The idea of Snap365 is simple. Take a photograph every day for a year. The only rule I’ve given myself is that the photo for each day must be taken on that day. No taking 7 pictures on a Sunday and chilling out for a week.
I will try to upload the pictures the same day I take them, but this may not always be possible.

The inspiration for Snap365 came from my desire to buy a new lens. For a long time I’d wanted to buy Nikon’s 18-200mm lens with built-in vibration reduction. The lens costs approx. £580 so it’s not a purchase to be taken without consideration. I had put off buying it for about a year or more due to the cost, but by the end of 2009 I finally had the money available. Once again I considered buying it, but then realised that for over 6 months I hadn’t taken a single photo with my SLR. The last photos I’d taken were in May when I bought my Exige.

I decided that there was no way I could justify spending £580 on a lens for a camera that I didn’t use. Infact there was no justification for me having the camera at all if I didn’t use it. So, in a “use it or lose it” moment, I came up with the idea for Snap365. Since starting the project and telling people about it a lot have replied with “Ooh, my friend XXX did that last year”, or “My friend XXX is doing that too”, or even “Did you see/read XXX? They recommended doing that this year”.
No, I didn’t read/see/hear about this from anybody else, and I don’t really care about anybody elses projects. This is something I’m doing for myself more than anything else, as an effort to get back into photography.

The website is more of a motivational “you better take your picture, people might be watching” rather than a “look at my photos” thing. A year is a long time, and I’m a lazy person. I need to feel that people are watching to motivate me to do this on a daily basis.

So here we are on day 16. So far so good. It’s a Saturday, and I have a day of work ahead of me including a wonderful tax return. To top things off, the weather outside is miserable. Once again, I have absolutely no idea what to take a photo of today!

Wish me luck!

The major benefit from this is that my 50GB iTunes library, and my 65GB iPhoto library can now reside on my local disk, rather than an external firewire drive.

If you’re doing any maintenance on your mac, i’d definitely recommend the ifixit guides!

Some pictures from the day:

Anyway, when the machine eventually boots (I’ve removed the mounts from /etc/fstab for the logical volumes on this misbehaving array) I’m left with the issue of finding the missing logical volumes and mounting them.

If I run vgscan now, I only see the volumes on the other disks, not those on the missing RAID array.

First issue is that the md device doesn’t exist (/dev/md2 is missing). Find the names of the devices you added to the array:
fdisk -l

Check that the devices are really members of the array:
mdadm --examine /dev/hdb /dev/hdd

Query the physical devices (this creates the missing md device):
mdadm -Q /dev/hdb /dev/hdd

Check that the md device was created correctly (should currently be inactive):
mdadm -Q /dev/md2

Assemble and activate the array:
mdadm --assemble /dev/md2

You should now be able to query the RAID device:
mdadm -Q /dev/md2
or
mdadm --detail /dev/md2

Next we search for the volume groups stored on the array:
vgscan
It should now show the names of the missing volumes which weren’t shown earlier.

Scan for the missing logical volumes:
lvscan
It should list a load of existing (assuming you have other volumes) logical volumes, and the missing ones listed as inactive.

To activate them and create the missing logical devices we run another
lvchange -ay <volume_name>
eg, if lvscan listed volumes x,y,z in the volume group /dev/datavg then activate them and create the logical devices with:
lvchange -ay datavg

Now you can mount the volume you need:
mount /dev/<volume_group>/<logical_volume> <mount_point>

Sometimes there’s just no reason!

http://www.elusive.cx/2009/02/26/safari-4-and-growl-a-fix/

Thanks BK!

To fix, simply remove the plug-in. Depending on how you installed it, the plug-in will either be in /Library/Mail/GrowlMail.mailbundle or in ~/Library/Mail/GrowlMail.mailbundle.

Open terminal and delete the folder above (depending on your installation) and all will be fixed. Re-install the plug-in when Apple have fixed the conflict, and remind yourself that it’s not called “beta” software for no reason!

I also wasn’t alone. A number of other people with mail hosted on my server complained of the same issue. So, I set about finding a solution.

After a few googles, I stumbled upon the Sender Policy Framework, or SPF.
It’s very simple in the way it works, is quick to set up, and best of all it costs nothing!

First you need to add a new DNS entry to the domain you want to protect. The following TXT entry tells the world that the only host authorised to send email from the domain jonpascoe.co.uk is the A record that it resolves to. All other sending hosts should be ignored.

jonpascoe.co.uk. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx -all"

Once you’ve added your DNS TXT entry, it’s just a simple matter of configuring your MTA to look for the Received-Spf email header and filter your mail accordingly.

In the last couple of days, I haven’t sent myself a single spam email!
As an added bonus, if spam is sent “from me” to somebody else on the internet, and their MTA is configured to use SPF, they should block the mail too.

First of all there’s John Major, the grey man who blends into the background:

(He’s a two-spot goby)

And then there’s Boris … who is somewhat odd:

(And he’s a pink-spotted flymo, or rockskipper. Yes, he has orange spots … I did say he was odd!)