Do you want to use your Google homepage as a feed reader? It’s easy to set up, customizable, and more visually appealing than boring RSS columns.

To create your Google homepage, log into Gmail and click the “Web” link in the upper left. Once on the official Google homepage, click the link in the upper right to “iGoogle.” You will then be prompted to select your theme.

Google will provide for you a default homepage. It includes gadgets for things like the news, the weather, and your recent Gmail.

To set up the homepage as a feed reader, start by deleting each of the default gadgets by clicking on the upside-down triangle in the upper right of each gadget, and selecting “Delete this gadget.”

After deleting all the default gadgets, you will have a blank Google homepage:

Now you can start populating your homepage with feeds. There are two ways to add a feed.

The first is by clicking on the “Add stuff >>” link in the upper right corner of the homepage itself. You simply search for the name of the website you want to subscribe to, and click on “Add it now.”

When you refresh your homepage the gadget will display. In this case, the gadget is a small feed box for your chosen website.

The second method for adding a feed is through the site itself. Visit the homepage for the site you want to subscribe to and click on the RSS icon. Select the Google subscription method and click on “Subscribe Now.”

When you refresh your homepage the gadget will display.

You can also add Twitter feed gadgets. Again, visit the homepage of your desired site and click on the Twitter icon. This will take you to the site’s Twitter page, where you then click on the RSS button in the right column and select the Google subscription method. After you refresh your homepage, the Twitter feed will display.

Once you have your desired feed gadgets in place, it’s easy to move them around. Click on the Move icon and drag and drop.

You can also modify how many headlines display. Click the Edit icon in the gadget and select “Edit settings.”

Select the number stories you want to display. You can display up to nine stories within a gadget.

You can also choose to display simply the story headline, the headline along with the lead, or a slideshow of the stories.

And if you want to make your new Google-homepage-feed-reader visually appealing, break up the text columns with some gadgets that feature images.

If you are satisfied with your homepage but want to add more feeds, it makes sense to keep the most important feeds above the fold. If you find yourself scrolling down to read headlines that you’d rather have more accessible, create a new tab.

This pulls up a fresh new page that you can set up just as you did with the original Google homepage.

Create your tabs to organize your feeds by subject.

Take advantage of the visual and functional flexibility of your new Google-homepage-feed-reader and enjoy!

Photo by lululemon athletica.

Unless you work on an assembly line, your job responsibilities and tasks will change, and for some people changes occur from minute to minute. Even if there is very little change in what your job entails, meetings, brainstorming sessions, and time crunches change the face of your day. The first rule of time management is to try to schedule your day, so that you can keep your work on track even in a rapidly changing environment. If you schedule the parts of the day you can control, you will know what to expect and can plan for it. If you schedule your day too rigidly, you can reduce your productivity and increase your stress.

Hinders Flexibility and Agility

If you work in a fast-paced environment, like a high-volume help desk, your directives may change several times a day. Scheduling your day based on the assumption that there will be no major operational changes or emergencies, hinders your flexibility. Success in a fast-paced environment is based on your ability to keep up and perform your duties under stress. If your schedule inhibits your ability to be agile in the workplace, it will affect your personal performance, and it may affect your coworkers as well.

Limiting Your Creativity

Creativity can strike at any moment. You may be on the way back to your office after a meeting and think of a brilliant idea or solution. Putting that idea on the backburner because you have a block of time scheduled to do something else may mean forgetting it completely. Even if you take a moment to write down your idea, it does not mean that you will be able to recall everything about it when you return to it later. Deviating from your schedule for a short time to document your solution or flesh out your idea can result in a major career breakthrough, but you will never know if you neglect to take the time.

Photo by qisur.

A well-structured schedule that allows you to roll with changes at the office may be difficult to create. If your schedule is too rigid, you may soon find yourself out-of-touch with your manager and coworkers, which may cause other employees to think you are aloof or uncooperative. If you fail to schedule at least some of your day, it will be impossible to meet deadlines. Taking the time over a couple of weeks to tweak your schedule until it is comfortable is time well invested if you can find balance between structure and flexibility at work.

Ever thought about turning your Linux Box into your own personal karaoke machine ? Well OSD Lyrics has just made it possible for us Linux users to turn our Linux into a karaoke machine.

OSD Lyrics displays your music lyrics onto your screen when you play music. At the time of writing this article OSD lyrics is supported  by Amarok 2.0 and 1.4, Audacious, Banshee, Exaile (Both 0.2 and 0.3), JuK new!^, MOC 2.5, Qmmp, Quod Libet, MPD, Rhythmbox, Songbird, and XMMS2.

Photo from Flickr

Installing OSD Lyrics

Open your terminal and type in the following command. Remember to hit ‘enter’ for each command to execute them.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osd-lyrics/ppa

followed by..

sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install osdlyrics

OSD Lyrics will be installed under ‘Applications’ > ‘Sound and Video’ > ‘OSD Lyrics’.

Showing Lyrics

OSD Lyrics displays lyrics on your desktop. OSD Lyrics will be minimized in your task bar after you open it. We can access OSD menu by left clicking the OSD icon in our task bar. An interesting observation that I notice in Ubuntu 10.04 is that we can’t start OSD lyrics before starting our music player.

We need to download the lyrics for the songs we play. Open the ‘Search Lyrics’ screen by selecting the ‘Search Lyrics’ option from the menu. Select different lyrics provider from the   drop down list if you cant find the lyric that you are looking for.

Click the download button to store the lyrics file into your local drive.

OSD Lyrics will automatically assign the lyric and the song we are playing in our music player. OSD Lyrics will immediately display the lyrics on the bottom screen after we download the lyrics.

Configuring OSD Lyrics

We can adjust OSD Lyrics display on our desktop. Just click ‘Preferences’ on OSD Lyrics menu. In this screen we can adjust the lyric’s font type, size, and color.

Conclusion

OSD Lyrics is a good Ubuntu software that we can use to transform our Linux box into a karaoke machine. The last thing we need is to get a microphone and connect your Linux box to some decent speaker, and now you’re ready to use your Linux box as a karaoke machine.

Photo by jakeliefer.

Maximize the Time You Have

When you have a lot to do, but have a limited amount of time to work with, it is easy to waste the time you do have. When you worry about deadlines and time crunches, it can get in the way of concentrating on the actual work. You may end up spending too much time on a simple task, or too little time on a complex task, but either way it amounts to using your time inefficiently.

An easy way to keep yourself on track is to use a timer. You can get a small portable timer or find an online stopwatch, and use it to break your work up into blocks. If you only have 45 minutes to work on a task, set the timer to count down from 45 minutes. If you need a warning a few minutes before, set the alarm for less than 45 minutes, so when it goes off you know you only have a few minutes to wrap things up. This technique will keep you on track by limiting your time for each task, and keep you from focusing too much of your time on any one thing.

Break Up the Monotony and Motivate Yourself

Everyone has chores that they dislike, and repetitive tasks that they need to complete. Folding clean laundry, packing, and cleaning are all repetitious tasks that can consume a lot of time and energy. By using a timer to constrict a boring, monotonous chore to a specific amount of time, you can accomplish more in less time. Not only will a time constraint force you to concentrate on a specific task so you can complete it, but you can also challenge yourself to get it done in less time than it would normally take. You can also break up large tasks into small chunks, so that you can take breaks in between to rest and recharge, or reward yourself for getting more done in less time. A small reward for meeting your goal, like an extra 30 minutes of TV, can be more than enough motivation to complete your task in the time allotted.

Keep Projects On Schedule

If you are a project manager or you work on projects (by yourself or on a team), you understand how hard it is to estimate how long it will take to complete a task. Even the most experienced professionals will tell you that time estimation is at most an educated guess, especially at the beginning of a project. If you want to capture how long it takes to complete a task, you can use your timer as a stopwatch. Start it when you begin your task, and stop it when you have completed it. If it is a complex task with several steps, you can calculate how much time it takes to complete each step, and then calculate the total time at the end. This will give you an idea of how long it actually takes. You can use that as a basis for time estimates, and adjust it based on the experience level and work load of the assignee.

Photo by wwarby.

If you know that you only have a specific amount of time to complete a task (or number of tasks), you can also set the timer according to how long it should take you to complete the task. Let’s say you need to write four 500 word articles a day, and it takes at least two hours to write and research each article. If you set the timer to go off in two-hour intervals, you will be able to gauge if you are on or behind schedule throughout the day.

These simple techniques help you work more efficiently, pace yourself, and ensure that your work gets done in the time allotted. When you are confident that you are managing your time effectively, you can spend more time actually working and less time worrying.

Monitoring News

Regator monitors news based on certain ‘Keywords’.  We can ask Regator to monitor as many keywords as possible.

We can filter news in Regator based on content type, date, topic, and new source. This feature is very helpful when we want to view only the latest update for certain news, or filtering the news type based on in its topic or content type.

Collecting News

Regator lets you save news for you to read later under a its ‘Favorite Posts’ tab.

We can organize our ‘Favorite Posts’ into folders to make it easier to browse them.

Latest Trends

Regator also make it easy for us to keep up with the latest trend. Regator monitor the latest trends from different blogs  and display them under their ‘Trends’ section.

Regator surfaces worldwide trending topic such as the Gulf of Mexico,  influential people such as celebrities, and other topics such as national security topics or one laptop per child. Regator compiles trending list in a manner that Technocrati never get it quite right and more interesting compare to Google News.

Comparing News Trend

Regator  lets you compare up to three topics and compare their popularity over 30 days or 12 months. Apple seems to be more popular than Microsoft. This is not a surprise, Apple has been coming up with interesting products such as iPad and iPhone. Apple definitely has more interesting products compare to Microsoft. Apple recently passed Microsoft as a leading tech company in term of market value.

Regator is your companion in exploring news on the web. It is one of the best tools available for us to subscribe to our favorite news and helps us save our time to triangulate important information from the best Blogs content on the web.

Regator

Ranting doesn’t have to be a waste of breathe and time. You can turn a rant into a powerful tool for productivity. Learn how to transform your sense of victim hood and irritability to self-empowerment and mental clarity.

By decoding the emotional mess behind a rant, you can find out what changes need to be made in your life to save yourself heartache and time. But you have to brew in the icky feelings first before you can understand what caused them — and then do something productive about it.

The rewards of a heartfelt rant don’t come easy. You have to put in the work, sweat, and maybe tears and refine your art of rant. You have to be willing to lose control before you can create order from emotional chaos.

Here are seven crucial steps for turning a rant into a productivity power tool:

1. Give Yourself Permission to Rant

Society has a hard time stomaching anger. The slightest drop in the bloodstream is sign that you’re savage. But anger is merely a signal that was biologically hardwired over centuries of evolution. It’s there to alert you of danger — things in your environment (or even from yourself) that prevent you from successfully attaining your goals in life. Now that threat may be real or perceived, but that’s beside the point. When your body goes into alert mode — it’s your job to pay attention and do something about it.

To give yourself permission to rant, you have to see anger for what it really is: a signal of threat. Once you realize that anger is just a signal you need to pay attention to, you don’t have to feel guilty, dangerous, or immature for getting the urge to rant.

Ranting gives a voice to upset, irritation, frustration, and anger. Ranting helps you connect with that signal of threat. Give yourself permission to rant all out, until you know what that signal is.

You can say to yourself, “Man, I’m really fired up right now. I’m going to take this time to get this rant out of my system. Because it’s important that I pay attention to what’s going on, so I can make sure I’m not ignoring something dangerous to my health, productivity, or success.”

2. Pick a Time and Place

Once you give yourself permission to rant, you need to figure out when, where, and how you’re going to do it.

When: The best time to rant is as soon as you start to feel upset about the trigger. When circumstances don’t allow, you can reschedule to later. Later is fine, but too late can give you time to cool off and think about things from different perspective. Which makes it harder to get in touch with your original feelings.

It’s not a good idea to go to sleep before a rant, because that will calm your nervous system and make everything appear to be okay for a while. Appearances deceive; if everything was A-OKAY then you wouldn’t have had the urge to rant in the first place.

It’s also not a good idea to eat a big meal before a rant, because digestion zaps your energy and ability to get all riled up. Avoid mood-altering substances period, as they’re neither helpful nor healthy.

Where: Ranting needs to be done in a place where you feel comfortable enough to be completely honest about how irked you feel. Your rant needs to be in raw form for you to shape anything meaningful from it. If it’s fake, it’s just a waste of time. If it’s forced, it’s not useful. If you’re trying to be logical, coherent, presentable, or politically correct — you’ll cut your rant short with sugar-coating and unnecessary defensiveness.

Ranting is all about you and your completely biased viewpoint — so only rant in a space where it can be all about you. That usually means in private.

In Good Company or in Private? It’s okay to rant in the presence of a good friend or someone else you trust — but only if they can respect your rant and not to interrupt or influence what you really have to say.

It’s also okay to rant in a public space as long as no one is harmed in the process, like on your personal blog. Keep in mind, online anonymity has its merits — for things like job security, maintaining friendships, or building your personal brand. Also keep in mind that people who rant in public usually try to please an audience or entertain instead of really get to the core of their feelings. That’s not ranting in raw form, but domesticated rant. And it falls short because it’s diluted.

3. Set Some Ground Rules

After you’ve figured out when, where, and within whose company you’re going to rant, you need to stick to the plan. It’s important that you are the one steering the rant, and it’s not driving you by the horns. In order to turn a rant into a productivity power tool — you need to use the rant as a springboard to finding constructive responses to clear problems in your life.

To accomplish this, you have to rant on your terms, and not just spew for the sake of it. Your aim is controlled recklessness, not just recklessness. That requires ground rules.

The first ground rule that you should have for any rant is:

“I agree not to harm anyone (including me) physically, emotionally, or psychologically, in the process of my personal rant.”

This is where having an audience can get tricky, and drawing the lines gets tough. Again, it’s safest to rant in private.

A second important ground rule you need to have is:

“The purpose of my rant is to be brutally honest about how I feel in regards to Billy/the weather/Aunt Jane/my car. In order to get clear on how to ultimately improve my relationship with Billy/the weather/Aunt Jane/my car. Or to walk away from the unhealthy relationship.”

Your short term goal is to rant about Billy/the weather/Aunt Jane/your car. But your long term goal is to figure out how to go about your business with them in the most productive way. When you set this ground rule going into the rant, you have more room to really let loose in the short-term to be as productive as you can in the long-term. The short-term is all about identifying problems. The long-term is all about finding solutions.

A third ground rule you need to have is:

“I won’t act on any rash decisions. Instead, I’ll wait until I’m completely done ranting, have transitioned back to normal-mode, and have ideally waited for at least 24 hours before taking any action.”

This also gives you freedom say things that you won’t really act on or plan things that you won’t really do. The point is that if you feel like acting on certain things or doing certain things — you need to acknowledge that. Which is a separate issue entirely from actually following through. And this ties into Step 7.

Are there any other helpful ground rules you can think of?

4. Rant Your Heart Out

Even if you give yourself permission to rant, pick a time and place, and show up — ranting can still be a challenge. First of all, it’s not comfortable losing control or feeling helpless. It’s no fun to admit that you’re upset in the first place. And it’s certainly no party acknowledging how rude your coworker was to you yesterday or how inconsiderate your next door neighbor is of your cat.

Here are some tips for ranting your heart out:

Cut to the chase: Don’t worry about explaining yourself, or building up to what you really want to say with a story first. Just say it. Say it loud. Say it clear. Exactly how you want to say it. Is your best friend a big meanie because he ditched you for a girl? Then start there with “Bigger-Than-Big Meanie.”

Don’t make excuses: So your pal fell head over heels for this girl? And it still hurts? Stay with the hurt, don’t make excuses. Glossing over his actions and looking for excuses won’t do you any good. It will distract you from getting in touch with the problem — that your best friend is not spending time with you anymore. And if you’re distracted from the problem, productivity goes out the window. Because you’ll either hold a grudge and grow resentful over time, resort to passive aggressiveness, overtly seek revenge, have trouble focusing on your work, end the relationship in an abrupt, unfair, and painful way, or slowly let it eat away at your self-confidence.

Suspend reason: Reason has no place in a rant. Period. Reason is for speaking calmly over a business meeting, or drafting up a contract with your landlord. Ranting is for getting in touch with how you really feel about something that’s rubbing you the wrong way. Ranting is for focusing entirely on you — so you can get clear on what needs to be done to better focus on your health, productivity and success.

Jump the gun: Does it feel like your best friend is going to come around anytime soon? Or does it feel like the more he courts his new lady friend, the more he’ll ignore you? Until you’re just a speck of dust on his radar? Well, if it feels that way, voice it. Get it all out of your system. Project the worst possible scenario. It could very well happen. It’s important for you to look at. Because that’s just evolution working for you. Anger was designed to alert you of danger, both present and future. It’s dangerous to your psychological health to associate with a best friend who treats you like a speck of dust. So jump the gun, and listen.

Forget your manners: Okay, “Biggest-of-Big Meanies” is a little weak. If it’s too weak for your rant, replace it with a stronger descriptor. That may mean saying goodbye to political correctness or respect or understanding — or whatever else comes with being a best friend. Ranting is not about political correctness or respect or understanding. It’s about zoning into to what’s absolutely bothering you and fleshing that out through the words that voice the raw feelings. That may mean recruiting a whole list of not-nice words.

Be uncensored: The best way to kill a rant is to censor it. And then you’re left with unexpressed feelings and a problem that goes unaddressed. So keep it uncensored. And that means saying naughty words if it feels natural. Did you know that swearing can actually be useful to your mental and physical health? A 2009 study showed that people who said their swear word of choice were better able to tolerate pain in a controlled experimental set-up than those who didn’t. Swearing helps you cope with pain (which anger also signals to) because it gives it a voice.

Center on yourself: Ranting is all about you. How you were wronged. How you’ve been slighted. The respect you deserve. Your efforts that go unacknowledged. Keep the rant all about you — you’re the center of attention. Don’t try to psychoanalyze why Billy hates your cat — just stick with how it makes you feel. Or, if psychoanalyzing why Billy hates your cat makes you feel better, go ahead. The point is to only rant about what ultimately makes you feel heard. Even if you’re ranting alone in your room, you’re still being heard. You’re bringing a problem to your conscious awareness so you can then deal with it productively.

6. Decode Your Rant

After you’ve finished ranting, take as much time as you need to transition back to normal life. Get a drink of water. Take a cold shower. Go for a walk. Fix some dinner for you and your cat.

But after you’ve had a nice break, you need to recall that second ground rule:

“The purpose of my rant is to be brutally honest about how I feel in regards to Billy/the weather/Aunt Jane/my car. In order to get clear on how to ultimately improve my relationship with Billy/the weather/Aunt Jane/my car. Or to walk away from the unhealthy relationship.”

That ground rule keeps you accountable — responsible — for turning your rant into something productive.

In order to make your rant useful, you need to decode it. Figure out how you can translate raw feelings into actionable steps — that save you heartache and time, as well as other personal resources.

Here are some suggestions for decoding your rant:

Look for the boundary violation:

Things don’t tick you off for no reason. You usually get ticked off when someone or something violated your personal boundaries. Personal boundaries are imaginary limits that you make up in order to protect your health and sanity. These limits prevent you from expending your time or other personal resources beyond the critical point. Because when you do expend your time or other resources beyond the critical point — you end up being stressed out, unproductive, and eventually in poor health.

You might have a boundary for the latest time during the day that you’ll answer a text. Let’s say you go to bed at 10pm each night, and need at least one hour to unwind before bed. On a normal night, you stop all email, chatting, and texting at 9pm. You go to bed an hour later and wake up the next morning feeling recharged and refreshed.

Now let’s say that one night you forget to turn off your iPhone. You get a text from your friend at 9:15pm. You go ahead and text back, thinking it will be quick. But he texts you again and twenty messages later, you see that instead of asking you a harmless question (which he did with that first innocent text), your friend really wanted to talk about his messy breakup with the once girl of his dreams.

At this point, it’s 9:45, and you’re getting really antsy. Instead of being all ready for bed, you’re remembering that your friend did, after all, dump you for this girl. And now that she’s gone, he’s crawling back to you?

The point is, you’re likely upset for a lot of different reasons. One of them being that you’re not going to get to bed at your usual time. And you’re not going to wake up in the morning feeling recharged and refreshed. Because ultimately, you violated your own boundary (of not texting after 9m).

Be honest about whether you allowed that violation:

In the example above, you’re the one responsible for the boundary violation. Much of the time, boundary violations do involve your action, or at least your consent. So it’s good practice to note whether you have a role in the ordeal.

Locate the personal resource that you need to protect:

Boundaries are put in place to ultimately guard your personal resources. When you effectively manage your personal resources, productivity is the natural by-product.

The three most popular topics to rant about are lost money, wasted time, and wrecked relationships. Each of these is a vital personal resource in your life. Money and time are important for obvious reasons having to do with your survival and mental health. Relationships are important because it’s through them that you get many of your needs met, such as moral support, good company, affection, and having someone to turn to when things get rough. Other resources include energy, attention, empathy, and creativity.

Any time you rant, it’s about some personal resource that you’ve lost or are in danger of losing — or some personal resource that you’re in danger of losing. And if it’s not directly a personal resource, it can be viewed as one or it gives you access to another personal resource. Figure out what that resource is, and then follow the next suggestion.

Recover and/or protect your personal resources when possible:

After you know what resources are in jeopardy, it’s time to take action. Confront the sleazy online business to get your guaranteed refund. Carve out some vacation time to make up for all the overtime. Call up your friend since second grade, and see if you can work things out.

Doing so means managing your resources more effectively. This is the core of productivity.

Clue in on shady characters:

And then there are times when you can’t recover lost or damaged resources. And you have to cut your losses and move one. While you do, make sure to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Avoid shady characters, or shady situations, that will likely only drain more of your valuable resources. Whoever you cussed out in your rant is a good candidate for a shady character. Again, your rant will give you clues about who to look out for, and who you can’t trust.

Set a contingency plan that protects your boundaries and your personal resources:

This is where everything comes together. Get it down on paper what you’ve learned from your rant.

Write down how you’ll modify your behavior — in order to cut your losses and minimize more losses in the future. Doing so not only saves you time and other valuable personal resources. It also saves you heartbreak because you’re no longer the victim. Instead, you’re taking control of your life and you’re much more aware of what’s going on.

7. Plan a Productive Course of Action

Photo by Jon Whiles

The whole point of ranting your heart out is to help you move forward. And help you figure out what you can afford to leave behind.

You can turn a rant into a productivity power tool when you pay attention to your personal boundaries that are put in place to protect your personal resources. Such as time, money, energy, and attention.

Ranting is just anger bubbling to the surface. Anger is just a signal of some past violation or future threat (real or perceived) to your personal resources. When you rant full force and listen to the signals, you keep your personal resources well-guarded, save yourself a lot of trouble, and can figure out the best way to move forward as productively as you can.

This program was designed to stop you from accidentally hitting your laptop/netbook’s trackpad with your thumbs while you are typing. However, this program didn’t really work for me – I still accidentally jumped the cursor from time-to-time.

So here’s my Autohotkey version, which has been working very well for me for the last couple of weeks since I created it. (Note that you can tweak the timer line if the 500ms default still isn’t quite long enough for you.) I’ve noticed no performance lag at all with method, since it’s a keyboard hook.

I think it’s always better to add little functions like these to my AHK master script, rather than installing YAU (yet another utility) for these small tweaks.


; Script Function:
; Disables trackpad for 500ms any time a key is pressed (prevents accidental mouse clicks)
;

CallNextHookEx(nCode, wParam, lParam, hHook = 0)
{
Return DllCall("CallNextHookEx", "Uint", hHook, "int", nCode, "Uint", wParam, "Uint", lParam)
}


This is what my first experiences with Rainmeter have lead me to so far. It’s a work in progress, but most things I do usually are. Most of the skins are based around the GeoSans 2.0 Skin by gberger. I’m using his skins for the drive icons, and have modified a few others to use the GeoSans font, which I’ve come to love. Other skins used include:

– SimpleMeter V1.02 by Chewtoy. I modified his clock setup pretty heavily to fit my needs.

– Yboris’ ToDo List Skin from yboris. Again, modified heavily to fit the theme. The font used here is Eight One by =glue, another nice font.

– The default Enigma RSS Reader skins. There are four of them used total – one for HowToGeek, one for ProductiveGeek, one for Lifehacker, and one for a basketball blog. They’re all customized to use the Eight One font and are set to a high transparency, fading in when I mouse over them.

– A custom built date skin, again using the GeoSans font set.

I also modified the icons of my pinned Taskbar programs to a set called Token by brsev in order to stick with the subdued color theme. The wallpaper used is Icy Undertow from TheReal7.

I’m pretty happy with it so far. It’s more minimal than I’m used to, which is nice. I use a fair amount of Autohotkey scripting to allow me to use the keyboard for mostly everything. I built a quick script to let me easily add a task to the ToDo list using an Input Box and the FileAppend command, making adding a task very quick. The next thing I want to do is change the start button to a darker one, as I feel it kind of stands out right now.

I’d love to hear your opinions and suggestions, though. What do you think?

~ Optimus

I recently went through the process of setting up backup of a WHS to a NAS device, and after a lot of trial and error with different programs and configurations, settled on robocopy. Here’s what I did:

1. Selected a NAS whose file system supports large file sizes (important for video backup – don’t get a cheap NAS with FAT32! I chose a Buffalo LinkStation Live.)
2. Created a new WHS user named ‘backup’ with full permissions to every share on the WHS.
3. Created a new NAS user with the same name/password as the WHS backup user
4. Created new share(s) on the NAS and gave only the backup user access (important, since the data on the NAS won’t inherit the security permissions from the WHS – don’t want everybody on your network to see the backup data)
5. Install robocopy on WHS (simply copy robocopy.exe to C:\Windows\system32 or similar)
6. On WHS, create scheduled task for each share to be backed up:

robocopy \\whs\share \\whs_backup\share /COPY:DAT /E /FFT /DCOPY:T /R:0 /W:0 /TS /FP /NP
/LOG:\\whs_backup\share\backup.log

Command line explanation:

/COPY:DAT – since your NAS doesn’t have NTFS, the only thing you can reliably copy is the data
/E – subdirectories included
/FFT – since we only want to copy files that have changed since the last backup, and since NAS doesn’t have NTFS, have to use this option to ensure the timestamps are selected correctly (this was the hardest thing to figure out!)
/DCOPY:T – copies timestamps on folders too
/R:0 – don’t retry locked files (don’t want the automated backup to hang)
/W:0 – don’t wait between retries
/TS /FP /NP /LOG – log file settings (really useful to figure things out when it’s not working!)
(Note that I didn’t use the /PURGE option; I want to keep files that might have been accidentally deleted in the source. Might be a good idea to run a purge job occasionally, though, especially if the NAS starts to fill up.)

7. Made sure the scheduled task was set to run as the backup user – required for read/write permissions to the NAS folders
8. (Not sure if this is necessary) Went into the WHS control panel users panel and made the backup user a member of the backup operator group
9. (Optional) Installed the WHS Advanced Admin Console add-in so I could remotely check/modify scheduled tasks, and can browse to NAS shares via ‘My Network Places’

That’s it – it’s been running like clockwork for two months now, backing up several hundred gigs of data and several thousand files in a 6-client small business network. The NAS is physically located in an adjacent building (wireless bridge connects the two), so should be protected even if one of the buildings gets hit by lightning.

Restore process (which I haven’t had to use yet) is simply connecting to the NAS as the backup user (password required!) and browsing for the desired files.