A Cool New Way to Read RSS Feeds

There is a new FREE (my favorite price) service being offered called http://www.tabbloid.com/ What this service does is take a generic list, or if you prefer, a custom list of RSS feeds and email any new headlines to you in the form of a PDF file.


The reason I like this option is that rather than sift through all of the various RSS feeds I like to watch one at a time, I simply open the PDF and get a nice clean summary of what is new. This is a huge time saver. It used to take me over an hour to go through all of the feeds only to find that most had not updated or what showed as an update was simply someone replying to a previous post. Now I can scan a couple pages of a PDF and select the articles I'm interested in reading in more detail in about 5 minutes.


Click here to download a copy of the PDF I received this morning: http://www.tabbloid.com/share/58470/a7b2ed36b4ba11de8e66001cc4dec67c


Like it? Visit http://www.tabbloid.com/


I offer no warranties on the performance of this service. I can only say I've been using it for several weeks with no problems.


As usual my opinions and advice are free and frequently worth the price.

Dan

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before." -- Jacob A. Riis

Trust Not Thy Backup

Do you back up your files regularly? If so good for you, you’re at least trying to protect your important files. Now for the hard question, do you trust your backup? Do you really? Are you sure?

When was the last time you ran a fire drill? No I’m not talking about making sure the family knows how to get out of the house in case of a fire. Yes that is an excellent idea, but the fire drill I refer to in this case involves your latest backup.

At the office where I work, at least once a month, I will pull one of our backup tapes (we have 16) and try to restore a random file. In the I.T. world, this is known as a fire drill. The 16 backup tapes I have, would be nothing more than paperweights, if I could not restore the files from them. I run the fire drills for my own peace of mind. My job security would be worth about as much as a paperweight if the need were to arise and I had to tell my employer that not only does the backup not work, but I took no action to make sure it was working.

Okay, so you may not be running a business, but aren’t your personal files just as important to you as a business’s files are to the business? Would you want to risk losing those family photos or the family history records? How about your bank or tax records? A fire drill takes about five minutes to run, costs nothing, and you may be surprised how often that DVD you burned, cannot be read by your newer computer.

Next question, do you store all of your backups in the same location? Is that location the same room as your computer? Do you take a copy of your backups and put them in, at the very least another room in the house, or better yet in another building. Do you have copies in you safe deposit box? Are you covered in the event of a disaster?

Final question, are you aware of some online options available to you for backup? There are companies like www.Carbonite.com that will store and backup your files for you on their servers. I do not use Carbonite myself, but I have been told they are an excellent service for a price.

The service I do use is hosted by Uncle Bill’s kids at Microsoft. This service, Skydrive (http://skydrive.live.com/) is free and provides 25 gigabytes of storage on their servers. It is available with any decent internet connection, and is as secure as any online bank.

The only real restriction they place on the service is that you may not upload any single file that is larger than 50 megabytes. Other than that it’s like having a free 25 gig thumb drive that you can access anywhere you have an internet connection. In addition to backups of files I DO NOT want to lose, I keep copies of my school files there, so I can always pull down my homework, and know that it is as safe as any DVD.

So what are you waiting for? Run a fire drill today, you may be surprised at what you find.

Remember; Trust Not Thy Backup!