Personal storage conundrum

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

The computer storage devices in my flat are

My desktop mac
- 1 TB SSD for boot drive
- 640 GB HD for clone of boot drive
- 500 GB SSD for secondary boot drive
- 500 GB SSD for clone of secondary boot drive
- 2 TB HD
  - 1 TB for extra clone of boot drive
  - 1 TB scratch drive (video-editing etc)
My laptop
- 120 GB SSD for boot drive
- 250 GB external HD for clone of boot drive
My partner’s desktop mac
- 500 GB HD for boot drive
- 500 GB HD for clone of boot drive
two 2 TB time capsules
a pile of smaller external HDs and SSD

Sometimes it feels like too much, sometimes too little.

The next addition will probably be a 1TB SSD for cloning my desktop mac’s boot drive. Then I can devote all of the 2TB HD to scratch disk.

backup botheration

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

I back up my laptop nightly to an external USB hard disk. When this disk directly connected to the laptop, a CarbonCopyCloner incremental backup takes about 5 minutes. Continue reading →

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

It should be obvious that I’m in favour of IT being used to improve democracy. So clusterfraks like this annoy are doubly annoying: the small part is that IT is getting a bad name, but the large part, even allowing for The Register‘s journalising licence, is that many eligible people may not be able to vote. Bah!

(post-title shamelessly stolen from The Register)

How to find online Glasgow CCs

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

Links to all Glasgow CC websites, Facebook pages and twitter feeds can now be found at http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=5603. The Glasgow CCLO tells me ‘A number of community councils have recently launched new websites using the WordPress platform, for example Mount Florida, at www.moflococo.org, Carmunnock, at www.carmunnockcc.com, Parkhead, at www.parkheadcommunitycouncil.wordpress.com, and Claythorn, at claythorncc.wordpress.com/.

The old CommunityCouncilsGlasgow website is now obsolete and should be ignored.

Munging Mendeley

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

For all academic writing up to and including my dissertation, I used Word’s built-in reference manager. This had at least two disadvantages: it couldn’t include PDFs of papers, and it put names of authors beginning with accented letters at the end of bibliographies. Continue reading →

ESRC-funded PhD studentship at Napier

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

Edinburgh Napier University has been awarded another ESRC PhD studentship. The vacancy has just been advertised on the University vacancies site, and there are further details on Professor Hazel Hall’s blog.

The title of the studentship is Enhancing the capacity for workplace learning and innovation Scotland. It is hoped to recruit someone with interests and expertise in the broad area of knowledge management keen to study organisational learning in the workplace, its relationship to skills development, and its impact on innovation, employment growth and productivity.

Applications are due on Monday 20^th April, interviews scheduled for Thursday 14^th May, and the start date is Thursday 1^st October 2015.

Put yourself on the map: complete the Workforce Mapping Project survey

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

(With thanks to Hazel Hall for almost all of the words below.)

The Workforce Mapping Project survey is live at http://bit.ly/workforcemap

This is a call to workers in the library, archives, records, information, and knowledge management sector to contribute to a research project by completing a short survey. If you work in this sector, please read on to learn more about the project and how you can contribute to it. Continue reading →