About a year and a half ago, I stumbled upon Ryan Tomayko’s ”dotfiles” repository on Github. The moment I saw it, I thought it was a great idea: the idea of managing all your $HOME directory “dot-files” in a Git repository. That single idea led me on a personal crusade to better understand all the different configuration files that live in your UNIX (Linux, Mac OSX, etc.) home directory, and the end-result was creating my own ”dotfiles” Git repository for synchronizing/tracking/deploying my dot-files between the various machines I work upon.

I learned a lot of neat stuff along the way, including some config options which I never knew were there and some tricks which really optimized my command-line shell experience.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a neat project named Octopress:

Octopress is an obsessively designed framework for Jekyll blogging. It’s easy to configure and easy to deploy. Sweet huh?

Sweet indeed! The more I read about it, the more intrigued I became. After a few hours spent exploring the code, importing the posts/pages from my Wordpress install into Octopress, and tweaking the default theme to my taste, I’ve taken the jump and moved my site over to using the Octopress platform.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reading-up on different options since my current home file-server setup is slowly running out of disk-space. Sure, I could just throw some new HDD’s in there, but the inner-geek in me really wants to setup a new system that has both redundancy and scalability – something more robust and future-proof.

In reading through different online forums, the topic of ZFS-based systems kept coming-up again and again. I had heard the term “ZFS” thrown around before but I had never really spent the time to read-up on it. It’s just another filesystem, right? How fancy can it be?

Well, ZFS is just damn cool. ZFS is lot more than ”just another filesystem“…

I have confidence in Google’s ability to keep their e-mail service up-and- running and keep proper backups of data, but my e-mail history is my data and I like to have my own copy of it. Since Google provides access to your Google Apps (and Gmail) e-mail over IMAP, you can do all kinds of things using standard tools, e.g. synchronize your Gmail e-mail to a local mailbox using IMAP.

I run an Ubuntu box at home and it was easy to install the dovecot-imapd package to get an IMAP server installed. Since my box is behind my router/firewall, I’m wasn’t that concerned with tweaking Dovecot’s default configuration, but I’m sure you could fiddle with the config to ensure that Dovecot only binds to 127.0.0.1.

From there, it’s just a matter of using imapsync, just like I ended-up using previously to initially transfer all my e-mail to my Google Apps account.

Two years ago, I transitioned from using regular Gmail (i.e. “…@gmail.com”) to setting up Google Apps for “nynim.org” (i.e. “…@nynim.org”). I had found the following article back then which gave me helpful hints on how to use imapsync to push data to my new Google Apps e-mail address:

http://gemal.dk/blog/2008/04/08/completed_the_gmail_migration/

I adapted that script for my own needs, and I was able to successfully copy all the mail from my regular Gmail account to my new Google Apps account.

(via kotaku.com)

(via autocompleteme.com)

Google auto-complete hilarity.

(via appolicious.com)

After hearing some rave-reviews from various places over the past few days, I picked-up GeoDefense for the iPhone this evening. Wow, it’s a blast! Nice balanced game-play, good amount of challenge, great graphics. Well worth the $2.

I’ve resurrected my nearly abandoned website and breathed new life into it! I’m now running SweetCron, an open-source project for rolling you own personalized lifestream.

I stumbled across this neat site called Clipperz a few weeks back. On the surface, it’s ”a free and anonymous online password manager”. This was immediately interesting to me because I’d really like to find a (secure!) web-based password manager.