My birthday

Today is my birthday. I'm 38 (alive and kickin'). But the main celebration of the day is my brother's wedding!!! Besides, it's my sister in-law's birthday too!!!

I have the feeling it's going to be a great day.

Easter Monday

It's Easter Monday today. We have had a nice day out in the countryside all the family together. It's a traditional thing to do in my region to go on a picnic with  family and/or friends. We eat a special cake that is called "Mona". The name has an arabic origin and it means "present cake" or something like that.
I have woken up at 6:30 in the morning and I have rushed to my cottage to light up the fireplace. I knew I didn't have to hurry because I had plenty of time but I wanted to have everything clean and ready before lunchtime.

In the afternoon we have taken a walk. And right now I'm sending the pictures of the day to my brother and sister.

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Backup schedule

I always backup important data. I might even say that I'm a bit obsessed with backups, especially when it is about irrecoverable things such as photographs.

In the past I used to make security copies from time to time (Quite randomly) but after my hard disk crash I decided to schedule a series of backups just in case. From now on I am going to:

EVERY MONTH: Backup important data once a month. I'll make two copies one on cd/pendrive and one sent to a security server.
EVERY TRIMESTER: Backup the entire home directory to dvd.
EVERY YEAR: (As usual) Everything that's valuable on my network. Documents, pictures, other files, scripts, configurations, programs ...

The great thing about backups is that GNU/Linux offers several excellent tools (Graphical and command line) to regularly carry out your security copies. Once you get the perfect setup you can do all these routine operations unattended because there is GNU/Linux backing you up.You get the pun here?

Using a proxy

I was familiar with the concept of proxy servers. I knew what they were and I had a slight idea of what they were used for. But I had never connected to any. I had tried once but to no avail. You only need to look for their addresses and configure your web browser to use them. Be warned that proxies provide many advantages but they also have some disadvantages. On the positive side, they are anonymous but on the negative side they are less secure.

This same week I have learnt an amazing internet trick. There are some free online services which operate in certain countries but which are not allowed or restricted in some other countries due to legal reasons or special conditions or whatsoever...But you still can access those services connecting to a proxy operating it the countries where the services are available. As simple as that.

I did the trick with a famous steaming radio station which used to be for free until recently (And still is in some parts of the world). In my country they require you to subscribe and pay a small quantity for the service. I connected to a public proxy and now I can listen to the radio as if I was living in that country. Fantastic isn't it?