A short video about how it’s possible to feel isolated even in a crowded city. I’m pleased with how this turned out, there’s a seriously ominous feel to it. Thanks to Colin for his filming and editing skills.
The music is Distant Light, Part I: Chromatic Clouds Surround by Slow Six.
I’ve accomplished more in the past two days than I have the last few weeks combined. Thanks to using up my holiday allowance before the year end, I found myself with two spare days and managed to clear a backlog of miscellaneous stuff that’s needed doing for ages.
You see, I’ve had a re-introduction to the awesome power of the To-do List.
Using nothing more than a tiny Muji notepad, pen and a little forward planning I wrote a list of the things I wanted to get done each day. The motivational power of having a plan (Heath Ledger’s Joker would love that) is incredible, with the feeling of accomplishment as you cross things out encouraging you to do more.
Amusingly, the use of to-do lists is one of the core concepts in David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which has sat unread on my desk for at least a year… a victim of my time management on things I decide are non-essential.
Thanks to the success I’ve had with the simple paper and pen lists, I’m going to apply the same approach at work. I’ll follow up in the comments and let you know how it goes - fingers crossed!
Peter Collingridge’s Apt Studio have teamed up with Asylum Films to make a short animated film to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Harper Collins imprint 4th Estate. Love it!
I was backing up our SVN repositories to DVD a while ago and wrote an entry on our wiki detailing how I’d done it. Thinking this is the kind of thing people will have to do at some point I thought it could be useful to share.
The method I’ve used is to create a single tar file of everything you’re looking to backup and then split that file into chunks which fit onto a single DVD.
Before we start, you’re going to need gsplit installed. This comes as part of the GNU Core Utilities package, so you can either download it from there or use your favourite package management software.
You can either build from source,
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.9.tar.gz tar xzvf coreutils-6.9.tar.gz cd coreutils-6.9 ./configure make && make install
Or use a package management tool like MacPorts.
sudo port install coreutils
Put all the files you want to backup into one folder, create the tar achive and then split that into chunks.
mkdir archive # … add some content to the archive/ folder … cd archive tar -cvf archive.tar * gsplit -b4500m archive.tar
After you’ve burned each generated file to a DVD, delete both those and the source archive.tar file as they’ll be using quite a lot of space on your drive.
Should the worst happen and you need to get your content back, copy all the files from across your DVDs to a folder on your machine and run the following.
cat x* > archive.tar tar -xvf archive.tar
I’ve always been on the lookout for a small application to remind me to take regular breaks from my computer, as it’s easy to get totally involved in what you’re doing and lose track of time.
The few I’ve found in the past have always had their problems, from terrible interfaces to being overly intrusive - think alarm calls and locking the computer. Thankfully I’ve found the perfect app for the task - AntiRSI.
As well as reminding you to take breaks, it’s small, unobtrusive and highly configurable. As an added bonus it even takes idle time into account so if you’ve told it you want to take 5 minute breaks each hour and leave the machine idle, the counter for your next break will adjust appropriately, clever!
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