I just bought another full year hosting, with a different host, with a new account, with a 25% discount for life and I really don't know what to use it for. Say what? It only cost 70SEK (that's about $10) a year, so I didn't really have much choice. :) Even without the discount that price was highly competitive!

Last year I signed up with a different host for a full year and I haven't even used the account, at all! It expired yesterday. It was a reseller; I had big plans for it, but it turned out the host wasn't as good as I expected so I feel worse paying for it than I do not actually using the account. Their control panel is so slow you have to literally wait a minute while a page loads, and in modern day that just doesn't cut it. This years discount host seems better, despite their calling themselves Reliable Host. I mean, any real host would choose a less reliable if they really were reliable and not just wanted to sound it. The name almost made me not buy hosting at all, but at that price, it's worth the risk anyway.

Reliable Host are new (thus cheap - for life - to the selected few who buy plans now) with great hopes and dreams and I hope as much as them that they won't die or start overselling their servers when their financial situation gets tough. Signing up with a new host is always a risk, but then again, if nobody signs up with new hosts there won't ever be any old hosts will there?

So, apart from the reseller I signed up for last year and never used (which I would still have had 70% off for life on had I not not renewed it a couple of days back) I bought a domain name for 10 cents last year as well. Don't know if I mentioned it, but that's a cheap domain! I put up a splash page saying I'd have a site up for the domain, but never made it, there's just too much to do and I don't have time for new projects if I don't let some old ones go. I mentioned the VPS I bought too, right? That was two years ago, and that didn't work out because the host died on me, disappeared; took the money with them. I didn't lose faith in new web-hosts though, as you should've understood by now if you read the above. ;)

So, for the sake of memory practice and to those who are interested in the world of webhosting and need a few names to blame... I won't link them because they really aren't places that need to be linked to. Here's the list:

The VPS that disappeared on me was The VPS Gods (.info).
I paid for a full year too and though it was cheaper than most hosts a VPS is never cheap. Their disappearance left a big hole in my pocket.

The host that now have incredibly slow servers are Desire Host (.net).
"All our packages include low server load" my ass... they have good plans just not good servers/personal/hosting/etc.

The domain I bought for 10 cents was bought at Binero (.se).
A free hosting account came with it for a full year, too! When they don't have special prices their prices are above average though, but on the bright side - they have both good service and good servers. It's one of those 'normal' hosts you can actually rely on, but they rarely give discounts, and when they do it's never for life. If they did (and it was big enough to bring the price below normal prices) I'd have bought an account with them immediately. Same thing goes for Loopia (.se) and One (.com). Though I had problems with mod rewrite on the latter. I told them and they gave me a refund. As for Loopia, I haven't tried their hosting yet, but they're good with domains.

Another host (like Desire Host) that offer great plans and pricing is Magma Host (.com).
I'm still signed up with a reseller there because it is insanely cheap (for life) but they truly suck. I hate to just flame them but I haven't had good experience with their services, their servers... not with anything. On the bright side I have a free dedicated IP for life along with my account - no extra cost (which is probably the reason I still have an account there in the first place). But that bright side is quickly darkened by the fact that they put my name on a client testimony and said good things about themselves. If they just start taking care of their business like they should I'll forgive them though.

Now that I'm on the subject. Hotfile. They suddenly decided to sharpen their policies and delete unwanted files like crazy. They deleted everything, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, that had been made public (not my files, the files of people I wanted to download from... I didn't have any uploads). I bought an account there for a year and little more and halfway through there was suddenly nothing left to download. Well, obviously there must have been something, but I couldn't find it. There was this one day when my download speeds crept down to 2KB (holy low shit) as well and stayed that way for a few days. I contacted support, got no answer. I looked on their site, they mentioned nothing.

They may be giving unlimited b/w and easy access to anything you want to upload, but if you're thinking of using them for anything not private (like backing up all your files) I don't recommend them. Frankly, I wouldn't trust my personal files with them either, they don't strike me as reliable at all after all I went through with them. But speaking about file hosts...

RapidShare. I signed up for a one month (or wait, was it one day?) account and enjoyed every second of it. Only problem was that downloads were actually limited, unlike the crappy host above, but you get what you pay for. Good support. Good service.

FileFactory. I signed up for a one day account here as well to download a batch of files, and all went good. Only thing I didn't really like was the fact that one day cost almost the same as a full week. I feel like I should've signed for a full week, but I only needed a day, but still... to sum it up that sales trick of theirs sorta cut down my respect for them a little. They have a download limit too btw. If I chose between this and the above, the above gets full attention I should mention.

There's also MediaFire and MegaUpload (been thinking of buing an account for life there, just one fee and it lasts as long as you live) but I haven't used them yet so I won't mention them. Oh whoops I just did... but seriously though, they seem like the top two candidates in the file hosting (a)biz right now.

And while I'm still talking about hosts and what not, the first host I ever signed up with, Canaca, are specialized in KVM hosting now (not that it's relevant. They had (still have) plans with insanely high amounts of space and bandwidth (at least they don't offer unlimited, many thanks for that) that you won't ever be able to use. We're speaking around 400GB, and that together with an acceptable usage policy and no hosting download sites allowed on their servers (all 'normal' hosts have that in their ToS, no shame there). What makes it stupid though is that I signed up with the Silver plan when they had a Bronze plan for half the price, and I still never used up more resources than the Bronze plan offered. Actually, at the start I think I would have been better off with just a free web-host and a domain name. A few 100MB would have been more than enough.

So I guess that's what they call experience. I eventually moved from Canaca not because the price was too high but because their servers were getting rather slow and they kept giving me trouble suspending my account for too many processes running amok or stupid things like that. Maybe not so stupid in retrospect, but back then I just didn't like my account getting suspended. Still don't, but I'm not stupid enough to let scripts go wild and eat up memory any longer. Or maybe the scripts I use are just a bit better than they were back then...

I know I've tried maybe a couple of other paid hosts as well, but I can't remember them... maybe I haven't. Free hosts are a different story though, if you're a 'professional' website owner (who uses FTP, SQL databases, Mod Rewrite, etcetc) - never get free hosting. The sites that offer free hosting on the scale you need will die down very quickly. I know. I've been signed up with ten or twenty and they're all gone now. The ones who still exist are the ones who won't let me upload files larger than 2MB or mod rewrite links or even give me access to a database. In other words hosts that aren't suitable for me any longer. So... moral of this story is... the world of hosting is vast and wild so....

Actually all I wanted to say was that I just bought a new hosting account and this time (third time right right?) I plan on using it for every cent of its worth! :) Later.

Left speaker isn't working right today. The volume is waaaay lower than on the right one. Cables and connections and balance are all as they should be, so I ended up having to open up the speaker config, reduce the sound level of the right speaker and then up the overall volume a bit. Hope the left speaker doesn't suddenly start working like it should though or I'll be partially deaf in a few seconds. Manually adjusting the balance by volume so it's equal for both speakers is much harder than it seems btw. It sounds about the same but it still feels a bit off. There, todays rant ?>

Nah, just kidding... but wouldn't that be friggin amazing?
Surfing at the speed of light...

It's been about half a year since I posted about making a system restore point. Have I made one yet? Nope. Will I? Probably not. How about backups? Uh-uh. What about after my external drive crashed and I realized I couldn't recover all lost data? Not really.

Yeah I should, I know. Moving on...

How can a program that looks so ugly grow so big? Can it really be because of its extensive functionality? Well, probably, but I don't like it. I started using it only because other people recommended it, yet I don't get why they would recommend such an unprofessional program. Not unless there really is no other application out there that does the same things - and does them better.

For those of you who don't know SUPER is a video conversion program. It can handle a ton of different file format and perform countless operations on these files. It would seem like a great program if it wasn't for the interface, which sucks, and the website, which sucks even worse. It looks a few decades behind in design terms, and it's a mirror for the program. Functionally, it works. Graphically, it doesn't.

And I don't mean the graphics are too simple. I have nothing against minimal design, Windows applications that look like they were made for Win 98 or use antique color schemes on hues of brown, blue, white & gray. SUPER does have graphics, but it's a mess, it doesn't look good, in fact out of all programs I've used (and there's a lot of them) I can't recall a single one that looks any worse.

I've tried RipBot & MKVMagic... and a few other alternatives to get the task I need to get done done, but none really did get the task done. Virtual Dub is an alternative, but it does too much, more than I need to have done. Why can't there be a speedy, simple, graphically coherent video converter program out there? I'll keep searching...

3/5

I've been browsing through installed apps trying to find ones I don't need, uninstall them, and save some space. The first app I came across the Acer Identity Card, which is basically a simple portable program that gives you information about your computer, such as serial number and product model, which is useful if you need to contact customer support, for example. Actually that's the only real usage example I can think of, but maybe it is enough to keep the program... is the conclusion I came to.

The program did mention a few additional things apart from Serial Number, Product Model & Date of Purchase (which you fill in yourself, as for me I don't really remember so I looked them up. First field gives you the part number, and though it's defined quite clearly online it still leaves me curious, is the number referring to a specific component within the computer? Or could it be the computer itself?

A part number is a unique identifier of a part used in a particular industry. Its purpose is to simplify referencing to that part. A part number unambiguously defines a part within a single manufacturer.

A few fields such as FUB & DLR where really mystifying. It turns out FUB stands for "Final Boss of Game" or "Fat Ugly Bastard". Really, don't they have answers for stuff like this online? Now I'm very curious, and it seems like my curiosity won't be relieved anytime soon.

DLR was easier to find , it stands for:

Design (or sometimes Detail) Layout Record.

What else? There's SNID too, Google tells me this is:

In geometry, the snub dodecahedron, or snub icosidodecahedron, is an Archimedean solid, one of thirteen convex isogonal nonprismatic solids constructed by two or more types of regular polygon faces.

Really? I doubt that. I think it stands for Serial Number ID. Sound reasonable? There's a lot of mysteries left unraveled with this program, but at least some things were figured out. If you know more, post a comment.