I say shenanigans because I’m not really blogging about anything in particular, I’m just giving an update to what’s been going on with me.

Mail Clients

Right so over at Facepunch in the Windows section Panda X was showing off screenshots of Windows Live Mail Wave 4. I’ll be honest, the clients I use right now are the web clients for gmail and the gmail app on my Droid. WLM looked like it had a pretty nice interfaced, and easier setup for gmail, so I gave it a try. I used it for a bit, and although I did enjoy the convenience of having all my email accounts in one spot (I have 4), I remembered why I didn’t like desktop clients.

IMAP isn’t smart enough yet to download recent email. Nah it’s has to download shit from 2 years ago in case I want to read it. Sorry, I really don’t.

Open source doesn’t make it automatically better

This actually comes from the same thread as before.

I like the open source-ness of Thunderbird, so expect no love for Windows Live Mail from me.

I cannot begin to imagine why being closed source would make WLM unacceptable. They’re both free, why does it matter. I’m pretty sure you’re not diving into the code making changes so IMAP doesn’t download 10000 emails (If you are send me an email) so why do you care.

Luaduck and his Novint Falcon

Recently Luaduck got a Novint Falcon. I’m not going to go over what this is as you could figure this out through Google. I’ve considered getting one but right now I just don’t have the desk space. Wanting to hear about what Luaduck says about it, I head over to his blog post.

The Falcon is a Haptic-Feedback device designed to replace the mouse in gameplay (the idea being that you can feel your games). The control scheme can be a little wierd at times (you use the central area for precise aiming, and the edges to pan around like a joystick) but you get used to it after about ~15h playtime.

To be honest? I love the thing. You’re going to get dreadful KD ratios for the first few hours, but you’ll gradually improve as time goes on.

Everything else was just copy-pasta. Thanks for the in-depth review man. Then again he also got a 20% discount code for everyone, so I guess that makes up for the lack of detail.

My motherboard is here!

Today my motherboard arrived. Horray!

But I don’t have any thermal paste. Shit. Sure I could use toothpaste but I don’t really want to. So I’ll just wait to get some. The saga continues.

Sand castles and subscriptions

About a week ago OpenPeer’s lead Server Admin, Scott, brought The Planet’s Sand Castle program to my attention. Although OpenPeer isn’t what the program had in mind, we were accepted on Thursday. After I put the final ordering through we’ll be the proud owner of a Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz server in Texas.

Very cool. This might mean I can downgrade vps2 or completely decommission it. I have to say though, for the 2 months I’ve been with FiveBean, they’ve been pretty good. I’d recommend them as a cheap VPS host and web host.

Now for the other part of the story. As if I wasn’t already in a great mood that day I get an email at about 11pm from Drew from Dev-Tips.com. About 2 weeks prior I entered into a giveway for Dev Tip’s first birthday, with some pretty cool stuff to give away. Not expecting to win or anything I entered.

Fuck yeah. I love the entire Tuts+ network, my favorite of course being Nettuts+, run by the very cool Jeff Way. They also pay very well for tutorials, $150 each for regular tutorials, and up to $600 for Plus tutorials. God damn that’s a lot of money (For a teenager). If a server or admin tuts+ ever shows up, I’d definatley write an article. (Although probably not on backup, why? Well…)

Wild cards makes deleting things quick

If you run WordPress you know that every time there’s an update, in the AdminCP a bar comes up telling you about it. Since I had some free time I decided to finally update. Because I don’t have FTP (or my permissions were wrong), I need to do the update by hand. Following the quick upgrade guide on codex, I decide to make an XML backup of the text. I knew this would be more than enough (At the time).

The next step was deleting all the WordPress files. Hell that’s easy! Just do rm -Rf wp-* xmlrpc.php. Great, gets rid of all of files, admin folder, includes folder, content fol-CONTENT FOLDER??

Yes. I just deleted my blogs content folder. The folder with all the uploads, the theme, and the plugins in it. And the most recent backup was a month ago.

I decided to just work off of what I have, and I uploaded the content folder (and the config file, I deleted that too). After that upgrading and everything was pretty easy, and I installed all the plugins I had installed (I only really use 5). Even though I had WordPress fixed an running, I knew I was still missing images (On a related note, this is the problem Jeff Atwood had a month ago.), so bracing for the worse, I went to the main page of my blog.

Wait, what. The images are there.

I still have no idea where they came from, but somewhere on the road to my display and the filesystem on vps1, the images were there. They weren’t being hosted offsite either, I looked at the source. Not waiting for a cache to expire, I quickly downloaded all the images and threw them in their right places on the server.

So everything is good. I’ll look into some automated backups now. I promise.

Okay maybe I can’t promise but I will sometime in the future. Yeah.

On the note of blogs

By the way I hope you’re enjoying my writing style here. It’s 12:06 AM right now as I’m typing this sentence, so…yeah.

Anyway, back to blogs. Even though I’m writing this one, I really don’t read many personal ones. If I see someone tweeting about their post, I’ll have a look. The only blog I check for updates since the owner doesn’t tweet about it ( >:( ), is Garry’s. He consistently writes quality and interesting content.

This one I just heard about last night, Virtual-losers.com. Basically it’s these three (losers) guys sharing a single blog and each writing posts. I guess that means it’s cheaper to host, but I’d rather have my own.

A few hours I read a really good blog post about the nook and why not to buy it. I was really compelled by this blog post not to buy a nook, the whole experience he had is just unacceptable, and how a company can treat a customer like that is ridiculous. I hope he gets enough money for a Kindle.

That’s all

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do another huge blog post. But I did. I can’t find enough time to write about a single subject, so just lumping bits of information together in a mega post is a good solution.

As before, I hope you read the whole thing.