Try a little experiment (I haven't tried this yet, but it's what I would do for backing up a TrueCrypt volume): Create a small TrueCrypt volume, about 100 MB. Put a few files in there. Unmount it and split the file into 100 1-MB files using HJSplit or similar. Make a copy of the 100 files (this is the backup).

VOTE: Google

Excellent. Clean, efficient use of small space is quite a bit more inspiring to me than a multiple-monitor setup in a remodeled basement. Not against multiple monitors or basements; just sayin'!

Excellent. Clean, efficient use of small space is quite a bit more inspiring to me than a multiple-monitor setup in a remodeled basement. Not against multiple monitors or basements; just sayin'!

@2 replies: It's not that bad, is it? The walls of a refrigerator are well insulated (does the outside of your refrigerator ever feel cold?), and the air intake for most upright models is underneath the fridge, away from air heated by the stove.

@Pooter: Exactly my problem, too. I tried scheduling daily backups at 12 AM so that at least my computer would crawl at the time I should crawl into bed. But that didn't work very well: I would just cancel the backup if I found a cool-enough YouTube vid.

It looks like it tries to figure out your present ZIP code from your IP address, so it will show average energy costs for your locale even without you entering any data.

@lolzstuff: Double-paned glass windows are pretty good insulators because of the dead space between the panes. It's just a matter of controlling the greenhouse effect in the summertime.

@Prairie Moon: Like other commenters have noted, tweaking process priority does not affect disk access. Probably most of the time we spend waiting on our computers is due to network latency and disk access. Our multi-core CPUs are not the bottlenecks; they are more than enough to handle "typical" workloads.…

duplicate comment removed. Be careful about commenting around midnight!

I'm interested in this topic, but this post was not written very well. If it's a how-to, then where are the steps? If it's providing several options to do one thing, then where are the options clearly compared?

Thank goodness! I spent way too many hours playing Google Pac-man last weekend because I thought it would soon be going the way of /dev/null.

I recall reading somewhere: Windows already gives a priority boost to the application whose window has the current focus. (This boost is not shown in the base priority displayed by Task Manager.)

I'm all for vertical storage, but if you live in earthquake country, take some time to secure the heavy items that are up high.

@OrielDrusus: I don't understand the original quote about your ideas being "someone else's" except maybe he is trying to say that no idea is 100% original.

@simonbarsinister: Re: refrigerator doors. That's my idea! (not actually kidding)

Excellent article.

@bookwench: That's all true, although I wouldn't make the mistake of underestimating a hacker's compute resources. As long as they have their botnets, the faster our computers get the faster their botnets get.

@bookwench: Nice.

@bookwench: "Antibacterial Hand Lotion" isn't random at all. But "pMkny0o3g2yXgHXeZb9c" as generated by Password Safe is random.