playing around so much with the album lately anyway. I'm not sure, but I think this upgrade might also have broken all the old links I might have had to the album before too. The images should still be there though if you take the time to find them. I also fixed the Underscore website which has been broken in years. And finally I removed the guest book and disabled commenting on the blog because it was just getting completely filled with spam.

A really depressing Midsummer

I've just lived through my second Midsummer and this year was a big disappointment. The main reason was that I came down with a cold in the end of the week and have thus spent the 5 days in my apartment doing absolutely nothing. I'm so completely sick of the walls in the apartment that I can't wait to get out of here.

I've also done some more work on the restaurant guide I mentioned in the earlier posting. First of all I've hooked it up to Google Ads so I will hopefully at least make the hosting cost back. It's $40 a year, I've made $2 already so it shouldn't be a problem (But don't forget to click on the ads if you check it out). Another thing is I have hooked it up to a really cool Google Maps hack so check out the Interactive Map part of the sight which I at least thing is really cool. It works best in Firefox browsers, but is at least functional in Internet explorer even though there are some formatting that looks a little bit weird.

Finally I am as I am writing this enjoying my first Oboj like beverage since I moved here. It's ok, even though it's a little bit too sweet so I think that is something that will need to be imported (Or is it exported) here from Sweden next time I go and visit.

Experienced my first earthquake

I have now experienced my first earthquake here in California. Also earlier in the week there was a Tsunami warning. Things are moving and shaking here in a way I am not entirely comfortable with.

On another note I have started a new website at http://www.dininglaguna.com. It's basically a site where I will put up reviews of all the restaurants that I go to down here. Hopefully someone will find it usefull and I had fun doing it. Last time I was trying something even remotely like this was when I started the SJ anti fan club (Which I have now discontinued because I really cant be hasled about it anymore from the fanatic pro and con people that kept contacting me about it and just generally taking it way to serious).

Welcome to my new website

Welcome to the newest feature of my webpage, a blog. Due to the fact that all my friends who until recently worked at Bahnhof Internet have quit I have decided to move my hosting to a new location and in the process I have take the opportunity to also include a complete overhaul of the entire site.

For the tech savvy reader I've decided that since I update my webpage about once or twice a decade I've tried to keep it as platform agnostic as posible. Removing all ties to databases (The MySQL support broke the old homepage in the end). I'm also removing the annoying parts of the website that generated traffic, most specifically the "Anti SJ site". I also removed the Swedish language because it is simply too much hastle to maintain a two language site, and everyone I hang out speak english at least passingly.

New on the personal front is the fact that I have booked a trip to St Thomas in May for a week and a half with a bunch of friends. I have also more or less pinned down the dates for my vacation back home in Sweden to the 18:th of August all the way through to the 29:th of the same month.

I'm also hoping to be able to make a quick trip to Mammoth Lakes for skiing for an extended weekend relatively soon. So in short I have the whole vacation thing down for a while now.

Also new is the fact that I am selling my appartment back home in Stockholm. The reason for that is that first of all Stefan Rindeskär has bought a house and will be moving out. Also given the fact that I think it is pretty good times to sell, coupled with the fact that I am pretty sure that when I get home I will want to have a bigger appartment (It's easy to get used to the 1000+ square feet I have now).