Last weekend my family went on a short vacation. We took some fun photos, and when we got home I moved them from my SD card to our external HD. And then I accidentally deleted a few of the photos from the HD. Yikes!

Luckily, there are tools to undelete files from an SD card. Unfortunately, most of them aren’t free or just plain suck.

After much searching and several failed attempts at recovering the images, I finally found TestDisk. It has an old fashioned interface (DOS) and took a few hours to run on my 32GB SD card, but it recovered all my images that I accidentally deleted, and many more that I intentionally deleted over the past year or so.

And best of all, it was free!

As a Zend Certified Engineer, I get a free Zend Server license. This is a $1,695 value, so definitely worth the effort of getting certified.

It has been a few years since I last tried Zend Server, and it didn’t go well. It was buggy, awkward to use, and difficult to install. Since I just ordered a new server, I decided to give it another try. It is awesome.

Installation was incredibly easy. I use CentOS. Zend Server has its own yum repositories so I just had to set them up on my new server and type “yum install zend-server”. Bam. PHP was installed.

Fake Name Generator has lots of special requirements. I normally spend an entire day getting PHP configured and dependencies installed whenever I get a new server. With Zend Server, it took maybe 5 minutes to figure out which pear packages I needed and then I was good to go. Zend Server’s PHP already had almost everything I needed installed.

Updating is also easy. This is normally a frustrating 30-60 minute process that often results in down time when things go wrong. A day after I installed Zend Server a notice was sent out about a critical security update. I ran “yum update” and I was up-to-date in just a few seconds.

Zend Server logs potential issues. I can easily see PHP errors, scripts that are taking too much memory or too long to run, and a pile of other issues.  I can also customize my php.ini from within the web GUI. Not amazing, but a nice little perk.

Finally, Zend Server integrates with Zend Studio (also free for Zend Certified Engineers). When Zend Server logs an issue, I can click a debug button in the web GUI and it sends the issue to my IDE for debugging. It is a bit finicky, but still very awesome. It also lets me easily profile my sites.

So basically Zend Server is pretty awesome. I wish I had started using it earlier. I’m pretty comfortable setting things up on my own, so I don’t think it is worth $1,695 to me, but it is definitely worth using since it is free for me.

Every year or two I like to order a new dedicated server and migrate all my stuff to it. This gets me newer hardware and software, lets me customize the hardware to my current needs, and gives me a chance to fix any mistakes I made with the configuration of the previous server. Plus I often save some money.

I just placed my order with SoftLayer for my latest server and am so super excited to start working on it. I remembered to check for any specials, and was lucky to grab an awesome one that has saved me some cash while letting me get a way beefier server than I had intended.

The configuration I settled on ended up being $550/month cheaper with the promo code and some luck (sometimes you get better than ordered, because they don’t have what you ordered available). That is a savings of $6,600 for the first year! Even better, it ended up being $10/month cheaper than my existing server, so I’m getting a much more powerful machine for $120/year less.

Specs of the new server:

• OS: CentOS 6.0 (64-bit)
• CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon-Westmere 5620-Quadcore [2.4GHz]
• RAM: 12GB DDR3
• Hard drive: 2 x 100GB SSD in RAID 1

I better get configuring. I’m only saving money if I quickly migrate to the new server.

I’m lazy. Really lazy. I’d rather sit at my desk in pajamas and watch Hulu than go for a run. Unfortunately, that isn’t a very healthy lifestyle, and I realize I need to start exercising or I’m going to have to start asking my wife to open jars for me.

My solution to this issue is to tie my exercises to the health of my business. I’m still thinking through all the rules, but I’ve got one figured out already. For every $10 I make, I have to do a push up. So if I earn $100 in a day, I have to do 10 push ups. If I earn $500, I have to do 50 push ups. If I earn $10,000, I have to do 1,000 push ups change the rule.

I’m not always going to be able to do all the pushups in a row (hey, I’m just getting started..), but I’m going to commit to doing as many as I can in a row, and repeating as many times as I need to in order to make my commitment.

I’d like to find something to motivate me to do some other exercises, like crunches and short runs/jogs. Analytics metrics (like unique visitors, pageviews, or time on site) don’t seem like a good idea because they can fluctuate so much based on things outside of my control, like getting Stumbled.

Any suggestions?

My most recent power bill was 30% higher than usual. Yikes! So how to save some money?

If you are using TomatoUSB and have a USB hard drive connected to it, then you can save some money — and extend the life of the drive — by having it spin down when idle. For some crazy reason this doesn’t happen automatically.

Luckily, some kind individual wrote a small program that can easily be run on TomatoUSB. The instructions are pretty easy to follow, but here are the basics:

1. Download sd-idle-2.6.
2. Uncompress the binary and put in a safe place on your USB hard drive.
3. Create a file called mount.autorun so the program will run automatically.

That’s it! You’ll need to either reboot your router, unmount/mount your hard drive, or manually start the program for the first time. By default it will spin your drive down after 15 minutes.

I’ve recently been bombarded by annoying “take our survey” in-page pop-ups on dozens of pages. I hate these things.

If you hate them, too, then you can opt out of many of them by going to these URLs:

• VoiceFive Opt-out
• Safecount Opt-out

Update: Sadly, ForeSee is the leader in this field, and they don’t have an opt-out option that works across all sites. If you have AdBlock Plus, you can add a custom filter for */foresee-trigger.js

Last week I got my very first iPod Touch. I had a surge of traffic to my sites from iOS devices, and wanted to test to make sure my websites worked well on them (i.e., I wanted to make sure there were plenty of ads and that they showed up correctly).

My current phone is an Android. It works okay. Most, if not all, of its problems come from me being cheap and buying the least expensive Android phone I could. I don’t fault Android for this. I got what I paid for. However, I frequently hear that iOS is sooo much better and more intuitive and it just works and things like that, and that iPhone/iPod Touch is sooo much faster, etc. Well now that I have one I can finally compare the two side by side.

Note: For a more coherent review of iOS that states many of the points I list below, try this article. I especially liked this statement: “But I disagree that the Apple App Store is substantially better organized than the Android Market. Both are disasters.”

The first thing I noticed is that the physical buttons suck. The power button is meant to be pushed at an angle, so pushing down from the top or forward from the back doesn’t work well. If you aren’t used to this, it requires sort of an awkward whole-hand-gripping-the-iPod sort of thing. Even worse are the volume up/down buttons. I can’t find any angle of pushing on them that makes them easy to push. Surely I’m not the only one that finds the buttons hard to press.

The syncing process is, for the most part, pretty nice. I wasn’t thrilled about installing iTunes (last time I did, iTunes decided that installing Safari was an “update” that didn’t require my permission), but I really like that it will sync over WiFi without me having to plug in the device. What I don’t like is that if I install an app on my iPod, then delete it from my iPod, it somehow magically gets reinstalled the next time I sync. This is probably some configuration issue, but it is super annoying and doesn’t seem like a good default setting.

My real phone, a Samsung Intercept, has a physical qwerty keyboard. Sometimes I use the on-screen keyboard, and it isn’t too awful. The keyboard on the iPod Touch is pretty much the worst thing I’ve ever had to deal with. Aside from there being apparently 3 or 4 different keyboard layouts depending on what app you are in and what type of field you are typing into, it doesn’t have any modern input options that don’t require you to peck each and every letter. Maybe there are replacements out there that make it better, but my Android just works… I didn’t have to find/install a new keyboard app.

The ability to integrate pretty much any email/calendar service with the iPod is pretty awesome. I got my Gmail and Google Calendar set up in about 2 minutes without any issues.

The App Store, like Google’s Android Market, sucks. It is virtually unusable on the iPod unless you know exactly what you want. For example, lets say you are browsing the top 25 free apps. You get to the end of 25 so you click the “show 25 more” button. You then click one of those to read the description, then click the back “Search” button. Bam. You are back at #1. You have to scroll all the way down, click “show 25 more” again, then find where you were at. But only sometimes. Sometimes it works like I feel it should where it remembers where you are at. I’m pretty sure inconsistent button behavior is against the rules of good UX.

The LDS apps on the iPod Touch are awesome. Overall I like them much better than the Android equivalents. I especially like how the Gospel Library app, like Safari, can have multiple windows open so you can flip back and forth. Very very cool.

However, I often find myself missing the context button that Android has. In most Android apps, you can press the context button to bring up an expanded menu that shows icons with text. Apple, and many app developers, seems to think that everyone can decipher what their little text-free icons mean. For example, the Kindle app has a button that looks like “Refresh” but is actually “Sync”. Never would have known if I didn’t click it. It also means that sometimes you have to do weird round-about things to do simple tasks. For example, to delete bookmarks in Safari you have to either swipe the bookmark then click delete, or you have to click edit then select the items you want to delete. Why can’t I just long-hold on them to get a list of options? Maybe if I started on iOS I’d see the long-hold as being the awkward way of doing it, but I don’t think so.

The iPod Touch is super fast. Except when it isn’t. Like my Android, it is sometimes blazing fast and sometimes molasses slow. I haven’t found any way of closing apps on the iPod Touch, and I’ve already had to do a reboot to fix an issue with a core app (the Music app wouldn’t acknowledge me touching the screen, but every other app would). I’ve also had several brand name apps crash on me already. I can’t remember the last time an app on my cheapo Android crashed. I think app crashes and slow downs are just a fact of life. Apple doesn’t have it any more figured out than any of the other device manufacturers.

The iPod Touch is super skinny. It looks really nice and fits well in my pocket. I’d prefer a plastic back though. The metal looks gross most of the time because of finger prints.

Hey Apple, 2007 is calling, they want their proprietary ports back. Put a micro USB port on this thing!

And oh my gosh, if it makes me type in my password one more time I swear I’m going to shoot somebody. Why in the world should I need to type my password to “buy” a free app? No money is changing hands. I have plenty of storage space. Just install the dang thing and let me use it already. I ended up having to change my password to something shorter and easier just so I could actually use my iPod.

Overall, I’m not super impressed with iOS or the iPod Touch. It has pros and cons just like any other device. Its core apps and OS has bugs and slow downs just like Android (or any other mobile platform). The UI has weird inconsistencies here and there, and generally requires me to click more buttons to get things done. I can’t get rid of or hide core apps that I don’t want. The only thing it really has going for it is that it is pretty and probably works well with its expensive cousins (like the iPad and MacBook).

I probably ought to throw this in the “rant” category, too…

This is my twelfth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. I know what I want to build. I have the plans. I have the shopping list. But, sadly, I didn’t have/take the time to do this.
• Launch twelve new websites. I failed. My December website was bigger than I could finish in a month. Okay that isn’t true, I just got lazy. But I did redesign Corban Works from scratch, so that is practically an entirely new site. And I redesigned the Fake Name Generator mobile site. So I kept busy at least.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Start an email newsletter. Didn’t happen.
• Create a game for mobile phones. Didn’t happen.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October. December earnings were absurdly high. I hit my 2012 goal, but I don’t think it’ll happen again in January.
  
• Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho. I got A’s in both of my classes. Yay!
  
• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  
• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

I’ve been hard at work on a new project, but got temporarily distracted by the horribleness that was the Corban Works website. I’ve had a rough idea of what I wanted to do with it for quite a while, but couldn’t get myself to devote the time to it.

So I finally buckled down and knocked out the new design in a couple days. It is pretty basic, but I like it a lot. The whole point of the Corban Works site is to showcase all my websites, so I switched from a blog format to a gallery format. It makes the page colorful and fun.

I also added some updated/new icons that show up over certain sites. This is all controlled from a single config file that defines all my sites, when they were created, and when they were last updated. This means I only have to update a single spot and the updated/new icons move themselves.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with it.

This is my eleventh monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing. Probably not going to happen.
• Launch twelve new websites. Created a quick and easy text conversion tool called ASCII to Hex. It converts to/from ASCII, binary, hexadecimal, base64, decimal, and rot13. I also put a lot of work into the Fake Mail Generator. I revived this site a few months back and have been trying to modernize it a bit. I’ve added a new logo and added MIME parsing, so it can display HTML emails.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Start an email newsletter. I don’t think this is going to happen.
• Create a game for mobile phones. Probably not going to happen.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October.
  
• Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
  
• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  
• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!