brain tags Je Maintiendrai

What is Brain Tags?

That is the question I have been asking myself a lot this year. In the past I always had a clear answer to this question, but lately I struggle with the aim of this site, which is why it has been very silent over here.

The first incarnation of Brain Tags was simply to inform my friends abroad about what was going on in my life, which was a very novel idea back in 1997.

The second incarnation of Brain Tags in 2001 still had the same aim, but intense due to my emigration to Spain.

After some years the content started shifting to include web design and other technology topics. I got settled in Spain, and my daily life was not so interesting anymore…

And now that blogging has become very mainstream (my wifes mobile phone comes with a blogging client installed!) and there are a thousand blogs writing essentially the same, I wonder what the place of Brain Tags is.

For a while I thought about closing Brain Tags, but then I decided that I do have a very clear and sometimes unique opinion about many subjects. So I do want to continue writing here, but probably in a different format. I think that shorter articles with some original thinking (less copying/forwarding stuff from others) will be the way to go. I will also incorporate som other things such as Twitter steams etc. in the blog design.

Be prepared for changes, Brain Tags is alive!

Mozy for Mac

My macbook has been without backups for several months now, so I started looking for a backup solution. Time Machine is out of the question, as I don’t want to hook up a USB hard disk while I’m working (and when I don’t work I don’t want to leave my macbook switched on) and the Time Capsule is out of my budget.

On my PC I happily use Carbonite, but they haven’t released a version for mac yet. I have read some good things about Mozy though, so I decided to give it a try. I signed up for the MozyHome Free account to test the service, installed the software and selected some backup sets to start with. A few hours later the initial backup was ready (I only selected 250Mb).

Happy with the results, I changed user to do the same, but Mozy could not find any files because it was still looking for files in /home/Jeroen. This very much surprised me, as I was used to Carbonite running as a service and being able to backup files from all users. I assumed that Mozy would not work the same, but that I could configure the files to backup on a per user basis. I couldn’t find how to do so… I checked the FAQs on the Mozy site, but most of the texts have been written for Windows users.

And today I received an e-mail from Mozy explaining me how to get started with Mozy… on Windows.

I am not sure what to do with the software. The initial backup went fine, but it is a real bummer that the backup is limited to only one user.

SmartFTP no longer free

For a long time SmartFTP was my favourite FTP application for Windows, and I have recommended it to many friends. However, SmartFTP suddenly has changed their licensing structure and is now obliging me to purchase a license. Of course, I immediately uninstalled the software and installed FileZilla, which for sure is going to stay for free.

Brain Tags redesigned

Today I launched the new design for Brain Tags. For a while I have been using the default theme provided by Movable Type, but after updating the blogging engine to version 4.2 I decided to make some changes to make fully use of the new features offered by this version.

The theme I used is called Mid-Century and is a good example of the posibilities of the latest version of Movable Type Pro. To improve speed and stability, I used a static publishing model, while using cached modules for some of the sidebar widgets. That way I can easily update for example my Latest Comments widget without having to rebuild all individual archive files.

With this redisign I also stopped using Google Adsense, as the income generated was simply too low to justify its use.

In the coming days I will probably be making some little adjustments to adapt the new design to my tastes and needs.

It's official...

I’m presenting myself as a candidate!