More Geeky Goodess

Keeping with my earlier theme, I thought I'd share some other geek fun I had this weekend.

I found, via the Total Choice Forums, a nifty little script called dbsender. What it does is create a dump of any MySQL database, gzip's it and emails it to you. By setting it up as a cron job, I can now automate backups of the database that runs this blog. Now, each night at 3:00 AM, I get a backup of my site via email. Cool!

What's even cooler is that a year ago there's now way I could have understood that last paragraph, let alone write it!

Secondly, my Palm Treo 600 phone had developed this rather nasty buzz that had rendered it nearly unusable. I really want to replace it with a nice, new Treo 700p, but alas I have 6 months left on my Cingular contract. There was no way I was going to get through 6 months of talking through a swarm of honey bees, so I Googled "treo buzz fix".

Link #1 on that list pointed to a simple solution that involved a T6 Torx screwdriver and a small piece of aluminum foil. It goes like this:

1. Sync your treo to back up you data.
2. Open the Treo case (that's where the T6 driver comes in).
3. Unplug the battery wire and wrap it in foil (seriously).
4. Close the case.
5. Re-sync to restore your data.

Sounded to good to be true, but there were a bunch of comments testifying to it's accuracy, so I dove in. I now have a buzz free Treo.

A little aluminum foil, who knew?

More substantial posts to come this week.