Google

There’s one thing that I fear when it comes to my storage and that is to lose all the pictures I’ve been taking for all these years. I have seen customers of mine that have lost all their images due to a hard disk crashing and seen the tears. I usually do my regular backup using TimeMachine on my Mac to an Apple Time Capsule. But my photo library in Adobe Lightroom is too big to fit on the SSD drive used in my MacBook Pro, and TimeMachine doesn’t do a backup of external drives. So I use rsync to make a backup to my NAS which uses RAID–1 for extra protection. But I don’t want to rely on a single backup. A fire, burglary or simple hardware failure makes me uneasy. So I also do an off-site backup using the excellent Arq backup program. ...

Here is an easy way to increase the speed of loading web pages by optimizing the DNS you are using when surfing the web. Everything you do on the internet will be affected by the speed of the Domain Name System you are using. So let’s try to make it faster. ...

I helped my boss today with a weird problem. In his calendars on his iOS devices, an extra line would show up, displaying the GMT time of the event. The event was placed correctly in the timeline, but it included the GMT time in the text. Naturally I did the obligatory Google search and found a lot of other users with the same problem, but not any solutions on how to fix it. After checking all the settings on Google Calendar and checked the time and calendar settings, I couldn’t find anything wrong. But after checking out his iPad settings, I realized that the old IT guy had missed a thing. ...

hAtom errors and Google PageRank When I checked my blog in Google Webmaster I noticed a lot of errors in the Structured Data section. After fixing the errors in Wordpress by adding structured data, my traffic increased without any changes. That includes posts. So obviously Google uses hAtom when setting PageRank. ...

When trying to sync a new iPhone to my Google Apps account it seems that it’s no longer possible to use Exchange push mail, address book and calendar syncing. By signing up for their service for free I paid by letting Google rummage through my mail for later use in targeted advertising. But now they killed yet another service that I come to depend on. My trust in Google is totally gone. Now I have to spend hours setting up a mail server, getting passwords from my users and sync all accounts using IMAP. Then I have to help everyone to set up iCloud sync for the address book and calendars instead. Because Google can’t be trusted. All these problems can easily fixed buy paying Google, but why pay twice? Money AND my private life? WTF? ...

Google Reader joins graveyard of dead Google products - Slate Magazine: It’s hard to lose a loved one, especially if that loved one is a Google service. That’s why we’re opening the gates of the Google Graveyard, a virtual space for grieving. Buried in these hallowed grounds are some of Google’s ill-fated services. Some, like Google Reader, lived long, prosperous lives, full of admiration and glory. Most, like Google Wave and Google Buzz, struggled to carve out a place in this harsh, unforgiving world where technologies continuously clash and innovation reigns king. But whether these services transformed our productivity or only polluted our inboxes, they all touched our world in some way. ...

inessential.com: Why I love RSS and You Do Too: Why I love RSS and You Do Too Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Insightful article about RSS from the venerable developer of NetNewsWire. RSS is everywhere. He’s right about the future of RSS. Google killing Google Reader will end up better for everyone.

When changing permalinks in Wordpress from an old format to a new, you risk losing Google page rank. On my blog, I’ve had my permalink set to /archives/year/month/day/name-of-article. Looking at my web server log, very few used the archives sidebar, so I removed it. To make the link shorter I needed to remove everything except the article name. But when changing the permalink, all the incoming links will get a 404 error from all old connections, and the search result from Google, lowering your Google ranking. Not good. ...