wonko.com

A pelican in a London park scooped up and swallowed an unsuspecting pigeon recently. An epic 20 minute struggle ensued, but in the end, the pelican prevailed and the pigeon was eaten. This is the funniest thing I've read all day. Oh, and there's video too.

Why is it that I always forget to drink my coffee once it's down to about an inch or two left in the cup? It's like there's a bit in my brain that gets flipped when the coffee is getting low and it makes me stop realizing it's there even when there are a few good sips left. Then, thirty minutes later, I look at my cup, realize there's coffee left, take a sip, and it's cold and shitty.

Crackup is a pretty simple, pretty secure remote backup solution for folks who want to keep their data securely backed up but aren't particularly concerned about bandwidth usage.

Crackup is ideal for backing up lots of small files, but somewhat less ideal for backing up large files, since any change to a file means the entire file must be transferred. If you need something bandwidth-efficient, try Duplicity. Crackup is a quick and simple (but secure and reliable) hack that gets the job done, but not much more. My main reason for writing it was that I needed something similar to Duplicity that would work well on both Windows and Unix systems. Crackup runs well on Windows under Cygwin.

Backups are compressed and encrypted via GPG and can be transferred to the remote location over a variety of protocols, including FTP, FTPS, and SFTP.

I just put the finishing touches on the first usable version of the backup client a few minutes ago and it seems to work well. There's no restore client yet, but it'll be easy to whip up as soon as I get around to it (which will hopefully be before I need to use it).

Update: crackup-restore is now complete and is available in the SVN repository along with the rest of Crackup. Enjoy!

Back when the New Coke fiasco occurred in 1985, I was a wee tyke who hadn't yet had my first sip of that nectar of the gods, Coca-Cola. By the time my raging Coke addiction began, New Coke was little more than a legend.

However, Wikipedia informs me that New Coke (now dubbed Coke II) is still sold on the island of Yap and in American Samoa. That's intriguing as hell. Blind taste tests conducted in the years leading to New Coke's introduction showed that most people preferred the taste of New Coke over Classic Coke, so obviously I'm curious what it tastes like. Unfortunately, as you might imagine, the web isn't exactly overflowing with Yap-based online stores selling Coke II.

I must taste Coke II. Help me, Internets! You're my only hope.

Loren spent $500 on a pair of 80 year-old lederhosen while he was in Europe. WTF?

Flickr is, for the most part, a pretty usable web app with a decent UI, but one thing that's always bugged the crap out of me is the "click here to add a description" area under the image on a photo page. It doesn't appear until you mouse over it, so it's completely non-intuitive unless you already expect it to be there, and even though I've been using Flickr for over a year I still almost always start typing my image description into the "Add your comment" textarea, which is always visible. I hate that.

I'm quickly approaching burnout at work. The long hours and weekends are piling up as our release date approaches.

I need a vacation. I have a fast car that'll take me anywhere in the continental United States. Where should I go?

I've been giving serious thought to using Amazon S3 as a remote backup solution for both my personal data and Jetpants customer data (which is currently backed up to multiple servers of my own). The price is pretty much unbeatable. Unfortunately, when I tried to sign up tonight, I kept getting dumped to the error page pictured here.

If Amazon can't even keep their servers operating well enough to take my money, how can I trust them to keep my data safe?

The new Google Reader rocks my socks. I wasn't at all impressed with the old UI, but this one's brilliant.