I really have enjoyed using FeedForAll as a nice, customizable way to insert ANY RSS feed into a web page. I use it with some of my wordpress sites to get relevant news (relevant to the page in question) published without the toil of multiple daily updates. It’s a nice “set it and forget it” style tool.
Recently though I wanted to make some tweaks to the layout of some of my feeds:
SMART testing has been around for a while and isn’t very well understood. I can’t say that I’m an expert on it, but I’ve come to have several fairly well developed ideas in regards to it. First off, if I have a live hard drive that fails to complete a SMART test, it’s time for me to retire that drive. It may seem extravagant, but I would rather not have to spend loads of time recovering data of a potentially failing drive. It’s true that SMART is not necessarily going to raise a red flag before a significant data loss event happens. In fact, I’ve seen drives report that they’ve passed the health test in spite of some serious disk problems. What I think you ought to look out for are a few of these points:
S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu linux environment, but you can do the SMART testing without installing linux on your hard drive.
How?
I’ve devoted quite a few pixels to this topic over on the Online Radio and TV site, but… in the United States broadcast TV will make the move to ALL digital in February. We have cable and the only way it’s affecting me is in my planning for the inevitable winter storms that will knock out the cable from time to time. Times like that we need over the air access to our local news and I’ve got the converter box for that. But, with so many people on cable or satellite – will the digital transition affect you?