along these lines i'd highly recommend: http://socialsafe.net/
PSA: Back Up Your Shit
101–110 of 137 posts
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#102I'm on Gentoo Linux and had my Skype settings set to never delete chat logs. After a couple of months these logs were in the tens of gigabytes. The strange thing is that I rarely even chat on Skype. This should be tens of gigabytes of just text chat. Well it's not any format that I can understand (and Skype lags badly and becomes pretty much unusable if I type /history to look at the logs) so I've had to delete them and for a while now Skype only stores the last month of chat. I can't think why the logs got so big. Perhaps Skype trys to optimize them for quick searches or something?
Anyway, does anyone know of a way to back up Skype text chats? They shouldn't have to use up this much space. (And ideally I should actually be able to load them up and read them too!)
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#103I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value. In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved. I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminis…
Is it impossible that people can have conversations that both: 1) are real and interesting conversations; but 2) are also improved by accurate facts? Some kind of "in the moment" banter where accuracy is irrelevant is fun sometimes, sure, but it's not the only mode of conversation, or to my mind the most interesting.
I have plenty of conversations that are both excellent conversations and come into necessary contact with facts. Sometimes the facts are purely from memory, but sometimes it's useful to look them up, if one or both of us aren't sure we remember them properly, or recognize a gap in our knowledge. A few topics in only the past week that benefited from looking up some facts: 1) talking with my parents about the circumstances under which my great-grandparents emigrated from Sweden; 2) discussing my uncle's MS treatment/management with family; 3) having a friendly argument with a friend about promising directions in artificial intelligence; and 4) discussing similarities and differences between some aspects of Danish and American culture.
It's not really a particularly new addition to conversation, either. Nowadays when you look something up it's probably on the internet, but when I was younger, conversations would sometimes involve pulling a reference book off the shelf to add some context or a point of reference to the discussion (atlases especially, but occasionally an encyclopedia or almanac).
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer. Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing. (My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)
You can play a game: everyone puts their phone in the middle of the table, the first person to pick theirs up during the meal pays the bill for the entire table (or split it if no-one does). There is another variant on this game that can be played with a goldfish bowl...
I'm glad no one I know plays this childish game, speaking as someone who is occasionally on call, lives under the conscious commitment to always pick up the phone when my wife calls, or maybe just likes to check the time every so often.
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can play a game: everyone puts their phone in the middle of the table, the first person to pick theirs up during the meal pays the bill for the entire table (or split it if no-one does). There is another variant on this game that can be played with a goldfish bowl...
I'm glad no one I know plays this childish game, speaking as someone who is occasionally on call, lives under the conscious commitment to always pick up the phone when my wife calls, or maybe just likes to check the time every so often.
... And check your Facebook, and Instagram your food, and reply some email that actually will wait until the next day but you want your boss to see that you're "working" after hours, and maybe a bit of Twitter...
If you want to do all that, stay at home alone and do it on your PC. If you want to enjoy a meal in the company of friends, then try to live a bit more in the moment.
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
So like a hundred years ago you would be saying, "Upon perusing my letters received via post, I always immediately incinerate them in the woodstove." That's one way to live, I guess...
People keep letters? Actually: people write letters?
I went through a phase a few years ago where I actually wrote people letters. Since my friends are all over the globe, it sort of made sense. I did it because I personally liked the feeling of receiving a letter. The conclusion, after sending 20 letters to several people, was that receiving one is great but more often than not the person receiving it would thank me online and not write back on paper.
If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters, I'd communicate this way when it was anything personal.
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
So like a hundred years ago you would be saying, "Upon perusing my letters received via post, I always immediately incinerate them in the woodstove." That's one way to live, I guess...
People keep letters? Actually: people write letters?
The letter archives of people in history are a source of lots of useful historical information.
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. You must be a delightful dinner companion. Fine, that's a cavil. This is not: Disk is cheap. My time is precious. It's a lot quicker and easier to just dump everything into a big greppable bucket, on the off-chance that five or ten years from now I might need to fish something out of it, than to spend hours or even minutes picking a…
I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer. Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing. (My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)
Of course it's unnecessary; you may note that I called it a cavil, and a cavil is always unnecessary, which is part of what makes it a cavil. But it's to the point and sort of funny, which is why I left it in.
As for the rest, of course it's rude to be "playing with your phone" during dinner, and while it's sometimes necessary to initiate or answer some communication, to leave the table before doing so is only polite. But rudeness in response to rudeness is rudeness nonetheless, and justified only in the face of extreme provocation; such a minor impoliteness as the one we're discussing is far more pleasantly and effectively dissuaded by a polite response than a rude one -- something which, it seems to me, "I will disallow anyone..." evinces a certain failure to grasp.
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#109"Remember: if it's not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it's not really yours." So, if we store our data in "the cloud", it's not really ours?
Well, it's 'yours', insofar as you have access to it (or should, barring outages and downtime).
But it might be accessible to someone else. And it might be lost by those hosting it.
Nothing is perfect or guaranteed.
Re: PSA: Back Up Your Shit
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad no one I know plays this childish game, speaking as someone who is occasionally on call, lives under the conscious commitment to always pick up the phone when my wife calls, or maybe just likes to check the time every so often.
... And check your Facebook, and Instagram your food, and reply some email that actually will wait until the next day but you want your boss to see that you're "working" after hours, and maybe a bit of Twitter... If you want to do all that, stay at home alone and do it on your PC. If you want to enjoy a meal in the company of friends, then try to live a bit more in the moment.
Yeah the thing is, I don't do all of that shit, which is why I would resent going out with friends who would treat me like a child. But I actually do have to answer my phone sometimes.