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This comet is moving really fast!

Last night was the first break in the clouds in about a month and a half. So I got out my astrophotography rig, which is based on the open source OnStep STM32 telescope controller.

The moon was bright, and there was too much moisture in the atmosphere. So, not ideal conditions.

As far as comets go, this one is underwhelming. It lacks a tail, and is below naked eye visibility. But what is remarkable, is that this comet was sure moving fast against the background stars.

A 5 minute exposure shows a fuzzy streak that goes in a different direction than the streaks from stars due to a hasty and inaccurate polar alignment.

Here is a screenshot of the 5 minute exposure, and another 60 seconds exposure.

Clouds rolled over and I had to call it a night.

Oh, and if you want an Open Source telescope controller, here are more videos on OnStep on the STM32.

I used to collect these scam emails on my web site.

Every week or two, I will get an email asking if such and such email is true, or asking to verify a winning ticket, or contacting the Sultan of Brunei for charity or a project, ...etc..

The sad thing is that while some of these emails are from the USA and other developed countries, the vast majority are from desperate people in poor countries. Some of them already paid the scammers and believe the documents provided by them, such as lawyer and bank certificates with official stamps on them.

I used to collect these scam emails on my web site.

Every week or two, I will get an email asking if such and such email is true, or asking to verify a winning ticket, or contacting the Sultan of Brunei for charity or a project, ...etc..

The sad thing is that while some of these emails are from the USA and other developed countries, the vast majority are from desperate people in poor countries. Some of them already paid the scammers and believe the documents provided by them, such as lawyer and bank certificates with official stamps on them.

And for those of you who do not know, Frank Herbert used a lot of Arabic and Islamic themes in Dune.

Coming full circle ...

Many years ago, I wrote an article on Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's Dune. It includes many etymological info on terms used in Dune.

Hope some of you enjoy it.

I would argue that fossil fuel is not the only determinant ...

The hard part is that we have become almost dependent on integrated circuits. This goes for any computer device, all control devices in manufacturing, and much more ...

If civilization collapses, how can we get back the IC fabs going with specialized material?

I wrote about it in a previous comment: 19th century technology vs. mid 20th century.

And expanded a bit on it in information readability and longevity in the digital age.

Look at how much JK Rawlings borrowed themes and story lines from JRR Tolkien.

I had similar issues, though on a machine hosted outside my home network.

The solution was to implement SPF, pointing to the PTR of machine (i.e. what a reverse IP lookup will resolve to), and DKIM.

In your case, doing a PTR will be hard, since dynamic DHCP may change what the PTR is, but the rest does apply.

I wrote the following detailing what I did: Setting up SPF and DKIM on Postfix.

I had lots of mails bounce after Yahoo implemented DMARC.

However, with a bit of patience, I was able to implement DKIM and SPF for my domain, and now all the mails get delivered to Yahoo addresses.

I wrote about how ot configure SPF and DKIM in this article: Setting up SPF and DKIM for Postfix.

Things were easy until the mid to late 19th century. Anything could be produced in a carpenter, blacksmith or watchmaker's workshop. Lenses were ground, metals were machined, ...etc.

Then in the early 20th century things started to get far more specialized. By the mid 20th century, we had the transistor then the integrated circuit.

Now, everthing from ubiquitous phones to home appliances to street lights have complicated integrated circuits, CPUs, RAM, ...etc. that can only be designed by specialized teams, and fabricated in very high tech fabs.

I wrote about it here : Information readability and longevity in the digital age.

If you have a Linode VPS, then you do have free Dynamic DNS. All you need is a script to update the relevant subdomain.

Here is a script that does it for an OpenWRT router.

Using Linode Dynamic DNS with OpenWRT

If you don't use OpenWRT, you can still use any Linux box behind the subdomain, but you need to setup a small "what is my IP" script outside your subdomain. For example, simple script like so will do the trick:

<?php
print $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "\n";
?>

Now, you need to change the OpenWRT script above to contact the server that has the PHP script, and get the public IP address of the subdomain.

Tired of the pace of upgrades that Mozilla (and Ubuntu) forces on you?

Well then, install the Firefox ESR on Linux, and stay for a year without changes ...

Indeed it was the Romans who destroyed it first.

Here is an article I wrote years ago with references on really happened. The Arabs burning it may be a myth.

Who burned the Library of Alexandria.

I totally agree with you, but only in theory.

In practice, I have seen the many terror plots that go to court and get convictions are mostly from disaffected lost youth who trash talk, like you said, but the FBI prods them into a plot that they would not have done if left on their own. See FBI manufacturing terrorism

And this is not unique to the USA either. Up here in Canada, there is a case that looks to me as entrapment. The perpetrators would have never took action on their own, had it not been a government informant been egging them on all the time. See Thoughts on the May 2006 terrorism arests in Canada

Why all this revulsion at eating an insect? There are lots of exotic yet disgusting food out there in this world.

And how are Cicadas that much different from edible locusts, which are eaten in the Middle East, Mexico and elsewhere?

I wondered about this for a long time. Given how common insects are as a food in many parts of the world, why is it so taboo in Europe?

And then I learned they're not kosher.

That's right...

Why all this revulsion at eating an insect? There are lots of exotic yet disgusting food out there in this world.

And how are Cicadas that much different from edible locusts, which are eaten in the Middle East, Mexico and elsewhere?

I wondered about this for a long time. Given how common insects are as a food in many parts of the world, why is it so taboo in Europe?

And then I learned they're not kosher.

That's right...

Why all this revulsion at eating an insect? There are lots of exotic yet disgusting food out there in this world.

And how are Cicadas that much different from edible locusts, which are eaten in the Middle East, Mexico and elsewhere?

Why all this revulsion at eating an insect? There are lots of exotic yet disgusting food out there in this world.

And how are Cicadas that much different from edible locusts, which are eaten in the Middle East, Mexico and elsewhere?

This is just more and more balkanization of the North American mobile market.

Why don't we see this "different network, different frequencies" problem elsewhere in Europe and Asia?

There is no spectrum shortage. Europe and Asia have no spectrum shortage, despite being more densely populated (generally), and all having the same handsets work on all networks. The decisions to buy a handset and the decision which network to subscribe to are totally separate. You buy the handset outright. No subsidy. No strings attached.

The urge to have balkanized networks is driven purely by networks wanting to fragment the market and put obstacles to their customers leaving for some other network.

I wrote about this re: Canada, and it applies to the USA as well. The only two markets that tie customers this way, and people accept it.

Read Mobile phone carriers lobby for more balkanization by asking for more "spectrum" and More balkanization and monopoly in Canada's mobile phone market.

This should be stopped!

There is no spectrum shortage. Europe and Asia have no spectrum shortage, despite being more densely populated (generally), and all having the same handsets work on all networks. The decisions to buy a handset and the decision which network to subscribe to are totally separate. You buy the handset outright. No subsidy. No strings attached.

The urge to have balkanized networks is driven purely by networks wanting to fragment the market and put obstacles to their customers leaving for some other network.

I wrote about this re: Canada, and it applies to the USA as well. The only two markets that tie customers this way, and people accept it.

Read Mobile phone carriers lobby for more balkanization by asking for more "spectrum" and More balkanization and monopoly in Canada's mobile phone market.

This should be stopped!

The options are not pretty, Canada having some of the most monopolistic mobile carriers in the G20.

Having said that, you should consider the following:

- CDMA is out, since I don't think it would work with another carrier. CDMA works only with Bell and Telus. So Rogers, Fido and the rest are out.

- Is the area you are in within mobile range of certain carriers? It may not be. So check with locals there. There used to be a map of all Canada with all the cell towers and all carriers somewhere. I forgot the URL though. Google may help.

- Is your iPad locked to a certain carrier or not? If it is locked, you need to unlock it before a SIM from a different provider

- Rogers Pay As You Go gives you 7 day access for $7, and 125MB. You will need a SIM, which is I think, $35, then you need to put some money in the account, say $25 or so.Since 125MB will not be enough, you will need several of these $7. The way it works is that you set the APN in your phone/device to Rogers', and then try to browse. A text message will be sent to you with a URL. You click that, and it will give you a choice of $2 for 1 day and 10MB, or $7 for a week, and 125MB. You click on the link, the money is deducted from your balance, and you are done. Check here for more info: Rogers Pay As You Go.

I have an article on my site for using Android Smartphones with Rogers Pay As You Go. The APN info may help with your iOS setup.

By the way, Rogers is my regular users, and Pay As You Go is my regular plan. I am using Rogers Pay As You Go this week in a not so remote place. That $7 has lasted me from Friday to Monday, but I have not uploaded photos on it. There is WiFi walking distance from here, and I use that for photo uploads.

I found an acre or more of land strewn with these kind of stones in Southern India. Here is a JPEG picture: http://baheyeldin.com/sites/baheyeldin.com/files/be/images/meteorite/meteorite-1.jpg After much debate and sending pictures off to a University Professor, settled on the explanation that the stones are metallurgical slag. We wrote up some details and posted here: http://baheyeldin.com/science/kerala-meteorite-volcano-or-ancient-foundry.html

I found an acre or more of land strewn with these kind of stones in Southern India. Here is a JPEG picture: http://baheyeldin.com/sites/baheyeldin.com/files/be/images/meteorite/meteorite-1.jpg After much debate and sending pictures off to a University Professor, settled on the explanation that the stones are metallurgical slag. We wrote up some details and posted here: http://baheyeldin.com/science/kerala-meteorite-volcano-or-ancient-foundry.html

Ack!

Correct link here.

The coordinates are: 4328N 8031W

This bill is good intentioned, but practically useless, given the state of affairs of the cell phone market reality in North America (yes, USians, you too!)

In Europe, Africa and most of Asia, everyone standardized on GSM. You ask the network for a phone number, and they give you a SIM card, you go to any shop and buy any phone and it is guaranteed to work with any network you choose. Not only that, but phones work everywhere from Hong Kong to Dubai to Spain to Johannesburg. Nothing special, other than getting a SIM card if roaming is too expensive.

In the USA and Canada, we the consumers, have accepted things that are never acceptable elsewhere. For example, we had CDMA, which is used only in the USA, Canada, Japan and perhaps another one or two smaller countries. CDMA does not have a SIM card. The phone is made by the manufacturer and locked to a certain network that sells you the phone.

Even when GSM came to North America, it was done in bands that were not the standard ones used elsewhere in the world, which was circumvented when quad band phones were put on the market. Meaning they work in Europe and Canada/USA, but they have a higher price and have more silicon inside to handle this fragmentation.

When 3G came by, more fragmentation occurred. The governments started selling "spectrum", and companies like Google and Cricket grabbed certain bands (WINDMobile, Mobilicity and Public Mobile in Canada did the same). AWS was invented.

This means that a phone from Rogers will not work with WINDMobile and vice versa.

So what use will the bill be if they are operating at different frequencies?

Not only that, we see industry lobbyists asking for "more spectrum". The excuse is that spectrum is too crowded, but the real reason is more fragmentation and balkanization so they can lock in customers more and more. Why does Europe which is more densely populated, or Egypt have more carriers, yet all handsets work on all networks?

See this article I wrote earlier: Mobile phone carriers lobby for more balkanization by asking for more spectrum as well.

You are on to something but then totally miss it: titles are big in Egyptian Arabic, not the profession itself.

Speaking as someone born and raised in Egypt, Arabic being my mother tongue, the society there is very large on titles. If you are writing a letter to an official in the USA, you address it to "Dear Sir/Madam" or to "Mr. John Doe/Ms. Jane Doe". In Egypt, you are asked to address the official with all the titles that he/she got. For example "Al Sayed Al Ostaz Al Doctor Al Kimya'ee John Doe" (Mr ? Dr Chemist John Doe, meaning he has a Ph.D and a Chemical Engineer).

Unlike a few other places in the Arab world, you never call someone with their first name, unless they are a close friend or relative of the same age as you. Anyone else has to get a title, even menial labor. For relatives there is "uncle" for older male. "Father and mother" for parents. "Abeh" for male older cousins (From Turkish Agabey), "Ablah" for older female cousins ...etc. So, this is where Ostaz comes in (derives from Farsi Ustad, meaning "Master", but used for anyone you don't know the qualifications for). Then comes Bash Muhandes (Bash is Turkish meaning "Head", so this means Head of Engineers), which applies to the man who fixes your car who has no degree at all, the untrained plumbers ...etc. Then comes Doctor, which applies for physicians, pharmacists, dentists and vets too. And so on and on and on ... In some cases calling someone by the wrong title annoys them, for example calling someone a mere Ostaz, while he is actually a doctor!

In other parts of the Arab world (Levant, Gulf), the kunya is used (hence the names, "Abu-something"), so the titles are used less.

It has gotten annoying that you find email addresses and Facebook profiles with the title in the name "Dr Ashraf Something" or drsomething@gmail.com.

Two professions are at the apex of social respect: they are doctors and engineers (architects, civil engineers, ...etc.) because the universities ask for the highest marks to admit students. Doctors being more respected I would say.

So, being an engineer is not something everyone just craves. There are other social status professions that are perhaps more appealing. But the main point is that the overuse of titles is rampant, and means little in practice.

So, I upgraded my own laptop from Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on Saturday. The GUI upgrade refused to run. So I did it from the command line using the do-release-upgrade command, and it was successful.

The Intel Wifi Link 5100 did not work but I was able to compile it from source and get it going, like I did on 9.04.

The second problem was power management. The laptop got so hot, up to 63C (normally it is between 42C to 49C). Guidance Power Manager did not detect when the AC was plugged, although at the ACPI level (/proc/acpi) showed that events were detected. The solution was simple: edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add:

acpi_os="Linux"

At the end of the line that has "ro quiet splash" in it.

Now the laptop works fine, and I am typing this from it. KDE4 on 9.10 is far better than KDE4 on 9.04 which was too broken.

Then, I proceeded with another laptop, also Toshiba, but older CPU. This one refused to boot after the upgrade.

It would show:

Begin: Loading essential drivers ...
Done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ...
Done.
Begin: Mounting root file system ...
Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ...
Done.
Begin: Running /scripts/local-premount ...
[ 3.710938] PM: Starting manual resume from disk
Done.
[ 3.728858] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[ 3.728942] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Begin: Running /scripts/local-bottom ...
Done.
Done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-botton ...
Done.
mount: can't find /home/public in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

Then nothing. No prompt, no GUI, ... stuck there.

This is reported on launchpad, but none of the solutions mentioned there worked for me.

Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del did indeed work though ...

I used boot options like noresume, acpi=off, single, to no avail.

Was able to change the grub command line to " ... rw init=/bin/bash", and get a prompt. I connected the ethernet cable, got an IP address, and ran "aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade" and made sure there are no pending updates. Still no go.

I regenerated the initrd image using update-initramfs -k all -c, and ran update-grub as well. No go still ...

Running dpkg-reconfigure -a did not help either (and complains about upstart socket not being there).

I booted from an old Kubuntu disk and connected a USB drive and made a backup of the home directory. Then booted from a fresh Kubuntu 9.10 i386 desktop CD, but the fonts were all borked: too big to be useful, and most popup dialogs (e.g. when you press on the K start button) are unreadable, so can't even proceed with a full clean install.

Not sure what to do for that second laptop. I am hesitant of doing 2 more now that I am stuck on that one.

Three decades ago, when I was at high school, and even in early university years, I was fascinated with biology and specially botany. I acquired a good conventional optical microscope and got custom fixtures made for SLR cameras to take pictures. I managed to scan some of those I could find on my page on photomicroscopy. I was endlessly fascinated by seeing the patterns on pollen grains and chloroplasts inside plant cells.

I always hit the limit on what optical microscopes can see, even with an oil immersion lens. The depth of focus was always very shallow and I had to prepare stuff before seeing much. I kept reading on electronic microscopes, both scanning and tunneling, and only dreaming of ever operating one.

Perhaps in my lifetime it can be more affordable as an item for the hobbyist.

So, would you pay $5-10k for an SEM that was relatively simple and easy to maintain?

Three decades ago, when I was at high school, and even in early university years, I was fascinated with biology and specially botany. I acquired a good conventional optical microscope and got custom fixtures made for SLR cameras to take pictures. I managed to scan some of those I could find on my page on photomicroscopy. I was endlessly fascinated by seeing the patterns on pollen grains and chloroplasts inside plant cells.

I always hit the limit on what optical microscopes can see, even with an oil immersion lens. The depth of focus was always very shallow and I had to prepare stuff before seeing much. I kept reading on electronic microscopes, both scanning and tunneling, and only dreaming of ever operating one.

Perhaps in my lifetime it can be more affordable as an item for the hobbyist.

False positive from a DLL? That is nothing ...

How about TrendMicro giving a false positive on a valid PHP plain text file that is part of Drupal!

Bruce

You are someone whom I respect, and as an Egyptian, I am disappointed by the misinformation in your post.

Here is an article I wrote about the issue of Egypt's response to the swine flu by killing pigs. First, it is far more than Egypt or Muslims: it is Swine Flu, social networks and media spreading misinformation, there is the Israeli health minister's comment, there is Twitter and social networks, and there is xkcd too ("I ate pork, am I going to get the flu")!

There is a real problem in Egypt, which is persecuting its Coptic Christians by slaughtering their pigs. A minority in Egypt are Christian, the word "Copt" refers to their Egyptian ethnicity.

The problem is misinformation. When bird flu hit Egypt a few years ago, about 26 people died, and chicken and ducks were destroyed for everyone.The current government just did the same for pigs, which happens to be kept mostly by Christian Coptic families. Not exclusively though. Some Muslim families raise pigs too. And just so you know, most Copts will not eat pork in Egypt because of the unhealthy way they are raised. The common knowledge is that it is non-Egyptians who consume the most pork (e.g. Greeks, Italians, Armenians, ...etc.) While in Europe with a Coptic friend, I was surprised when he ordered pork for breakfast. He explained that he does not eat it in Egypt because of the unhealthy way it is raised, but OK with eating it in Europe due to more sanitary conditions. You will know why when you read about the Garbage village of Muqattam.

Even the Coptic Church has chimed in supporting the cull of pigs in Egypt this time, saying that eating pork is neither forbidden nor recommended by church law, and if public health calls for killing them, then it supports it! Of course, pigs are not a vector, and that is misinformation.

Some of the Copts farm pork, which the majority of Egyptian Islamic citizens (and their powerful clerics) feel are unclean.

Just like Judaism, Islam has some dietary restrictions, which include pork. You can agree or disagree with that

And which "powerful clerics"? Can you name a few? Are they in the government? Do they make government policy? You are probably confusing Iran with Egypt, no?

Fact is, the government in Egypt is far from being religious (of any brand) neither are they ethical nor moral!

The Copts feed the pigs by recycling garbage, compounding their unclean nature in the eyes of Islamics.

Who are the "Islamics"? Use the proper terms please: Muslims.

So, the Egyptians are slaughtering the pigs in the fear that they are influenza vectors.

Exactly. This is not about prosecution, this is about misguided fear. The government are wrongly extending the bird flu measures to the swine flu.

We don't actually know that the pig is a vector for the virus at all. Thus, the Egyptian slaughters are unwarranted. We do know that human-to-human contact is a problem this time.

Agreed, and that is what I wrote in my post above.

The pigs are where influenza genes are often mixed, because they are susceptible to avian, human, and swine viruses. There probably was one pig-to-human transmission at the beginning of this epidemic, but there isn't evidence of continuing transmission after that.

Agreed again.

The Copts are persecuted like most religious minorities in religious states.

The Copts are no more persecuted than the Muslims. The current issues in Egypt are due to a government who is despotic and resisting an change or attempt to cha

Paris was one of the best and worst places I've ever visited. Worst because of the rudeness of the natives, whether they are a customs official, subway inspector, Algerian taxi driver, or a Moroccan couscous restaurant waiter. It is so pervasive, that the hotel reception and the folk I was visiting on business stuck out by their politeness.

Read about the entire experience in my Paris travel notes

Yes, the Conservatives did promise to reintroduce the copyright "reform" legislation. This will be the third attempt at it by the Conservatives.

As for the elections themselves, there are many interesting observations. Read my thoughts on Canada's federal elections 2008.

I don't know about uprising against the British, but for sure, Herbert used many Arabic and Islamic themes in Dune. Some of the stuff is obscure historical terms, so he digged deeper than just current colloquial terms in use in the Middle East at the time.

Well, it works both ways.

One can ask whether J.K. Rowling has borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien too.

There is a lot more Islamic and Arabic stuff in Dune that one thinks.

See Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Fremen were inspired from Arabs/Muslims http://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-in-frank-herberts-dune.html

Try this paper. VERY well-written and engaging. It's interesting to see someone attempt to identify the myriad of influences Herbert used to craft these fantastic and detailed worlds. http://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-in-frank-herberts-dune.html

http://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-in-frank-herberts-dune.html

There are many implications for the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo merger for open source.

Microsoft will not continue to run on an open source platform, like they did with Hotmail.

- PHP: heavily used in Yahoo. Yahoo employs PHP founder and project lead Rasmus Lerdorf.
- Apache: Yahoo uses Apache heavily, and has many patches and modules for it. IIS will replace it.
- MySQL: likewise, they use it heavily. Expect MS-SQL in there.
- FreeBSD and Linux: they use them a lot. Expect those to be turfed for Windows.
- Yahoo YUI javascript library.

Yahoo also hosts open source events (e.g. OSCMS: Open Source Content Management Systems back in March 2007).

All the sponsorship money, paying salaries for open source leads, ...etc. will end.

This is not good news at all.

Yahoo is the provisioner of email to Rogers, a very large ISP (and cell phone provider, among other things) here in Canada. Rogers' competitor, Sympatico is allied with MSN. So, there will be some impact here if this goes through.

The implications of Microsoft bidding $44.6 B for Yahoo are many, and they are all bad news. Bad for customers, bad for the internet at large, bad for employees, and bad for open source.

Google acquiring Yahoo is a lesser evil, but still one less competitor to keep the others honest.

But with an offer on the table, and a possible counter offer/alliance from Google, something is going to happen, and it will have profound implications on many people.

I wrote an article on this here: Education, social status and terror leadership.

I agree with you that greed and desperation are motivations for scams, internet or otherwise. Add to that ignorance and naiveté as well.

On my site, I published some internet scams and fraud that appear in my inbox. The response is overwhelming. People are actually falling for them. Many are from third world countries and poor. Some are from Western countries and greedy. Some were laid off by their employers and desperate.

Many people mistake my site for the fake lottery and ask if their ticket number is genuine. Some post phone numbers and email addresses.

Really depressing ...

The same is true in other cultures too, such as some rural areas in the Middle East, observant religious people, desert dwellers, ...etc. In such a culture, being "nice" to a female in the Western sense, is taken as being lusty or making a pass, and hence the indifference. The same goes for looking a woman in the face.

Imagine the airport profiler is a female, and the person avoiding eye contact and being aloof/indifferent ...

There is also the incident where traveling Imams (Muslim clerics) were praying in an airport, only for them to be arrested by those who thought they are staging a terror attack or something. One guy is even blind. There was a case of an Orthodox Hasidic Jew who was evicted from a plane in Canada because he was praying too, and did not know English to explain himself.

TV is the modern version of Panem et circenses, specifically Circus games (as in Gladiators) replaced by American Idol, Top model and pseudo news about Paris and Britney.

Glad to see the USA is finally catching up to the third world.

Egypt and other countries have done that for a long time. It is mainly due to higher ups in power being in collusion with those who hold the distribution license for the country, and hence kickbacks by the business men motivates those in power to enforce these things.

I described that in this article and this comment.

Such practices have caused some businesses to consider alternatives, such as Linux.

Sandvine is a local company here in Waterloo, Ontario. It has been a high flyer and a media/investor darling of late.

The local newspaper had an article , which I blogged about a few days ago, on Sandvine's technology and how it is involved in the Comcast debacle.

Actually, Google bought two mobility sites: Jaiku and Zingku, not just one.

This may be in anticipation of the launch of the gPhone, rumored to be launched end of this year.

Several years ago, I had a break in. The computer was stolen.

Luckily, I have been using a tape backup, and the robber did not take those. So, I was able to go back one month with everything intact.

In those days, everything I had fit in the 2.5GB tape. I then bought a 10GB tape, and it lasted for a few years. Backups were simply a cron job and an email to tell me that the backup is done and to change the tape. I kept one tape offsite as a precaution.

However, life changed. I got a digital camera and started taking a lot of pictures. Then I got another one with more megapixels and started taking more pictures which are larger in size. All of a sudden, tapes were not enough. The largest Travan tape is 20GB native capacity.

Getting tapes for a home setup is a real chore, specially with the rate the capacity of hard disks is growing. Tapes cannot keep up, specially at price points that home users can afford for both drives and media. Finding the media can be a challenge, let alone finding them at reasonable prices.

To this day, my page on Linux tape backup comes up first on Google, despite moving on from tapes.

Because tapes are no longer enough for the size of data that I have, I now use external disk drives in USB enclosures, two of them to be sure, and a cron job to do daily incremental dumps, and weekly full dumps. See setting up a hard disk USB 2.0 enclosure for backup under Linux and Ubuntu Linux backup of a laptop using a USB enclosure and the dump utility (I use a similar approach for the server).

Although drive enclosures can be theoretically kept offsite, they have to be unmounted, unplugged and are bulkier than tape. So it is inconvenient. Using 2.5" drives may make this more convenient, but their price vs. capacity still makes them more costly.

What are others using for a home setup for tape and offsite backup? DLT? DAT? What?