For the past 6 months I’ve been using JungleDisk to back up most of my important files on Amazon S3. It has a great auto-backup feature which keeps me from worrying about data loss. Like many people, I never thought about data loss until after I lost an entire drive (which I’m still keeping in case I become rich enough to blow $2k to have it restored).
Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee and no start-up cost.
$0.15 per gigabyte-month of storage used.
$0.10/0.18 per gigabyte of data uploaded/downloaded.
$0.01 per 1,000 upload or 10,000 download requests.
Remember that you only pay for what you use! If you have 1.2 GB of data stored, you only pay 18 cents! If you only have 100MB that’s only 2 cents!
It gives me some strange satisfaction to receive my monthly 10¢ bill from Amazon. :)
The only problem I have with the setup is that Windows Explorer ALWAYS locks up when browsing my JungleDisk drive. I’m assuming it’s not a problem with JungleDisk since it works fine on my Mac.
Anyway, the Amazon S3 & JungleDisk combo is certainly worth checking out. It’s so ridiculously cheap for the amount of pain and trouble it can prevent!
For the past two months I’ve been logging my mileage on MyMileMarker.com and am happy with the results it provides (given the amount of effort on my part). Every time I fill up I just take out my phone (they have a mobile version) and log the current odometer mileage, gallons required to fill up the tank, and price per gallon. I’d always calculated my MPG in my head after filling up but I find it a lot more interesting to have the data recorded and displayed in pretty graphs (see below).
MyMileMarker gives you nice graphs.
Although my car’s mileage still sucks, it was nice to see it go up by about 2mpg after changing my air filter – a $12 part that took me about five minutes to replace.
Of course there’s no way for them to verify that the numbers people enter are accurate, but I’d really like to see how my car performs compared to other Volvo V40s out there. Maybe they’re already working on this, but I haven’t seen them push any updates to the site in quite a while now.
In order to learn a bit more about screen scraping with cURL, I coded up a script to generate an RSS feed of Safeway’s weekly specials. The number of frames and strange redirects on Safeway.com shows that they probably paid some lifeless company a ton of money to develop it for them (Vertis, in this case). I can only imagine the frustration their engineers must have while trying to debug this stuff.
I’ve stopped hosting this service as it was receiving very little use and am shutting down my old web host. Feel free to grab the code and run it yourself if needed, though it seems likely that it’ll stop working soon anyway. It’s surprising that Safeway hasn’t changed their site enough to break the parsing logic yet, which is very brittle.
