External Hard Drive Enclosure

My laptop has been acting up a little bit lately, and it’s been a little while since a reinstall, so I’m getting myself into the reformat mindset. I don’t want to lose everything on my hard drive, and I don’t want to burn 20 DVDs, so I started looking around for an external hard drive.

I started looking around NewEgg and TigerDirect to see what’s on the market.  I only really need about 100 or 150 GB, but it was looking like I’d be spending about $50 for that sort of size.  When I see 1TB drives (~8 times the size) for less than $125 (2.5 times the price), I couldn’t really justify getting ONLY 160 GB.  But at the same time, I don’t have $125 to spend right now.  So I was rather turned off of external hard drives.

When I remembered the dead computer sitting in my closet (I think it’s either a motherboard or CPU problem but don’t have anything to test that…), I realized that there is a 160GB SATA (and a 60GB IDE) drive in there, which I would actually like to get information off of as well!  So that’s when I started looking at external hard drive enclosures.

I found this one at NewEgg.  It works with both SATA and IDE hard drives, it had good reviews, and for $37 with shipping & handling, it was certainly cheaper than buying an external hard drive.  I ordered it Sunday night (2 hours and 13 minutes before a $10 mail-in rebate started… I’m going to see if I can get that anyways..), and it got here this afternoon (I love NewEgg’s speed!)!  I popped in an old hard drive (for testing purposes), and it worked right off the bat!  Now I can access the files I haven’t been able to touch in 2 years… and I can get ready for a reformat!

For $20 from now until March 30, I would definitely recommend picking up one of these bad boys if you have any internal hard drives or plans to buy one!

Google Calendar Bookmarklet

A bookmarklet is a piece of JavaScript which you bookmark in order to add a little piece of additional functionality to your browser and make it easily accessible.  Bookmarklets can be used to do things like change the font size or style on a website, or they can help make a task simpler.

Just the other day, I found that RememberTheMilk (I blogged about the greatness of RTM back in August) has a task creation bookmarklet (they call it a “QuickAdd“).  Using that the past couple days, I realized how handy bookmarklets could be!

When I wanted to add the Penguins remaining schedule to my Google Calendar, I figured a bookmarklet could make the task easier.  After some Googling, however, I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted.  This article’s #4 was close, so I took it and modified it with some additional JavaScripting.

Without further ado, here is my first ever bookmarklet!

<edit>All right — WordPress won’t let me play nicely sharing a bookmarklet IN a link. So go here:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/dri106/_GCalIt.html

and do that.

Whenever you want to add something to your Google Calendar, click that bookmark and you’ll be at the New Event page.  If you have text selected before clicking that link, the selected text will get put in as the “What”, otherwise, a prompt comes up in which you can type a “Quick Add” such as “Dinner with Mike at 7pm tomorrow”.

Code (modified from #4 at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/07/useful-google-bookmarklets.html):

javascript: var s;
//Figure out the selected text
if ( window.getSelection ) {
    s = window.getSelection();
} else if ( document.getSelection ) {
    s = document.getSelection();
} else {
    s = document.selection.createRange().text;
}
//If there isn't any text selected, get user input
if ( s == '' ) {
    s = prompt('QuickAdd');
}
var re = RegExp( '[AaPp][Mm]' );
if ( encodeURIComponent(s).match(re) ) {
} else {
    s = s + ' 1pm'; //if there isn't an AM or PM in the text, add the default 1pm time
}
void(
//open a new window with this information in the Google Calendar event creation page.
    window.open(
        encodeURI('http://www.google.com/calendar/event?ctext='+s+'&action=TEMPLATE&pprop=HowCreated:QUICKADD'),
        'addwindow',
        'status=no,toolbar=no,width=520,height=470,resizable=yes'
    )
);