Hello Octopress!

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? – Octopress

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.

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ZFS: The Last Word in Filesystems

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"…

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Backup your Google Apps (or Gmail) e-mail over IMAP using imapsync

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.

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Moving E-Mail from Gmail to Google Apps over IMAP using imapsync

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.

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GeoDefense

GeoDefense

(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.

Maintaining Online Identities

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.

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Simple Off-Site Backups...?

Lately I've been consumed with the idea of getting more serious about backing- up all the data I have. I tend to be a digital pack-rat: my music collection, digital photos I've taken, all the songs I've ever recorded, various tarballs filled with code-stuffs for college projects I did, etc. There's a wealth of nostalgia there, and I realized that I really wouldn't want to lose a lot of that stuff.

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