HowTo: Design an offsite backup system

Everyone has experienced the heartbreak of a failed hard drive… that sickening realization that your music, photos, and important documents are gone, victims of statistical likelihood. Luckily, there exists RAID — a system that keeps your data mirrored on two drives so that you aren’t out of luck if one dies. Amanda and I have [...]

Anatomy of a network

Slowly but surely, I’ve been moving our home network to an architecture that wouldn’t keep me up at night. Since we needed both wireless and wired access, my primary goal was to design a network that would allow wireless clients to access the internet but not the rest of our network — I expect that [...]

HowTo: Find orphaned Address Book entries

Between the two of us, Amanda and I have over three hundred entries in the Mac OS X Address Book application. Sorting through the entire list is tedious, so we’ve organized people into groups — high school, college, church, family, work, etc. Unfortunately, though, some contacts are “orphaned”… they’re in the address book, but they [...]

HowTo: Make the most of the Bialetti Brikka

Amanda and I have had a Bialetti Brikka espresso pot for quite a while now — it’s much cheaper (and smaller) than a full-fledged espresso maker, and the coffee tastes great. For the first few months, though, we weren’t getting as much espresso out of it as we’d expected, and what was being produced tasted [...]

Keyboard shortcuts for effective text

So — you’ve digested Anatomy of a print design, and you’re interested in making your online and print publications look more professional. Unfortunately, HTML and CSS lack many of the features that publishing applications afford… things like kerning, smart line breaks, and paragraph keep options just aren’t there. Learning a few new key combinations, however, [...]