mount usb disks using by-label

When the screen on my old family laptop died a few years ago, I found the perfect use for it: as a headless server on the family network. Running Ubuntu 9.04 Server, this laptop primarily acts as a file server on the network, dishing out bits to a wide variety of clients (Mac, PC, iPod Touch and an Xbox 360). The internal hard drive is relatively small, and pretty much used only as the system drive; an external 500 GB USB drive holds data, and I recently added a second 1 TB USB drive to give the growing bit collection some much needed breathing room.

The addition of the second USB drive, however, has exacerbated an annoyance that I've suffered since setting this system up: the challenge of configuring consistent mount points. The USB drives appear as SCSI drives to Ubuntu, and therefore show up as /dev/sd* in the /dev hierarchy. Although Ubuntu magically handles recognition of the drives as they are plugged in or unplugged from the server, the drives don't consistently show up as a particular sd* device. I don't often unplug these drives, but when I do and then plug them back in (or when the system has been restarted), I have to hunt around the /dev directory, find the correct sd* device, and then manually mount the drive. With one drive, I could easily tell which sd* device had just been added to the system: with two, it became troublesome enough that I searched for some better way to handle my USB drives.

tasty google bookmarks

I opened a del.icio.us account as soon as I read about it, and posted my first bookmark on November 4, 2004 - an overview of 10 alternatives to the recently-killed bittorrent search engine Suprnova, as it turns out. Since that time I've continued to post my bookmarks to del.icio.us, amassing a total of 900+ to date.

I was posting a new bookmark recently when it suddenly struck me: I couldn't remember when I had last used del.icio.us to retrieve a bookmark. In fact, I view my friends' shared bookmarks on del.icio.us (via RSS) far more often than my own!

I find that I've adopted a search frame of mind for information retrieval - and not just for new material. Having used Google Desktop for several years now, I tap CTRL-CTRL instinctively to search for and retrieve documents even when I know exactly where they are. And I've increasingly used the same approach for web sites that I've bookmarked - Google search is so fast that I can jump to a well-known site more quickly than I can type the URL! There are, however, some gems in the 900+ bookmarks I've collected in del.icio.us that I've forgotten about. Many times I've "rediscovered" sites when I attempt to bookmark an interesting web site I've found, only to discover that I had already bookmarked it in the past! But I find I can't break the Google search habit I've developed, even when a quick search of del.icio.us might turn up exactly what I'm looking for.

Enter Google Bookmarks. I had given this new Google feature a try when it was first released, but found it didn't have several key features (like tagging) that made del.icio.us so valuable to me. Google Bookmarks has since added tagging, but otherwise had no additional "killer" feature to tempt me to switch. Until I read this snippet on a blog, that is.

The most important features that set Google Bookmark apart from other services is that all your bookmarks are private (nobody else can see them) and fully searchable. You are no longer restricted to the title of the page, the description and the URL - you can search the entire page.

Whoa - hang on. GB indexes all the text on all pages I bookmark and makes it all searchable? After some testing, I also found that GB bookmarks are included (and highlighted) in Google searches (when I'm signed in) and in results-as-you-type in the Firefox search box. I was hooked.

I've since switched to GB for all of my bookmarks, and now I see them pop up all the time when I'm searching for stuff using Google. Both the bookmarklet and Google Toolbar tools for bookmarking support tags and auto-suggest tags when you bookmark a page, but not at elegantly as del.icio.us does [sigh]. There's no doubt, though, that I get more out of my bookmarks now that they're woven into my "search reflex" approach to finding information.

foxy del.icio.us

In a posting on the del.icio.us blog yesterday, product manager Nick announces the availability of an updated del.icio.us extension for Firefox. The quick tour page gives an excellent overview of the new features available, and being a del.icio.us fanboy, I had the new extension up and running in minutes. So far, I'm quite impressed with the greater integration of del.icio.us bookmarks within Firefox - my bookmarks now seem "nearer at hand" than they did when I had to jump to a separate web page to view and search them.

If you "roll" with both Firefox and del.icio.us, check out the quick tour to see if you'd like to trick out your browser with this new extension.

speed your surfing

After reading this post by NYT columnist David Pogue, I couldn't resist trying out this free web service that claims to speed up surfing by caching DNS requests. It could be just me, but web pages do seem to load more quickly now. The OpenDNS approach itself is also interesting: you tweak the settings on your home router to point to the OpenDNS service, and that's it! No software required on your computer.

Sweet.