Chris McCormick

This thing is great. I got it from VTech Industries for about $220 AUD. It is basically a mini GNU/Linux server with 2 giant hard drives in it. That price gets you a single 1TB drive and you can install your own drive in the other bay by removing the lid and dropping it in place. The unit, pictured below, is a bit taller and wider than three PC hard drives stacked together.

It comes with a reasonable web interface you can access over your LAN, but I installed the fun_plug hack on it by copying the files across the network and restarting the device - easy. That hack gets you SSH access, rsync, and a bunch of other Linuxy stuff.

We are storing our media and backups on it and it is basically perfect for that use-case. I now once again have a cron-and-rsync based regular backup of all of my servers in the USA, hooray! I'm also routing all SSH traffic to our ADSL router through to it so I can access the files on the device from outside our network if neccessary.

All in all I am very pleased with this purchase.

If you visit my website you will notice everything is in a scrawly hand-written font now. This is a digitized version of my own handwriting. Here is how I produced it:

• Went to YourFonts and printed the templates twice.
• Scanned both copies, used the best version of each letter, and tweaked some stuff in an image editor.
• Uploaded the templates, paid $15, and downloaded the resulting TTF file.
• Tested it out on my blog (see the cross-browser CSS font-face declaration below).
• Loaded up the TTF in font forge and tweaked more stuff.

To get it as a web useable font:

• Use a program called ttf2eot to create a web font file that Internet Explorer likes.
• Use the following CSS font-face declaration, which works on pretty much all mainstream browsers including Internet Explorer 6.

Font-face declaration:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'MyFont'; /* Use the real name of your actual font */
    src: url('MyFont.eot');
    src: url('MyFont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
    url('MyFont.ttf') format('truetype');
}

You can do this with basically any TTF font, but watch out for the legal implications of using commercial fonts on the web. It's obviously fine to do it with a font of your own handwriting. There are probably lots of other free fonts you can do it with too, but read the licensing information first.

Here's to more flexible web typography!

Looking for a good open source Software Libre alternative to Google Analytics? I can't recommend Piwik highly enough.

• Setup was easy - PHP & MySQL with a simple web based installer.
• Basic mechanism is similar to G.A. - add a code snippet to the bottom of your HTML code and you are done.
• Reporting seems more comprehensive than G.A. - all kinds of interesting data, visitor trails, etc.
• Take back ownership of your stats data!

Have fun.

Calm down, Internet, I am back! My server had a small mishap.

My new hosting provider is much more reliable than my old one. Hooray!

My new one is called prgmr.com and they are great.

I have also taken the opportunity to redesign my website. I hope you like it.