Lots of Topics. My Opinion.
Let me start with a couple of assumptions.
Accidental file deletion, or failure of a hard drive can be easily protected against by making a local backup of all your information. “Local” for the purposes of this post means that the backup copy is located in the same physical premises as the master copy, probably your home or small business, and on your local / home network. I’m considering the requirement for this to be a separate physical device, be it an external hard drive or ideally on another computer.
Continue reading “Let’s Get Started”One. This is how old our kids were when they began to mimic our behaviour of talking on the phone. Sure it was a banana or a bit of cardboard or a toy car, but it was held up to their ear just like a phone would be.
Two. Our kids were this old when they got their first toy mobile phone. Pushing the buttons made sounds like you might have heard from a mid 90s phone. But who cares because it made sounds.
Three. It was about this time that they both learned how to pinch-zoom and swipe through photo galleries. And maybe even take a picture or two using Mom’s phone.
Continue reading “Cell Phones For Kids. How Young Can They Be?”Now that you’ve planned your backups, bought a new drive and maybe a new router, it’s time to actually get the backups working.
The first thing to do is to connect the external hard drive to either your router or a designated always on computer. You will need to set this drive up as a shared drive so that all your other computers and devices can see it over the network. If you’re more adventurous and have a NAS device, you will connect via ethernet or wifi but the concepts are the same.
When you think about protecting your digital life there are a number of things that can wipe out everything electronic that you have if you’re not prepared.
This is a bit of a shopping list of random smaller stuff that is worth considering for your build. There’s no real order here, just a big list of things that might save you headaches, or money, later.
Continue reading “New Build Series: Plan Some More”Our philosophy on upgrades was to add the things that are nearly impossible to change later on. Builder upgrades tend to be a lot more expensive than paying contractors after the fact, so wise choices at this stage could easily save you tens of thousands of dollars.
Continue reading “New Home Build: Upgrades”We followed some advice given to us by a realtor friend. Post up the couple of floor plans you’re considering where you live now, and at the end of every day, discuss how you would have lived in the new house. Do it for two weeks. Try to imagine the day you just lived in different weather, times of year, perhaps with a larger family. If you do this for two weeks you will likely eliminate a number of floor plans you thought were quite good. Plus you will likely end up making some changes to the winning plan to better fit your lifestyle.
Continue reading “New Home Build: Live In Your Plan”That’s a cliche. But it’s so true. Picking a location is not just about what town or what street, it’s also about what side of the street, how close to the corner, and a whole lot of other little details that make a big difference to your quality of life.
Continue reading “Location, Location, Location”We live in a digital world. Gone are the days of taking rolls of film to the photo store to get developed then storing them in photo album binders stashed away on some obscure basement shelf. We are taking many more photos than we used to, mostly because we now always have a camera with us, and because it’s really, really easy.
But then we leave them on our phones, on our digital cameras, on our computers. We are playing roulette with them, hoping that hard drives won’t fail and phones won’t get lost or dropped in the swimming pool.
In addition to these precious memories, most of our important documents are on the computer. Or at least easy to access copies are on the computer.
I used to worry about losing everything, but not anymore.
Continue reading “A Comprehensive Home Backup Solution: Intro”