internet connection – Almost Geek

At the prodding of a buddy of mine over the winter I signed up for an online backup service called Zip Cloud. It’s an online backup service which basically takes a copy of all your files and places them online. If your computer ever crashes you simply download all your files onto a new computer. Pretty novel concept, eh? I’ve been using online backup with Dropbox for quite a few years now.

There are lots of services out there that specialize in online backup. I personally use Dropbox, which isn’t truly an online backup service in the traditional sense but serves my purposes well. I pay $10/mo for 50GB of space and unlimited computers.

Zip Cloud offers “unlimited backup” space for $4.95/mo which sounds great until you actually sign up. The red flag was they tried to squeeze you into yearly billing. So $4.95/mo becomes $60 if you’re not careful, more on this later.

First off, you can pay quite a bit extra per month for “unlimited upload speed”. This is probably the most scammy upsell. The speed of your backup is determined by the the upload speed of your internet connection. For the most part, upload speed is abysmal in the US. You would essentially be paying extra to remove an artificial limit placed on your account by Zip Cloud and still be waiting days for your backup to complete. My guess is support would blame your internet connection after taking the extra money.

Instantaneous backups? Yup, that’s a monthly upsell too. Every reputable service offers instantaneous backups of your files even with the introductory or free plans. What use is a backup that’s days old? Every additional computer to be backed up or sync’ed also incurred another monthly fee.

ZipCloud / My PC Backup is nickel and diming their customers. Generally, I’m okay with the upsells or “freemium” business model. However, scamming people with nonsense upsells is not okay. The ‘unlimited upload speed’ package is what turned me off right away. It’s a pity that you don’t see all this nickel and diming before you sign up.

Once I seen what was going on I went to cancel and here are screen caps of the cancellation process.

Remember that yearly billing squeeze I mentioned earlier? Look the first option of cancellation:

Continuing on with an offer of 20% off:

No, okay how about 50% off?

You really want to leave? Well okay but would you stay with us to the end of your billing period so we can keep your money?

Zip Cloud seems pretty desperate, don’t they? Stick with reputable services like Dropbox, Mozy, and Carbonite. Skip scammers like Zip Clound / My Backup PC.

With the release of Ubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala last week it was time for me to do a fresh install of Ubuntu on my main machine which dual boots Vista and Ubuntu. For the most part I upgrade my Ubuntu install around beta 1 then roll along with the updates until final release, a few days after final release I wipe the partition and install with a fresh copy just in case any bugs are hanging around.

The default Ubuntu install has some great software out of the box but we need some multimedia stuff like the ability to play MP3s (which may or may not be legal in your country, IANAL) and flash player. From there I install a bunch of other programs I enjoy playing with. Here’s the first command I run for installs:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
–output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo apt-get –yes -q –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-restricted-extras skype googleearth kompozer keepassx pidgin pidgin-plugin-pack inkscape xaralx epiphany midori audacity djplay hydrogen hydrogen-drumkits terminator filezilla gftp abiword cowsay thunderbird banshee virtualbox-ose gnome-do gnome-do-plugins nautilus-image-converter cheese

This adds the Medibuntu repository, which distributes among other things multimedia codecs and Google Earth then updates the software sources and adds it’s keyring (for authentication of packages) then yet again updates the software sources and finally starts installing my programs with confirmation.

Let me run through the packages and what they do:

Ubuntu-restricted-extras: Installs flash, MP3, WMA, and MS Font support among other things.

Skype: The world famous video messaging client works on Linux.

Google-earth: Who doesn’t love Google Earth?

Kompozer: Fork of NVU a WYSIWYG HTML editor, good for simple webpages.

Keepassx: A great cross platform password database app to save all your passwords. I use this on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Pidgin & pidgin-plugin-pack: Multi-protocol IM client. In Karmic Empathy is the default IM client however I’m still happy with Pidgin. I use Pidgin on Windows & Linux

Inkscape & Xaralx: Cool graphics programs, which I haven’t dived into as much as I’d like to as they appear to have a steep learning curve.

Ephphany & Midori: Internet browsers as a webmaster you can never have to many browsers.

Audacity, Hydrogen, and DJ Play: These are all programs. Audacity is a track editor, Hydrogen is a beat maker, and DJ play lets you play DJ between two tracks. I haven’t played around with the latter two a whole lot but like to have them installed for when the mood strikes.

Terminator: Embeds multiple terminals in one window. Mainly useful for when I’m ssh’ed into more than 1 server

Filezilla & GFTP: Filezilla is my preferred cross platform FTP client. GFTP is my backup FTP client in addition to Nautilus’s capabilities.

Abiword: Lightweight cross platform word processor I use this on all 3 platforms for hammering out blog posts and replies to longer private messages on forums. I must admit I lauch Abiword before Open Office in most cases.

Cowsay: Neat little app that puts whatever your place after the command in a comic strip bulb over an ASCII cow. It’s not useful for anything just good a for a quick laugh. 😀 Check out Cowsay:

Thunderbird: Firefox’s sister a cross platform email client. I mostly use it just to monitor a couple of IMAP accounts

Banshee: A music manager.

Virtualbox-ose: A free virtual machine app, I use this to run Windows XP in a virtual machine both on Ubuntu & Vista

Gnome-do & Gnome-do-plugins: Gnome do is a great launcher app much like Vista’s start menu or spotlight on OS X. It can do a lot more but I don’t use for much more than the basic functionality

Nautilus-image-converter: Resize images by right clicking.

Cheese: Webcam application much like Photo Booth on OS X.

From there I head on over to GetDeb.net to grab Songbird and Ubuntu Tweak the go off and download Opera & Dropbox from their respective sites. Assuming Firefox is saving your downloads to ~/Downloads, I install them all with two commands.

cd Downloads/

sudo dpkg -i *.deb (this tells the Ubuntu to unpack all .deb files)

then

sudo apt-get install -f (to fix dependency issues with Ubuntu Tweak)

Lets run through the apps again: 😉

Songbird: Is a cross platform music manager based on Mozilla. I use it mostly for streaming Shoutcast but it has some great library features built in and is expandable with extensions just like Firefox

Ubuntu Tweak: Basically helps you install packages and if enabled set up some of Compiz’s features in additon to setting default user paths and desktop icons. It’s a nice little app, sort of the modern day Automatic

Opera: Just another web browser

Dropbox: This an awesome cross platform sync tool. I’ve got a premium account and use it to sync and files across all my computers that aren’t confidential. I really cannot say enough good about Dropbox, give it a try.

There you have it with my internet connection I normally get all this installed and have a system ready to go within less than an hour. What do you install first with Ubuntu? Leave any questions in the comments please.