alex.mullr.net/blog

Consider this a PSA.

If you’re not backing up your computer, for the love of *insert preferred religious figure* do it now. Seriously, bookmark this or something, go do it, and come on back. The Internet will still be exactly where you left it.

Jeez, c’mon – rumour (read: twitter) has it that adam2z, a creative guy, isn’t backing up his stuff. What the hell is this? It makes me cringe knowing that a simple hard drive failure would screw over so many hours of work. Buy an external hard drive, plug it in, and at the very least, drag your stuff over to it. Move on to more complicated solutions like offsite or bootable if you can be bothered, but do something. Cost can’t be blamed anymore – if you can afford a computer (the absolute cheapest of which is £300), you can afford a £60 external hard drive.

What makes me really nervous is that there are seriously simple "consumer" solutions like Apple’s Time Machine, but even the computer-savvy people I know aren’t doing anything. How does the rest of the world stand a chance?

I watched a 20 minute documentary this afternoon on BBC News 24 about the One Laptop per Child program in Africa.

Really interesting seeing the parents saying just how pleased they were that their children didn’t go out to play nearly as much as they did before the arrival of the laptops, and were busy working. In developed countries, I’d say the opinion’s pretty different.

Something that really hit me from the program is that teachers in Nigeria seem to be more willing, accepting of and excited about technology in the classroom than anywhere I’ve seen in the UK. Whether that’s down to the way the BBC edited the show is up for discussion, but I still noticed it. In any case, it made me feel bad seeing how animated the teaching staff were when using the new laptops in a lesson, and no doubt there are teachers here who could do with watching that segment.

It also highlighted the CMPC, a rival project "powered by Intel", which I’d never heard of before.

Quote to sum it up from reporter Rory Cellan Jones:

If I came in tomorrow and said we’re going to take your laptops away and you’ll never be able to use them again, what would you be, happy or sad?
Every kid in the (crowded) room yells "sad!"

You can watch it on the BBC’s iPlayer for the next 5 days (until about the 17th Jan) here.