Nifty 'WhatIsMyIP' Script - put current WAN IP on Clipboard

Pre-req's:

• 4NT - love love love that little bugger… but i guess PowerShell is probably the new cool kid in town for this kind of stuff 
  • ‘echos’ command in 4NT outputs test w/o a linefeed... so I can tack something else I wanted onto the URL… obviously the sky is your limit (can’t find the equivalent in PowerShell yet??)
• curl - everybody's favorite web mashup tool

echos http:// >clip:
curl -s "http://whatismyip.org" >>clip:
echos /training >>clip:

Cisco VPN and "Split Tunneling"

And that's all I have to say on this matter ;)

Awesome, CAD for LEGOs!

ok i know it's been around for ages apparently... but man that's awesome

anybody do a hard drive cage in the "technic" rivit oriented pieces yet? :)

highlights:

• it actually "knows" when you put two technic "i-beams" together on a rivet pivot point... it'll rotate them in 3D so you can line things up with true geometry!
• it adds up the whole parts list and gives you a total price to physically manifest your creation <nifty>
• people can & are publishing their custom designs
• it copies multi-part "bundles" and flips/rotates them easily to construct symmetric objects quickly

Flash Drives Go eSATA!

Example #1: “PhotoFast G-Monster”

• 170MB/s READS!!, 100MB/s writes
• 32   /  64     / 128GB!!
• $?? / $249 / $449 (28 Aug 2009)

Example #2: "OCZ Throttle"

• comes in 8/16/32GB models, street (28 Aug 2009) ~= $40 / $55 / $92: ProVantage Link
• Good review at Xtreme CPU forum
• 90MB/s reads, ~30MB/s writes
• fyi, USB2.0 spec tops out at about 40MB/s theoretical top end...  the fastest USB flash drives get somewhere around 35MB/s reads and 20 MB/s writes
• this has dual eSATA and USB2.0 interfaces (of course)
• and this drive still does very well over USB2.0 interface... 33MB/s read, 21MB/s writes
• remember, SATA1 = 150MB/s, eSATA=SATA II=300MB/s theorectical top end
• it'll actually draw power from eSATA if you're lucky enough to have that fancy of an eSATA port but those are rare so most will wind up attaching an annoying mini-usb cable for power
• supposedly even more bootable than USB since eSATA is a "real" hard drive link
• not very sexy casing is it? :\

Volume Shadow Copy Service is Pretty Cool

(at least in Windows 2008)

More specifically the "Previous Versions" functionality that leverages this service.

To cut to the chase, I didn't realize that you could browse into whole folders worth of snapshots... screenshot below says it all...

Notice that there's a funky "\\localhost\drive$\@GMT..." syntax for getting at the old version of that folder... in this case I shadowed the entire drive starting at the root level.

After Googling around a little more on this I'm starting to think us Winblows users shouldn't be quite so OSX TimeWarp jealous and that VSS although not as sexy, is perhaps even more robust.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about this is a built in file level "snapshot" feature at the OS level... we get to recover the previous version of any file that's been snapshot this way... I'm not sure yet but I think one might be able to turn it on so that a snapshot automatically occurs whenever you modify a file.

It's kinda tucked away ... you have to manually go and turn it on under the Properties of your drive letters:

Here we can create snapshots manually of course.

And you'll want to check out the snapshot schedule under Settings button which defaults to weekly... might wanna make that more often ;)

One quickly realizes the best strategy is not to simply blindly shadow your whole drive but to define a frequent schedule on your documents and development type folders ... pick and choose like that depending on the specific content.

The help is quick to point out its something to be used in tandem with normal backups and is not a replacement.