Early this morning I released Totus Copy. Totus Copy is a utility that was born out of necessity. As some of you may know, I work as an Apple Certified Technician. I see a lot of failing and plain out dead hard drives in my line of work. I also spend a lot of time painfully pulling data off failing hard drives.
Once we get a hard drive showing in the bus, there is still a lot of work left to do. OS X doesn't have what is referred to as resumable copying. What this means is that if a file fails in the middle of a copy, the entire copy will fail. This is all well and good for normal use, but for copying data where you expect 20% or more of it to fail, it is a total pain in the butt. You can spend many hours locked in front of a system.
What Totus Copy does is solve this critical problem. If a file fails, Totus Copy will attempt to retrieve as much data as possible. It will then move onto the next file and continue the process. Many technicians know the pain of going directory-by-directory trying to salvage as much data as possible. Totus Copy makes this a problem of the past.
While writing and field-testing Totus Copy over the last several months, an impressive feature set was developed that makes this software a very practical and powerful data recovery tool. It has the ability to skip over invisible files or applications and you can set it to target specific directories or files of a certain type. It will never transfer a bundle or a directory rather it recreates them. Totus Copy will never give up and has been known to grab working copies of files that other data recovery tools left behind.
Totus Copy will unquestionably save data that would otherwise been lost.
This method does not currently work on the 3g or 2.0 iPhone software, as soon as I get it working I will post a link here to those directions.
So I am leaving this week to drive 10,000 Miles, which I will be posting more about later. At the same time I am enrolled in college and have some course work to complete. I will of course have my laptop with me but I was a little nervous about being able to find wifi hotspots out in the middle of nowhere America.
I do have my iPhone of course but it does not have a decent text editor nor does it provide me an ideal platform for doing school work or prolonged web browsing. The solution? I needed to tether my laptop to my iPhone.
For those of you who are not familiar with tethering, it is when you use your cell phone signal as a method of connecting your laptop to the internet. In the case of the iPhone I will be using EDGE to get online. Its not fast but it will do the job.
Below I will provide very detailed instructions on getting this going, not because it is too hard but because there are a lot of uninformed people out there that might want to try this.
Instructions after the jump
They are handing this out at high schools all over the country. Do we really want to teach our children that threats against people are on the same tier with terrorism or is one step short of full blown genocide. I hope im not the only one that this does not make sense to.
Now don't think for one second that I condone violence or anything worse, but this is really trying to teach our children with fear. It reminds me just slightly of "If you buy pot you fund terrorism" ads from a few years back.
Now you would think that maybe this is being handed out without school approval or in very strange private schools, wouldn't you? Well you would be wrong.
This handout comes from the Anti-Defamation League's website and is mirrored on several public school websites. In fact a quick search Google search turns up an alarmingly high number of results linked on government funded websites.
In todays world you rarely hear of a company that goes above and beyond what is expected of it, much less does what is expected of it.
It all started very routinely, I had a malfunctioning video card so I got an RMA from the manufacture and sent it in for repair. Within a few days I got an email telling me they were going to send me a new replacement card. It was going to be over-nighted to my house from Texas. This was great news since I had the day off of work and I was going to be doing some errands around the house anyways.
So im home at 3:15pm, and the package had not yet arrived (it was promised at 3), I call customer service and this is where things all be it a little frustrating got impressive. After navigating a somewhat annoying voice system I got a live person after being on hold maybe 20 seconds. Now I typically expect to be on hold for at-least 10 minutes even with the most respected companies. I spoke to a very nice representative who said they would promptly refund the entire shipping cost. Now while this did not really help me any it was a very nice gesture and im sure the shipper will be happy. They said that they would track down the package and give me a call within an hour.
Well on rolls 4:30 and I don't have a call yet, at this point I am a tad frustrated. I call them back and tell them what is going on. The customer service representative is very understanding and calls the local office. Normally a company would put you on hold and get back to you with an answer. I was very surprised when he 3-way called the local office and told them what was going on. I was told that the truck had broken down. They said they were trying to get the packages loaded on another truck to continue delivery. Well it was getting late in the day so I prepared to have to wait until monday for my package.
I received a call around 5 from another representative, they told me that the drivers are gone for the night, I saw this one coming. Here is were the real shock comes in, they said the driver would personally deliver my package on his way home. About 45 minutes later the DHL driver in his personal car arrived in my driveway, gave my dog a graham cracker (go figure) and delivered my package. He was very apologetic even though he had no control over a broken down truck. To be honest I thought he would be very upset that his boss made him come out on his way home and give me my package but he seemed very happy to be able to do it, it felt like it might of even been his idea.
So there is still at-least one company out there that tries to make its customers happy. I would have been satisfied and more then likely used them again even if I had to wait till monday to get my package.
No you are not seeing things. Yes those are google ads in the sidebar over there. I spent the last few weeks looking into ad programs to help balance out the cost of running this site and to hopefully pool in some money to my poor programmer fund. After looking at a whole lot of programs and weighing benefits I went with Google Adsense. So far I have been very happy there website is a breeze to use and everything is very easy to get up and running. If you guys have any feedback on the new ads let me know so I can adapt the site as needed.
If you are running a blog or a website and are looking to balance out some of the cost it is definitely worthwhile to look into Adsense. Just figured I would toss a bit of info on whats going on out there, and possibly a tip to other bloggers.
Im currently looking for some good ideas to blog about and keep everyone entertained. Stay tuned for some interesting updates.
