I’ve noted other studies highlighting similar conclusions about the benefits of drinking red wine and black tea if you’re a type 2 diabetic. A recent article over on sciencedaily.com is more evidence that type 2’s should consider adding both tea and red wine to their diet. Check it out, and tip a glass or two back this weekend.

I bought a Thermaltake USB hard drive cartridge system for work last week after almost losing all my data on my laptop. Techreport has a lengthy writeup which I basically agree with, but a bottom line statement would be, for ~$50 this thing is excellent. I got it and a 500GB drive, partitioned half as OSX journaled file system and half as fat32, then backed up my mac and pc at work, using time machine on the mac and Cobian backup on the pc. Cheap, infinitely extensible, and cleverly designed. Well worth a look if you’re in the market for a backup device.

(stupid product name though)

Leopard is the latest version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Last Wednesday I decided to install it. Little did I know what I was in for.

Like most folks, I have limited backups of stuff, and my mac laptop is the home of some pretty critical data – project timelines for my staff, project sheets for each of the major projects we have, a huge knowledge base full of all kinds of info related to my day job, and more. So I go to install the upgrade, choose the ‘archive and install’ option, and let it start. An hour later it pops up a very helpful ‘the upgrade has failed for unknown reasons, press to restart’ message. Aigh! I press to restart and the machine won’t boot from its drive. I boot from the OS dvd and it can’t find its drive. Needless to say I freaked out. Many machinations later and I could get it to recognize that it did, in fact, have an internal drive in the laptop, but the volume was hosed and it wanted to reformat. I couldn’t let that happen. With some trepidation I handed it over the our support folks for a look see, more because I lacked the time to continue looking into it than because I had exhausted all my options.

To their credit they did manage to restore my drive. Interestingly, they could never get Leopard to even recognize its existence, but they tried booting from a Tiger OS dvd and it recognized the drive straight away. They didn’t even have to run disk tools – once Tiger had ‘touched’ the drive, it was back to its normal state, and the machine was working fine again.

I have no explanation for how the above happened. I do now have a laptop running Leopard, and I now have several backups of it since the whole experience put the fear of ‘OMFG I lost all my stuff!!!’ into me. Leopard is pretty great once it’s running, but of all the OS X releases this one was by far the worst in terms of the upgrade process. Back everything up is my advice to anyone thinking of upgrading. It came out during this process that I was the 8th machine that was being upgraded to Leopard on our campus, and it was the second one to have a serious issue. The other one actually had data loss too.

(that would be cathode ray tube based television sets for the technotards out there)

Ok, so maybe they’re not completely dead yet, but as a symbol of their demise you can’t do much better than Sony stopping the manufacture of Trinitron sets. Trinitrons were for most of their existence the finest tube tvs you could buy, and I still own one today, the last of the great tube televisions in fact (an XBR960N for those keeping score). The irony from my perspective is that you still can’t buy a better tv than the one I own, if image quality and flexibility are your primary criteria. Anyway, a tip of the cap to the old crt as it fades into the sunset.

This one’s for Andrew, who asked me to post a photo of the back of my new receiver. I bought a new mid tier Yamaha RX-V3800 receiver for myself for my recent birthday. I scored it at a great price – they list for $1699 and I got it for $1099. I think Andrew’s mostly interested in the complexity of the back panel compared to older generations of hardware, but the irony is I’m actually using much less cabling with the new one because the HDMI ports on the far left each replace 6 cables for AV devices and 2 cables for audio-only devices. You should have seen the mound of cables I was able to pull out of my AV stack once I had this all connected. Anyway, the photo:

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Got a webcam on your laptop or attached to your PC? Check out the asciicam, a cool little flash webapp which lets you grab images from a webcam and turn them into ascii art. A sample:

Bonus points for whoever can tell what that is. Anyway, a fun little diversion, which you can check out over here.

News of this is all over the web, but as a PA for my friends since I’ve actually had two IM conversations about this in the past week:

Skitch is this great screengrab/editing tool with great integration with existing services. It makes it really easy to take a screenshot of something, edit it, and get it posted online to your blog, flickr, wordpress.com, whatever. It’s been in private beta for quite a while, and I use it pretty frequently. At this week’s Macworld Expo they made the beta public. If you don’t already have a copy, give it a try, it’s a great little tool. This is a commercial product but they’re not yet charging. Right now only the Mac version is available, though a Windows version is coming as well.

[via]

I haven’t been banging the RSS drum much lately. For a while I was regularly promoting it on this site. I guess at this point I figure either you’ve gotten the message, or you’re beyond hope. Still, I can’t help mentioning that two of my favorite RSS products, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, are now free. I used each for extended periods over the years, and paid for licenses to both of them, but stopped using them when they were acquired by Newsgator several years ago in a pique, angry because instead of solving the synchronization issue in an open manner, they tied the products to one commercial provider.

Synchronization isn’t likely to be an issue for most users, and they’re fantastic products. If you need an RSS reader they’re definitely worth checking out. NetNewsWire is for OSX, and FeedDemon is for Win32. If you don’t think you need an RSS reader… you’re not keeping up with the times, and you’re wasting your own time. Read up on it, then go grab one of the above and get busy!