XP vs Ubuntu, backups

Some of you may remember that after a Tuesday update, Wednesday October 4th my computer stopped working and my bandwidth after that was very limited. I never figured out what went wrong, but still have that XP drive that won't let me type the password to login. I have often missed information on that drive, and perhaps now that I have a long Christmas weekend I will have time to come back and revisit this. Meanwhile I have retrieved some information from the drive, I also bought a great 250 Gig Seagate external USB drive from Best Buy for $99.99+Tax, saw another Western Digital 500 Gig at, of all places the Apple Store on 3rd St., Santa Monica, for $149.99, not bad, for something in that store, but more important, this is lots of storage for very little money. I even took a look at the 1 TeraByte, $300, maybe I can store everything I need without breaking the bank. This kind of limitless space would do wonders for my ability to store things twice, once on a system and again on the backup drive, because lets face it, we all don't want to spend time doing backups, but we really do need too. The other option that I have been using for backups is Google. I run my email through Google now and this makes email backup automatically, then I can upload some files to the documents section, and pictures and again a complete backup model, and to boot I have access from anywhere in the world I have internet access. It is funny as I am typing this Security Now #123 is talking about Jungle Disk, based on Amazon S3 15 cent per gigabyte storage. Free 30 dy trail, I might try it. So offsite backups at Google or Amazon are really easy now that we have all this connectivity and storage available.

I got to test that a blue tooth keyboard to the N95 sometime, the time I had one available I couldn't find the option on the menu, turns out under Office is where it lives, who knew, the stupid numberpad is really bad for typing. My aunt came back a week ago from Cape Horn, the weather was good so they crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific on the bottom of the world and got some sort of certificate on the boat, flew back to Germany from Buenos Aires.

I have to sometime get someone to give a talk at LiLAX.net about firewalls again, I listen to Security Now and keep hearing about the Astaro, which is Linux based and sounds awsome, I also need to run Snort on my home machines to see if they are behaving and on visitors to check for bad behavior. I think that it even makes sense for ISPs to have some automated scripts send email to users of thier system, although it is a bit like big brother and users might not like this sort of thing, besides how quickly would the RIAA ask to use that system to figure out if someone is sharing music? but so much wasted bandwidth on the internet used for bad things could be saved.