So what do I mean by syncing? Well there are programs that will keep a mirror image of a source directory to a specified destination directory. The reason I want this is because after a backup I will often move directories around and delete them. When you setup a backup scenario these changes aren’t reflected, but if you setup a sync, they are. In the past I had used a program called Second Copy that did this well but I have recently discovered two new free apps that also provided sync functionality and wanted to give them a shot as it’s always nice to have a free solution to recommend to people. More on that in a minute, but first let me share my hell with you.

So I setup the first of these new backup apps which was called GFI Backup. I decided to use my MP3 collection as the source directory for these tests (huge mistake). It appeared to be a pretty nice program with a clean and simple interface. The backup process worked great, but the setup options related to synchronizing folders was a little confusing and I couldn’t get them to work properly. So I went on to the second app called Syncback which I read about in Lifehacker backup tools roundup. I decided to create a new source directory for this test with just a subset of my mp3 files in it. I did however place the destination directory in the same root directory as the one I setup for GFI Backup. I also could not get Syncback to properly synchronize the directory. So I gave up and went to bed that evening.

The next day I went to my machine and as I often do loaded Winamp and click the play all button for my collection. I noticed that it was skipping around from track to track in the player and suddenly felt my heart sink. I knew that behavior. It meant that the data from the loaded library wasn’t located in the directory. I quickly went to my MP3 folder. I saw all my folders in there but as I poked around within directories I found them all to be empty. I then went to the destination directory on my NAS. Same thing, no files. I went into panic mode. I double and triple checked the directories but no luck. At this point I realized that something in my synchronization setup of the backup apps had gone seriously wrong. I’ll say that I never went back to try and determine what exactly I did wrong, but if it was that easy to screw things up, I wanted nothing to do with either. To be fair, they both operated fine as backup programs, but synchronization can be a little trickier and neither made that setup work easily. Also, the fact that I shared a destination directory for my testing may have lead to the problems as well. So take my mistakes with a grain of salt and if you choose to try these programs do it with some unimportant data files first so that you don’t have to worry about losing anything important. I know better than taking the actions I did for these test. I can sometimes be a bonehead.

Anyways, at this point it was time to seek out a recovery program to attempt to undelete as much of my MP3 collection as I could possibly salvage. One thing to note is that whenever you delete data on a hard disk your best bet is to stop doing any file related actions on the machine and stop using it if possible. This will ensure the chances of recovering the data. When you delete files all the data is still on the system and the operating system just sets a flag to not show them in your file system. If you start moving files around and writing new data to your system then you risk overwriting the data that is on there and thus lowering your chances of recovery. So I had used a few recovery apps in the past and needed to refresh my memory as to which were good.

I found this great Lifehacker story on the five best free data recovery tools. I had used a few of these before and just wanted to determine which would be the best for the job. Of the five listed I decided to try the two which offered the most functionality which were Recuva and Undelete Plus. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that Recuva was far better. It scanned the drive very quickly (less than a minute) to determine which deleted files where on my system. The same operation took about 20 minutes on Undelete plus. Also, recovering files using Recuva was very fast it appeared to be able to do a several within a second or so whereas Undelete Plus took several seconds just to recover a single file. Now this may not seem like a big deal but I had to recover over 15,000 files. Lastly, the ability to filter the results by a specific directory worked great in Recuva and I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in Undelete Plus. Needless to say I chose to use Recuva.

(Click image for full view with details)

Recuva also had a nice feature that showed the probability of being able to recover each file that it scanned as being deleted. In my case it appeared that over 95% of the files had an excellent chance of recovery. So before I started I got an external USB hard drive I had which also had a snapshot of my MP3 collection on it from 2 years ago so at least I had something but have obviously acquired quite a bit since then. I created a new directory on the drive, flagged all files in my MP3 directory and told Recuva to go to work. After ~2 hours I was able to recover over 15k files for a total of over 60Gb of data. That turned out to be over 95% of my lost files. I was pretty amazed by how lucky I was.

I had to take screenshots (because there is no facility to save the file info) of the remaining files Recuva identified as being poor or having no chance of recovery so I had a record of them. This way I had a record of what I lost. I did locate some of the files that they listed as having a poor chance of recovery and they worked so it could be a painstaking process to try and determine which are good and which need to be replaced but at least I have a record of them. Overall I’m extremely happy with Recuva and sending this awesome freeware a donation for what they’ve done for me.

The other issue is that there was some data that was still ok and on my local drive that didn’t get deleted. I knew this because showing properties on my local MP3 directory showed that there was 5Gb of data still on it. but there was no way I was going to click individually on the hundreds of folders many of them nested to determine where the data was. Ok, if push came to shove I would have done that but I was pretty sure there was a tool to do this for me. I remembered that there are some file / directory compare tools out there and was able to find WinMerge which was recommended on Lifehacker as well (Yes, I like Lifehacker). So I compared the original MP3 directory to the recovered one and WinMerge showed me that there were 7 directories on the original that weren’t on the recovered one. Nice, so now I was able to identify these folders with data in them that wasn’t deleted and could now merge them into the newly recovered MP3 directory.

But there were still more files to be found as that wasn’t everything. Apparently some of the folders in the source still had files in them. So the issue was that I would still have to click on every folder in WinMerge to try and find which ones had data on the original directory versus the newly recovered one. That was going to be a pain so I looked into a way to do a directory listing of the source to try and root them out. I found this great tip on how to create a text file of a directory using the command prompt. This worked perfectly. I opened the file in a text editor and then began searching the file for the value “.mp3″ which then uncovered the only folders that had files in them. Bingo, that worked and now I finally was able to locate every possible file I could recover.

The last thing I want to mention is that I could have taken another course of action that would have probably insured a closer to 100% recovery. If you remember I had all the data on my NAS which also was subsequently deleted. I read about a process where if I would have taken one of the drives in my RAID 1 array out and placed it in an external case and then plugged it into my computer via USB and used a program called Diskinternals Uneraser which would mount the NAS ext2 file system and then undelete the files that way. But I figured I had done a pretty good job with my recovery process and really didn’t want to go through all the trouble and then risk any issues by putting that drive back in the NAS and losing any data on their after the process. Enough damage and time had been wasted already.

So as you can see this was a very agonizing process that I brought upon myself by not really being careful testing new software that can be very dangerous on unimportant data. I was very lucky to find such good tools to help with the recovery and hopefully this will be useful to someone else who unfortunately runs into a large data loss situation. So I’m going back to using Second Copy for backups and Synchronization which has worked perfectly in the past. I just hope I learned my lesson and can avoid this torture from happening again.

Here’s a quote:

For every feature that we could add to WordPress, there is a plugin for it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at the usage of these and guage where should we go with it.

They also state that there are 4.96 average plugins per blog. The most a user has installed is 1290; 526 of those are active.

The post goes on to list the top 10 plugins…sans links. But I have taken the time to make your journey to them a little easier by providing them in my list below. Also, no information was provided as to the basis for how this list was calculated.

Top 10 plugins
1. Akismet
2. All in One SEO Pack
3. Google XML Sitemaps
4. NextGEN Gallery
5. WordPress.com Stats
6. WP-DB-Backup
7. WP-Cache
8. WP Automatic Upgrade
9. WP-Polls
10. CformsII

I was pretty amazed when after doing a little searching around on dealnews, techbargains, and fatwallet I was able to find a 2GB Kit (2 x 1GB dual channel kit) of DDR2 memory for only $70 with free shipping at one of my favorite online merchants newegg.com so I decided they were too cheap not to buy them. I could then easily get about $30 for the 1GB dual channel kit I already had in the system making the upgrade net at only $40, but I decided to be nice and put the memory in my son’s computer.

As I went to the page to provide you with the link I come to find out that they dropped the price another $5 to only $65…amazing…Here’s the Link

I installed 2.2 on my local server and verified that my version of K2 was broken after upgrading. Luckily I found a solution. Darrell Schulte is a progressive WordPress blogger who is currently running version 2.3 alpha and uses K2. It appears that as he was using beta versions of 2.2 when he came across this issue and developed the Disable WordPress Widgets Plugin.

I downloaded and installed it and can verify that it worked with the release version of 2.2 and allowed my K2 theme to work gracefully again. I thought I’d help get the word out for all the other Sidebar Module users out there.

My wife’s current hairdryer had just died. It was a pretty good one that had cost her ~$100 (I had no idea they could cost that much). But she really liked it. We went to Costco and she bought some $20 model they had over there and had been using it but knew that she didn’t like it as much. Being the tech gadget freak that I am, I decided to employ my research and purchasing skills as if I were buying some new computer accessory, to find her the best hairdryer I could as a birthday gift.

So I searched around for some reviews and comparisons of top hairdryers out there. The best I found was “How to pick the best professional hair dryer” at Missiko.com and “Buying The Right Hair Dryer” from CBS News. After reading each of these it became clear that a two rose to the top which were the Farouk CHI Turbo & Rocket Ionic hair dryer as well as the T3 Evolution Tourmaline hair dryer. I learned about what makes these higher end hair dryers so much better based on use of negatively charged ions, tourmaline, and ceramics. So my next step was to find some user reviews for each of these which I found over at a commerce site called Folica.com. They had a good number of user reviews for the Chi Turbo, Chi Rocket as well as the T3 Evolution. After thinking about it some more I decided to get my wife the Chi Rocket. Needless to say my wife was very happy not only with the hair dryer I bought her, but with the research I did to make sure I got her the best one.

Guys, let me tell you, going through a process like this to get your lady a tech gadget can go a long way in getting her to appreciate the nuances of getting better gear. It can also open the door to her understanding why we go through so much trouble selecting our gear. Hopefully she will understand this as I decide which High Def DVD player I will be purchasing soon.

• I was having IE6 compatability issues where the sidebar was wonky and didn’t appear properly
• didn’t like being at the mercy of the modder to update based on newer K2 releases
• I started having some issues with the Sidebar Modules embedded in the latest K2 and once again didn’t want to be at the mercy of K2 for SBM upgrades
• I was bored

My search for Cleaker took a while. My requirements for a new theme were:

• 3 Column with content on the left followed by 2 sidebars on the right
• Flexibility to change the overall theme width as well as the columns
• Support for Widgets (hence Sidebar Modules)
• Navigation buttons in header based on Pages
• Ability to have a custom header image
• Looked good

This was a pretty time consuming process but in the end it was worth it. Cleaker met all of my requirements and then some. The first step was to prepare by porting over all of my existing theme customizations necessary to Cleaker. I’m pretty good about keeping a text file that identifies every customization I make to my theme along with details and the actual code. These items include content from third party services like Google Analytics, code necessary for plugins, scripts for widgets etc. I highly recommend you do this as it can be a nightmare trying to remember where all these pieces are without them being documented. So edited the templates necessary as well as created all the sidebar modules necessary.

After finishing that process I began to concentrate on remaining issues. Currently I’m having layout problems I haven’t gotten around to with my Slickr plugin which I use for my photos page as well as with my Lifestream plugin for my Lifestream page. I’ve been too lazy to fix them as I struggle nightly whether to work on content or design and content usually wins. Not a huge deal and not the fault of the theme.

Next up was customizing the theme a bit for my liking. As I began to dig through the style.css file I was very happy to see that it was lined with helpful commenting. The main thing I wanted to do was modify the column the overall width of the theme as well as the columns. For anyone else interested it is easily done by editing the style values below:

#wrapper – changed width to 1000px
#header – changed width to 1000px
#content – changed width to 550px
#sidbarRight – changed width to 170px
#sidebarLeft – changed width to 150px
#footer – changed width to 971px
ul#Nav – changed to 1000px

There was still one more step necessary for these column changes to work and that was to modify the “contentbg2.gif” & “header.gif” images. Since I was increasing the content column and extending the overall width of the theme, I needed to move the seperator and add to the right side of contentbg2.gif.

Cleaker contentbg2.gif modified

I also had to increase the width of my header.gif image from 900 to 1000 pixels

I made some other changes too such as incorporating the blockquote style which I liked more from K2 and changed the font weight to bold for the headlines. I will probably play with the color scheme and make some other changes as well in the future.

I am very happy with this theme and urge others that are looking for a great looking, and easily editable theme, to give it a try.

My modified version of Cleaker 2.1 Widgetized is available here

I’ve been hunting and pecking for nuggets of info for Battlefield 2 and haven’t found a single source that has everything. So I thought I’d create a quick little repository of all the info I’ve found thus far.

Note: I will continually update this page as I come across more information so bookmark it and visit often.

Update:6/29/07
I found another cool player stats site called BF2Player.com that is definitely worth checking out and also offers a large number of custom signatures that you can use. Below is the one I selected but there are a bunch more.

Update:6/23/07

• There have been several comments regarding Stats not getting updated I’ve found a thread that discusses the issue here

How to re-install with Expansion Packs & Add-ons

• I recently had to re-install on a new machine and it was a bit tricky considering I had purchased add-ons using the EA downloader. Luckily I found a thread that explained the sequence of loading stuff here

Info Snapshot

• Current Version 1.41
• Official Home Page here
• Download patches and demos here
• More downloads at GamersHell
• Top 100 Mods available here

Tweaking

• A guide to tweaking your system for Battlefield 2 can be found here
• A guide to tweak your complete system for gaming in general can be found here
• Having trouble with crashing to desktop or other lockup issues Some have mentioned that it may be a good idea to clear your cache

Great new overall Tips & Strategy site. This is probably the best and most comprehensive one out there now. It has all the standard stuff like rank and badge requirements but has much more to offer. This includes a guide to piloting helicopters, to specific tactics on all the maps. It even includes easter eggs in the game. Check it out now at http://www.secretsofbattlefield.com/

WidgetBucks – Trend Watch – WidgetBucks.com

Best stats website I have found
BF2s.com
This site goes way beyond any others in regards to stats. It has a super clean design using some fancy css layout that allows for individual column sorting within tables. You do a head to head comparison with another player. And they provide the html to create the fancy image insertion you see below.
You can look me up here.

I found a WordPress Plugin that allows you to display your stats from bf2s.com. The plugin is available here. An example of the output with my stats is below:

Ultimate Tools Utility for Battlefield 2
I came across the following tool which has lots of good features

You can download it here

Ribbons, Badges and Medals

The best site I have found to contain the most detailed information is Ubar which is now part of BF2S

• Battlefield 2 Ribbons Requirements
• Battlefield 2 Badges Requirements
• Battlefield 2 Medals Requirements
• Battlefield 2 – Special Forces Ribbons Requirements
• Battlefield 2 – Special Forces Badges Requirements
• Battlefield 2 – Special Forces Medals Requirements

Below is some other basic info.

Best First Weapon to Unlock
After reading posts on many forums, the overall concensus appears to be either the Spec Ops or Medic kit

If you want evidence of this it can be found at the Total BF2 Forums here

Remove intro demo movies
This will allow you to automatically bypass all intro movies and take you directly into the game.

Assuming you installed in the default location:
Go to C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\Battlefield 2 Demo\mods\bf2\Movies
Create a folder called backup
Move all files into this folder EXCEPT for:
noise.bik
menu.bik
menu_loggedin.bik

Others instructions state to delete the files, but I feel safer moving them to another folder in case they become necessary in the future with a patch.

Run game in 1280 x 1024 resolution
This is a common resolution that people are running that isn’t supported within the in-game menu.

Simply modify your shortcut to the game to include these parameters:
+szx 1280 +szy 1024

So your shortcut should look like this if you installed in the default location:
C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\Battlefield 2 Demo\BF2.exe” +menu 1 +fullscreen 1 +szx 1280 +szy 1024

Console Commands and other inforamtion
A comprehensive list with additional information is available here

Graphs & Charts of Weapon Damage and more…
A table containing this information and more is available here

Rank Requirements and Weapon Unlocks
Below is a breakdown of the Global score necessary to achieve a rank and whether a weapon unlock will become available.

* Also requires + Awards: Basic Knife Combat Badge, Basic Pistol Combat Badge, Basic Assault Combat Badge, Basic Anti-tank Combat Badge, Basic Sniper Combat Badge, Basic Spec Ops Combat Badge, Basic Support Combat Badge, Basic Engineer Combat Badge, Basic Medic Combat Badge

** �Also requires + Awards: Basic Armor Badge, Basic Transport Badge, Basic Helicopter Badge, Basic Aviator Badge, Basic Air Defense Badge, Basic Ground Defense Badge

File downloads – Patches, Demos, Movies, Screenshots, etc…
I think the best collection of these can all be found on this single page at 3D Gamers

It was only a matter of time before someone created a Battlefield 2 Wiki. I haven’t checked it out yet but this could be a great source of info.

Battlefield 2 Case Mods
these case mods are awesome!

Robin Williams plays Battlefield 2 as a sniper
You can read about it here

Tom’s Hardware tears EA and Dice a new one on Battlefield 2′s early release
The pull no punches in there story available here. I will start off by saying that I love BF2 but the fact does remain that we have all become frustrated for a product that really wasn’t ready to be released to the public. Let’s hope they learn from this.

Purchase Battlefield 2 Items

Current distractions
Listening: Interpol
Watching: Y Tu Mama Tambien
Playing: Desert Combat