How-To

Disk is inexpensive compared to the value of your time and data. My personal backup configuration consists of three types of backups. The following combination has proven itself over the last several years and I recommend it. It includes 1) A full disk clone, 2) an incremental backup, and 3) an online backup service. This setup is redundant, quick to configure, needs little maintenance, and allows for rapid recovery of data, even with a catastrophic failure. ...

SSL De Facto for Securing Connections SSL, short for Secure Socket Layer, is a cryptographic protocol for securing network traffic that is the de facto mechanism for securing transactions on the web and many other protocols including email (SMTP/IMAP/POP), IM (Jabber/XMPP), VoIP (SIP), and SSL-based VPNs. The topic of SSL certificates is a bit arcane, but the much of security of our everyday online purchases depends on SSL. Yet, fewer services use SSL than one might hope. It is possible to buy a basic no-frills SSL certificates from a universally accepted certificate authority very inexpensively–less than $15 a year–if you shop around. In most cases, it makes no sense to use a self-signed certificate, to purchase a certificate from a second tier provider, or to purchase a chained certificate. This article is a substantial revision of an article in Messaging News from a few years ago. I receive some requests for an update and have also found an even more inexpensive provider in the meantime, which make the update worthwhile. ...

Email is still one of the most convenient ways to quickly share links to friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, there are two major problems. First many people’s browsers are not configured to work correctly with their email client, especially for webmail. Second, many browsers only support emailing a link to the web page and not the entire web page. Furthermore, native support to email links is inconsistent and often formatted in a way that may break links for the recipient. I my Messaging News article a Better Way to Share Links in Email described these problems as well as a solution based on the free Readability bookmarklet that should work in nearly any browser and typically produces better results. ...

I take a lot of screenshots when I research products, both on the desktop and on the iPhone, so having some way to automate organizing my collection is important. The problem is that screenshots images taken with the iPhone have no EXIF metadata. This means there is no straightforward way to produce a list of all your screenshots. After a little bit of experimentation, I found a workable but not ideal solution. You can use the lack of EXIF metadata as conditions to group all the images. Screenshots are saved as PNG files on the original iPhone and the iPhone 3GS (the two models I had access to) and have no EXIF records. The only other metadata fields available are filename, file size, and modified, and imported dates. The PNG extension for the filename is the one existing feature you can search for, all others have to be unknown. I selected two features aperture and ISO, even though one would work in the hopes that this would reduce any false positives. ...

The Apple iPad does an excellent job of displaying most web sites. However, there are a few obstacles you may want to avoid. There are also a few customizations that will make your site look even better on the iPad. I will summarize the most important issues you should start to plan for and the differences between the iPad browser, the iPhone browser, and desktop browsers. As an added benefit, most improvements made for the iPad will also benefit users with an iPhone or an iPod Touch. There is list of resources to find more information and a list of tools to help you test your site at the end of the article. ...

Character set encoding Character encoding is the low-level representation of the letters, numbers, and symbols we see in our daily interactions with computers. Common encodings for documents in English are ISO-8859-1 (a superset of ASCII), UTF-8 (an 8 bit Unicode character encoding), and Windows-1252. There are a great number of character set encodings in use and a long and complicated history of how they came to be. This complexity often leads to problems. Typically, these problems are caused when the document is encoded with one encoding, but is interpreted as another. ...

The web-based interfaces offered by the shipping services allow you to schedule shipments, manage billing, store addresses, and track packages online. Some third-party services offer simplified interfaces and allow you to track shipments from multiple shipping carriers at once. Still, the process of entering multiple tracking numbers into multiple services can be cumbersome. I prefer the email-based input method used by the TrackMyShipments service. TrackMyShipments is an email-based online package tracking service I used for more than year and half to as a streamlined method to track packages. TrackMyShipments takes advantage of the fact that you already have the tracking numbers sent to you in email. I wrote about another email based interface in my review of how TripIt Shows the Value of Combining Email, Web and APIs. The signup process is very quick. After registration, you simply forward an email messages with tracking numbers to track@trackmyshipments.com and the service will send you a notification when the shipping status of you package changes. ...

Validating data in web forms reduces the likelihood of inadvertent submission of data that is incorrectly formatted, inconsistent, or incomplete. It is often useful to validate email addresses, especially if the addresses are going to be used for receipts or other types of follow up. Validation (and basic bounds checking) can also reduce the chance that email address field could be used as an attack vector. It is important to note that email addresses can be significantly more complicated than commonly thought. This means that it is important to consult the most current RFCs for email standards and ICANN announcements for new types of Top Level Domain names otherwise valid email addresses may be blocked. For example, the plus character is a valid within the local portion of an email address. The plus is typically used as an optional feature for sub-addressing and is supported in many mail servers, Cyrus IMAP installations, and in Gmail. However, the plus sign is frequently rejected as invalid by many web forms. ...

When I travel out of the country, I usually test out new VoIP services both for calling back to the states and receiving calls while I am traveling. I consistently find that while the rates for VoIP services are very attractive, the user experience and flexibility is often lacking when I traveling, particularly with limited network connectivity. Depending on the length of my stay, I purchase a prepaid SIM to use in a spare unlocked mobile phone so that I can make and receive local calls at local rates. Since most countries outside of the US offer free inbound calls, having a local SIM is even more attractive, although navigating voicemail prompts in another language can be challenging. I often use one of the VoIP services to forward a my United States phone number to my international cell phone number so that I can let friends and family reach me without incurring international charges on their part. Rates for calling international mobile phones range from $0.15 to $0.30 a minute, so be careful who you give your forwarded number to if you try this method. ...

I regularly share links with friends and colleagues. I use several social bookmarking services, but the vast majority I share via email. Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer have a function to create a new message with an email link. The main disadvantage of sending links using the built-in browser methods is that the links they generate are prone to breaking unless the whole message is converted to HTML rather than plain text. ...