One of my friends, a Mr John Wood, has been working for the past year on a piece of software that allows you to automatically backup your data to a small peer-to-peer based network of your trusted friends, or buddies. It’s called BuddyBackup.

BuddyBackup monitors the folders you ask it to and makes sure that your files are backed up (encrypted, of course) to the people you nominate. In return, their files are backed up to your PC. Once you’ve chosen the folders, the software can be left to run in the background and it will make sure any changes to the monitored folders are distributed to your buddies, safe and sound. The changes are sent compressed and only a diff is sent to each buddy, so it doesn’t swallow all your bandwidth.

The other day on an open-source mailing list I subscribe to, someone was asking whether people thought that an idea for a feature they had was a good one. The way it was written was nice enough, but the final paragraph contained this:

If I could write a line of code, I’d write this myself. Unfortunately, I can’t, so someone else will have to do it :). It shouldn’t be very complicated, though.

I’ve changed the way sources are displayed in Bluefunk. I’ve moved them to a separate side-pane that can be shown or hidden. I changed this because I felt it was confusing to have the playlist and sources contained within the same container widget. This was both from a user point of view and a coding point of view as it added quite a few conditional checks to the code. I think this probably acts like in the new Totem, but I have only seen one screenshot so I cannot say for sure. It’s slightly annoying because I’ve been planning this change for at least a couple of months — I haven’t just copied Totem!

The bands we saw; bigger is better, as is supposedly the case with many things.

Friday
The Rakes, The Subways, The Bravery, Franz Ferdinand, The Prodigy

Saturday
zZz, Vive La Fete, Maximo Park, Arcade Fire, Pixies, Marilyn Manson

Sunday
Editors, Patrick Wolf, Nick Cave

We moved house at the beginning of the month; this is the first time I’ve lived away from home in a non-student house. So far it all seems pretty nice, aside from a couple of problems with light bulbs. We have the Internet set up with Telewest — the set up went very smoothly — but only a laptop online at the moment as we haven’t set up a network. Wireless network cards and router in en route to (hopefully) solve that problem.