From Bits to Bites &
Windshields to Worship

It seems that lately there’s been a rash of blog posts coming out of Richmond, Indiana about the not-so-new but still amazing Motorola Droid (or Droid by Motorola, if you want to follow their nomenclature.) As a new Droid owner myself I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring too.

Last Friday my wife and I received our new Droids, and after using it pretty intensely over the weekend, these are some of my overall impressions. I won’t even attempt at making this post exhaustive – instead I’ll try and post some follow-ups on things like what apps I’ve found useful (or not) and so on.

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I’ve recently started contributing as part of a new(ish) blogging project with several other Church of the Brethren young adult theologians. The site is called Already and Not Yet, and was originally an outgrowth of a conference I helped plan last year. Occasionally I may do some cross-posting with this site as well. This is one such occasion …

(Original post available here)

This post is part of my Upgraded Linux Backup series.

One of the challenges I faced in configuring my new backup system on my Ubuntu Linux-based server was setting up my two external drives to mount at the same place in the filesystem.

Why? Because the program I use to manage my backups, BackupPC, expects the storage “pool” to always be in the same place. My options were to write a script to change the BackupPC configuration each time a different drive was plugged in, or make the pool mount in the same location regardless of which drive I’m using. Because I was working with LUKS-encrypted volumes I faced additional complexities which made it  difficult to use other methods (like volume labeling) because of how Gnome handles and mounts such encrypted volumes.

While it took a while to make it work, once I figured it out it did exactly what I needed. Now, I’m sharing my results with you to save you the trouble of doing all the research yourself!

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This post is part of my Upgraded Linux Backup series.

After obtaining (and assembling) my new backup hardware my first order of business was to get the external hard drives formatted and set up with drive encryption. Since I’m swapping out one drive to store off-site I wanted to use drive encryption just in case it somehow ended up in someone else’s posession. In Ubuntu, the easiest way to encrypt a whole drive is using LUKS. I chose LUKS because it is easily readable by most Linux computers and can even be set up on a Windows PC, if absolutely necessary. This post will walk through the (remarkably simple) process of setting up encryption and formatting.

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Let me start off by saying that I’ve been making a lot of soup the past several months. Since January I’ve made soup almost once a week, with a few weeks off around our vacation this summer. Part of the reason for this is that every Monday night my wife Becky and I host a dinner and conversation get-together at our house, and I like to keep the menu simple – usually some kind of vegetarian soup and fresh baked bread.

But even with making soup nearly every Monday and often eating the leftovers for lunch throughout the week, sometimes there are other not-so-simple (or not so vegetarian/vegan) soups we like to eat. White Chicken “Chili” is one of those favorites. While I haven’t deviated much from the recipe I started with, over the years I have tweaked this dish to where we really like it a lot. Keep Reading »