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....

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 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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....