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Tim Hoeck

by Tim Hoeck

Prevent a Disaster! A Remote Backup Service ShowdownAugust 13

How much data do you have on your computer? Is it important to you - no, is it irreplaceable? So much of our data is stored on our computers nowadays, yet so many do not have a plan in place in case of emergencies. Maybe you, like me, have all your data on a separate drive. Maybe you even have it on an external drive. What would happen if you turned on your computer today, to find out that the hard drive has failed?

This very thing happened to me just two weeks ago. For me, it was one of my “backup” drives. I have two secondary 120GB internal drives that I store all my non-system data on. One drive is for miscellaneous files (games, some software, random stuff I would need if I reformatted); it would be a moderate headache to get these files back.

The other drive contains my music collection (also recoverable with painstaking work), along with ALL of my IRREPLACEABLE files - including digital photos and videos from the last 7 or so years, software I have written, custom web sites and images that I have created for a number of projects - all unrecoverable data should something go wrong.

Truth is, this isn’t the first time this has happened. The last time, it turned out to be the not-so-important drive. Did I learn my lesson? Not really. Oh sure, I do the occasional copy and paste files to another location. I probably uploaded some photos somewhere, or e-mailed them in the past. But 90% of the UNRECOVERABLE data is not backed up some place safe.

The One Week Diigo ChallengeJune 23

I have recently been on the lookout for a new social bookmarking website. I have used del.icio.us before - a few times in fact, only to find that it was lacking features that I needed. I kept trying because, well, that is what everyone was using. Why should I go elsewhere?

I recently stumbled upon (no, not that way) Diigo, and some of its features caught my eye. I have spent approximately one week using the service, and now I am hooked.

What is Diigo?

Diigo is an online social bookmarking site, similar to del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. It allows you to store all your bookmarks online, tag them, make comments, and share them with other people.

Why not del.icio.us?

The first question that everyone wants to know is, why not del.icio.us? del.icio.us is the de facto standard when it comes to social bookmarking. I wondered why everyone - even myself - was using the ‘Everyone else is doing it’ argument. I had the need for a social bookmarking site, and I have tried del.icio.us a number of times. It never seemed to work out.

Line and Pie Charts Made Easy!June 15

In addition to my Bar Charts Made Easy!, I have now setup two more Yahoo Pipes - Line Charts and Pie charts.

Google Line Charts Pipe

Google Pie Charts Pipe

Here they are in action:

The Line Chart support multiple data sets, which you can specify by splitting the data sets with a | character.

For example, suppose you have data for two people, for the last four months:

Line Labels: Me,You
Data: 10,25,18,15|14,12,15,22
Line Step Labels:March,April,May,June
Side Labels: ,5,10,15,20,25
Min,Max: 0,25
Grid Step:10

The 10,25,18,15 would b

Bar Charts Made Easy!June 15

I have been using Yahoo Pipes a lot recently, and I saw the amazing flexibility that the Google Charts API provides. I wanted to be able to pass data from my Pipe to create a chart. But I also wanted to find a way to make creating charts easy for the non-programmer.

So, I have created the Google Bar Charts Yahoo Pipe.

Google Bar Charts

This pipe allows you to manually enter data, and specify how you want the chart to look. Anyone can take some number figures, and create a bar chart.

To use this, place your Data Descriptions in the Bar Labels box, and your Data Values in the Data box. Let’s take a look at who has commented the most this week from some of the big names on FriendFeed. We will enter this into the Google Bar Charts Pipe:

For the Bar Labels: Louis Gray,Robert Scoble,Leo Laporte,Bret Taylor
For the Data: 171,155,75,103

Here is the entered data into the Google Charts Pipe:

There are some default values to show you what to fill in, but here is what I modified for this chart:

New FriendFeed Yahoo PipesJune 10

I have two more Yahoo Pipes up and running for FriendFeed stats. The first will show you who you have commented on the most. The second shows who you liked the most. These are basically the same statistics in the Friend Settings Stats page, but keep in mind this is in the past 300 entries (max). You might find something interesting that the Stats page doesn’t pick up on. Oh yah, you can also see other peoples stats too!