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About a year and a half ago, my old iBook died, and I wrote this post about what I learned from that experience: namely, your computer will die someday, and you probably won’t be able to back it up right before it does.
Since then, I’ve found myself returning to that post time and again, for reference about how to best back up my computer’s data. It’s strange yet satisfying to have written a post that becomes a reference page for yourself.
When my PowerBook stopped accepting a battery charge a few weeks ago, I didn’t have to panic. I had just backed up a few days before, so all I had to do was close the computer, write down the few places I needed to grab files I’d edited since then, and then hurry and grab that info before the battery ran out its final charge. A few weeks and paychecks later, I’m back up and running on my new computer, for which I’m very grateful.
I did find a few things I’d forgotten to mention explicitly (and forgot to do) last time:
- backup my Mail settings, passwords, rules, signatures, and ALL of the mailboxes (including my Sent folder).
- Here’s the link for how to do this in Mac Mail. Links to other mail program instructions are on Not OK Computer.
- Chat transcripts. Most people probably don’t care about these, but I have some great conversations with friends and work colleagues that I want to save. I use Adium on a Mac, so the path to find your chat program settings and transcripts is Users > Library > Application Support > Adium 2.0. Backup that folder, and once you’re on your new computer, you can put it in the same location for a seamless transition.
- I also totally failed to copy my Stickies, so I might have to perform emergency surgery on the laptop again to retrieve those. Honestly, it was kind of fun to disassemble the laptop last time… Edited to Add: Here’s how to back-up stickies!
Now go back up your data!!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
My cohort at Emotion Technology (and husband) Christopher Gandin Le is live blogging for the CDC at the National Environmental Public Health Conference: Healthy People in a Healthy Environment.
Majora Carter, a genius and one of my favorite speakers on this subject, is speaking at this conference along with many other great minds. You can enjoy the highlights of a conference on a vital topic from the comfort of your own computer!
You can also register to watch a free live webcast here.
This week, I’m sharing my own work, because I’m so dang proud of it. Chris & I, along with our incredibly talented Austin-area friends, created this 2 minute water conservation PSA in response to RainBird’s “Intelligent Use of Water” film contest. Austin is in the middle of the worst drought in 50 years, and last week, officials announced even tighter water restrictions, so this awareness-raising contest comes at a crucial time.
We had a great time making this film, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy!
Small Changes from Jennifer Gandin Le on Vimeo.
Written by Jennifer & Christopher Gandin Le
Edited by Matt Donaldson
Music by Liz Clark
Starring our brilliant friends and cohorts!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
This week, I got an exciting e-mail from my friend and fellow 2006 REAL Hot 100 winner, Deanna Zandt. She’s a media technologist and a leading expert in women and technology, and she’s about to add “first-time author” to her resume.
She’s signed with the Berrett-Koehler publishing group to write a book about “the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action.” Women, people of color, queer people, and many more have too often been left in the dust of technological advances (see film, TV, and radio in their formative years). Deanna will use her experience in the feminist community and bring in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare, and more, to assemble strategies for widening the diversity of voices in social media.
Deanna is a sharp, compassionate, thoughtful person, and her book is going to help women and other sidelined communities release their fear and take advantage of the new technologies. The last thing we need is another place where the dominant culture creates uncontested content that blocks out all other perspectives.
If you’re interested in technology and social justice, you should be reading Deanna’s blog. Also, the publisher doesn’t offer advances, so Deanna is fundraising for living expenses this summer while she writes the book in 4 short months. Even if you have $10 to spare, visit her Feed The Author page and join supporters like the Hightower Lowdown, and Don Hazen and Doug Kreeger (editor and board member of AlterNet). It’s a fantastic project in which to invest.
Her full fundraising letter below the cut.
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
On Friday, instead of waking up at 4 a.m. to go spend money we don’t have anyway (seriously? What’s with those ads of women stepping into high heels at 4 a.m. for a sale?), consider taking part in StoryCorps’ first annual National Day of Listening. In the last five years, StoryCorps has helped more than 40,000 Americans record their stories, creating a massive oral history project.
On their website, they include instructions with tips on how to spark a meaningful conversation with someone around you and record it, if you can, the day after Thanksgiving — your grandmother, parent, sibling, friend, neighbor. Anyone whose story you would like to hear for one hour on Friday. They’ve got interview examples on the website; I highly recommend sampling them. I’m a personal history nerd, so I love listening to these stories.
Also, I would be remiss if I did not share the live web feed that has swept the internet in the last month: six Shiba Inu puppies, which have garnered over 6 million viewers since they’ve been online. After the cut, you can see why. This is great for entertaining the varied generations gathering at your home for the holiday:
I just learned today that President-Elect Obama has an official Flickr page. There’s a set of candid photos of the Obamas on election night, waiting for the results to come in. Obviously, they were taken by an official photographer — it’s not like Obama took them on his camera phone and sent them to Flickr — but there are some very cool shots. (Also, it’s amusing to see Flickr’s standard description at the bottom of his profile page: “I’m male and taken.” In case anyone wasn’t sure.)
This got me thinking about Obama and Technology. (It appears I’m not the only one: GeekDad has a funny post on Wired.com about five reasons that Obama is a geek.) He has a Twitter page. Technology was included as one of the main issues on his campaign website. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.
Can you even imagine?
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
This week, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, with a donation from producer James L. Brooks, is launching The Lifeline Gallery, a powerful virtual space where suicide survivors, attempt survivors, and suicide prevention supporters can share their stories.
Basically, you can create an animated avatar that looks like you (or not), then record your two-minute message by phone. The website instantly links your message to your avatar’s lips, and then you can save your story in the gallery. You can also e-mail your story or embed it on your MySpace, Facebook, or other website. (For those not using a U.S.-based number, you can also type your story and the site will transcribe it your words into speech.)
After the cut, I’ll let the project speak for itself (turn on your speakers to hear her story):
If someone finally figured out how to dig a hole to China, or to London in this case, and you could be seen through a giant underground telescope on the other side, what would you do for your trans-Atlantic audience? Would you have a message to write on a big posterboard? A flag to wave? Would you use sign language? Blow a kiss? Think fast. You only have until June 15 to go to Paul St. George’s Telectroscope on the Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge or to the one on the other side by London’s Tower Bridge on the Thames.
I saw an old man in a Sherlock Holmes hat (I assume he was in London) do a little dance in front of the Telectroscope, kicking his legs out and waving his arms. This was on the news, so maybe that’s why he was hamming it up. But it also struck me that it was as if he thought this was a fleeting opportunity to test technology’s latest limits, in which he needed to be as “big” as possible to be understood. Like when people talked way too loud on their newfangled cordless phones and even louder into their poor cell phones. Or a more apt comparison– when film was first invented and silent movie actors had only their bodies to convey plot, emotion, character. The same must be used for our audience of strangers on the other side of the ocean, who can’t hear us but can see us surprisingly clearly.
I have important news for all of you computer users out there. Your current computer is going to die. Maybe sooner than later; who knows? But your data does not have to disappear with it.
This seems obvious, but when my G4 laptop conked out two weeks ago, it was a big surprise to me. I realized that most news stories or ads about backing up your computer data make it sound like, “You should back up just in case your hard drive dies.” What they should say is, “Back up your data because your computer will die.” Americans may like to deny death in all its forms, but, like pretending that each of us will live forever, we can lose a ton of vital information by refusing to believe that our computers are mortal.
Data back-up is like safe sex (with much less dangerous consequences) — you can’t afford NOT to do it. And I’m not just talking about your Word and Excel files. If you’re like me, there’s important data lurking in all corners of your computer. Do any of these places sound familiar?
When you get bored at work today, wrapping things up before the holiday weekend, check out the Library of Congress’ online photo collection over at Flickr.
They recently uploaded 3,100 photos from their collection of 1 million, and already there’s been a huge positive response. Flickr users are categorizing old photos with tags, commenting on them with additional information about the photos, and some are even geotagging the photos (tagging where they were taken, so that users can look at a map of the world and see all the photos on Flickr that were taken in specific places).
The coolest part about this project is that most of the pictures have no known copyright restrictions on them, so I’m sure that we’ll start to see people integrating them into their creative projects, online and off.
Enjoy!
I’m really not a techie, but my friend, writer Maia Szalavitz, showed me the coolest computer ever yesterday. 
The EEE by Taiwanese company Asus, is a 2 lb laptop–yes two pounds–that basically does everything any traveling businesswoman needs. There’s word processing, internet, email etc. And at only $400, it’s almost a no-brainer purchase–especially for those of us who can write it off as a business expense.
I don’t have a blackberry cause I don’t necessarily want to be connected all the time. However, at the end of the day, when my back is aching from dragging around my heavy laptop, a 2 lb computer seems almost essential.
The AP wrote all about it here.
Happy shopping!
I’m going to have an orgasm this Saturday at 06:08 GMT.
I don’t typically blog about such a personal event, but this is a special occasion. Saturday the 22nd marks the second annual Global Orgasm for Peace, when people around the world will synchronize their orgasms with the winter solstice, using the energy surge to focus on peace, empathy, and compassionate leadership.
I have been in one fight my entire life. I was in fifth or sixth grade. I should tell you that I grew up on a block with a bunch of ragtatg, multi-culti kids. Our gang was something like The Little Rascals minus the blatantly racist overtones.
One summer afternoon, bouncing from backyard to backyard, we came across a brood of baby kittens. We gave them names and all tried to get our parents to take one in. It didn’t work.
On some equally empty summer day it was decided that I should fight Adam Drucker*. Over what, I’m not sure. It may have just been a case of, “Can Felice beat Adam?” Let’s watch.
This weekend I moved out of the apartment I’ve lived in for the last eight years. To paraphrase U2, I took with me all that I couldn’t leave behind. This meant throwing away most of what I own, including at least 100 CDs, ranging from an unopened copy of Finley Quaye’s “Maverick A Strike” to the Backstreet Boys’ self-titled debut, which I hadn’t listened to since 1999 — okay, maybe I played it a few times in 2002, but you get my drift. “As Long As You Love Me” just isn’t making any of my current playlists.
So my question to you, dear Crucial Minutiae reader, is this, “What have you done with all of your CDs?”
On occasion I fall for an unavailable man. These non-relationships inevitably end with me in some varying degree of pain. When this occurs I:
1. listen to George Michael
2. karaoke with friends
3. make a mixed tape (or new playlist, as the case may be)
These are what one might call my “go-tos.” Guaranteed to bring me pleasure under the most excruciating of circumstances.
As of late, my friend J and I have taken to saying, “Remember the astronaut.” It is both a cautionary tale and a rallying cry.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing an epidemic. Yes, bandwagonitis, an obscure but deadly disease that only appears in October, is sweeping the nation. You or someone you know may already have been infected. Symptoms include:
- wearing a Red Sox hat and a Rockies jersey because you “really like them both”
- purchasing baseball paraphernalia after October 1st, 2007
- rooting for the Colorado Rockies
“Oh my god, do I have a Crucial Minutiae for you!” My friend called me from her double suite in an upscale hotel in Washington, D.C. She’s there for a conference, and can you imagine who else is staying there? After her description of the hotel’s hipster bar, I could only think of Hollywood actors and visiting royals. “You’ll never guess,” she said. “The Dalai Lama! I’m staying in the same hotel as the Dalai Lama!”
You already knew, didn’t you? I gave it away with the picture. What a great smile.
But that wasn’t enough for a Crucial entry. No, we needed this juicy bit of minutiae: Not only did the flurry of red robes make for a striking contrast to the swanky hotel foyer, but my friend reports that she saw one of the monks– who looked a lot like the Dalai Lama– on his Blackberry!
If you drop your cell phone on concrete as often as I do and it happens to have a SIM card (that’s the little chip in the back with all your info and all your digits), you may be about to thank me… Or the undercover guardian angel of delinquent cell phone users at the Sam’s in St. Louis.
This is our big wedding weekend– and with the arrival of our huge families and close friends as widely tossed around the world as Germany– I NEEDED MY CELL PHONE. But as I’ve already admitted, it doesn’t always make it into my bag, or if it does, it’s squashed by a camera and nicked by my keys. Besides, the sticking-out antenna is just asking for trouble. So, imagine my shock when my cell phone completely quit on me a few days ago. No outgoing calls, no incoming calls, no speedy text messages. And how much does a replacement cost? Upwards of $200! If you don’t have that kind of money and you don’t feel like logging onto Ebay and sending $70 plus $20 shipping (anybody know where the hell they’re sending these used cell phones from?) to someone who promises you won’t get a refund, you’re about to lose all inability to communicate on the go. UNLESS…
