This is another one of those posts that many regular readers will want to skip on past. It’s nerdy, and only interesting in a very specialised way :-)
I’m based in office where we all keep our files on a central file server, which is then regularly backed up. As I mostly work on my laptop, often from somewhere that is not the office, I needed a way that would reliably keep the contents of a folder on my computer in sync with my folder on the file server. Ideally this would be done in a way that didn’t require me to remember to do anything.
A quick search led me (via Lifehacker, if I recall correctly) to ChronoSync, which when run compares two locations and keeps their contents in step.
As far as having it done automatically, the best I could come up with was ChronoSync’s background scheduler which sits in the menu bar and can be configured to run a sync when a specified volume is mounted.
This worked well, but required to remember to mount the shared volume on the file server — essentially no different to me remembering to run the sync operation myself.
I then came across HomeZone, which can be set to carry out certain actions when you connect to a specified network. If I could figure out a way to trigger ChronoSync when I join the network in the office, I’d be set.
I tried setting it to open the ChronoSync file for the necessary sync, but I couldn’t figure out a way to get it to run the sync in the background. This offended me — I was after a totally background, inconspicuous operation.
Maybe I could get it to fire off an Automator workflow? No, ChronoSync doesn’t support Automator. Aargh.
But what I could do was get it to launch an Automator workflow that connected to the file server and mounted the share, which would then trigger ChronoSync’s background scheduler to run the sync.
And you know what? It worked. In an ideal world this could all be done with one or at most two applications. Maybe it can, but I’ve ended up using three. At least it works, totally unobtrusively.
When I go into the office in the morning and bot up my laptop, it connects to the office wireless network. This in turn tells HomeZone to run the Automator workflow which mounts the shared volume on the file server. That then tells ChronoSync to run the sync operation — all without any input from me beyond turning on the computer. Exactly the way I wanted it to be.
Not too long since the last one, but here we are again.
A couple of videos I found when we were looking at a new lawnmower at the weekend:
And finally, an interesting one that is well worth a read for the author’s observations, even if you have no interest at all in science fiction or its production.
I might have to try working some of those themes into a story or two…
My reading through of NT Wright’s theology of resurrection has been slowed by life getting in the way. I don’t get nearly as much time to sit and read as I used to, and when I do I tend to fall into easy fiction that doesn’t require too much thought.
As I continue to crawl my way through the second section of the book, the text on a couple of pages jumped out at me.
Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p108:
Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil which is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.
Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p106:
Evil then consists, not in being created, but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God's wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something which will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure. The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls 'spiritual death'. In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile.
Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, pp105-6:
Nor — and this is crucial — does evil consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves in autumn... indeed, it is precisely the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose. Creation was good, but it always had a forward look. Transience acts as a god-given signpost, pointing not from the material world to the non-material world, but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant one day to be...
Prior to this, Wright has explored what he views as the two most common ways Christians tend to view the destination of creation: that it is progressively improving towards perfection, or that it a vile physicality to be endured until we find perfection in some ‘spiritual’ reality. While he doesn’t spend too long presenting evidence for the prevalence of these views, they certainly fit with what I have heard and observed — while not fitting terribly well with my reading of Scripture. The author then goes on to explain what he understands as the Scriptural picture.
I am intrigued by the image of death as exile, never having given it too much thought. I’m looking forward to exploring it further as a way to help understand salvation, redemption and new life.
At this point in my reading I find the passages I’ve quoted above to be full of hope, but I wonder how well they would be received by the very most conservative and traditional, what with the slightly gnostic (gasp!) tendencies that tend to be expressed in those ends of the Church.
20 st 11 lbs.
Ten weeks in, and I suppose time for a little review.
After a couple of blips, I seem to have settled into a very slow but consistent downward trend. It’d be nice to go a little faster, but moving in the right direction is enough to keep me happy. Going slowly increases the chances of it being sustainable.
Also, this week I am half a stone down from my high-tide mark of 21 st 4 lbs, which is a very satisfying milestone indeed.
(Please forgive the poor pun — sometimes I can’t help it.)
It seems like over the last year or two everyone paying attention to the web has been talking about social networking sites. The chat in the press started with the Arctic Monkeys, and then somewhere down the line Microsoft paid a fortune for a tiny bit of Facebook.
There is something inherently social about the internet. It’s a medium all about the transmission of information, and that information has to come from somewhere (and go to somewhere).
All over the world there are people writing, publishing, singing, dancing, talking, and there are plenty of people reading, watching and listening to them. I’ve been writing this blog for a bit over five years now, pretty much just for the hell of it; there are even a surprising number of people who drop by here regularly, don’t ask me why. The power of the internet: although I haven’t seen the complete works of Shakespeare materialize just yet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of all this and I thought it would be interesting, for me at least, to chart my own engagement with the social aspects of internet use.
When I was a teenager my parents stuck a PC in the living room with a 56k modem that introduced me to email. That was pretty much all I used it for. The same people I saw every day, talked to on the phone regularly, we emailed each other too.
Once I moved to Scotland, email became a more important way of keeping in touch with people. I also began to discover how much information there was out there on the web — and its great potential as an aid to procrastination.
Since then, this is the journey I have taken through various online interactions:
- Fora and newsgroups. Discussions, theoretically based around a particular subject area.
- Instant Messengers (MSN et al.). Like a phone call, only slower :-)
- Friends Reunited. Feeds the gossip in us, or it did the last time I went near it.
- Flickr. A mix of photos and fora.
- MySpace. Maybe a year or two ago I followed a bunch of friends to MySpace. You can probably count on two hands the total number of times I've logged into my account there.
- Bebo. I have an account, and I've literally never done anything with it beyond signing up.
- Facebook. More recent, a similar story as MySpace except you can probably do the counting on one hand.
- Twitter. Tough to describe. I was initially very skeptical, but there's something compelling about it.</a>
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Alongside this there are all the blogs out there (like this one). It's not a formal network built around one specific site. Instead readers and authors link to each other, communicate through comments, emails and other posts. Some of those I follow are linked in the sidebar over there; I still haven't got round to making it a more complete list.
After all that, though, I'm left with some questions:
- What's the point of it all?
- What's the use of it all?
- What constitutes quality, genuine interaction and communication?
- Does it matter 'in real life'?
- Where can we take it?
In the car this morning I was listening to an interview with Tony Jones (of Emergent Village) where he said:
I just don't think we can overstate how important the internet is in reshaping the social structure of our society. It's an egalitarian force...
Is this true?
I may have a few thoughts and ideas, but I've formed no conclusions yet. This short series of posts is by way of me thinking out loud, so please do chip in.