For many small businesses, like my own, there isn’t enough time to take care of the important but nittygritty stuff like running virus checks, updating software, and backing up data. These kinds of tasks aren’t urgent, but when things go wrong, proper handling of each of these steps can save a ton of money and effort to fix things.

Virus Checks and updating software are becoming increasingly automated, but backing up data is still something that most people seem to do manually and involve copying the data to an external hard disk, or backing upto DVD or CDrom.

Occasionally, though, when I’m restoring a system or copying back lost data, I wish that it were much more automated, and less finicky. In other words, I would prefer that I use an Online Storage for my data as it kills two birds with one stone: it backs up stuff, and it’s off-site meaning it’s safe from theft, fire and flooding! Onsite backups, while mostly safe, don’t have this added benefit.

IBackup’s online storage allows users to treat their virtual drive as if it were a real drive by mapping the drive to ‘My Computer’ (You can view the demo here). Then dropping, double clicking and many typical file functions are available, making back up easier. Want to back up a folder? Just copy the folder and paste it on to the drive as usual. Copying takes a little longer across the net but should work just the same.

With these mapped drives, you can open many types of Office files by just double clicking as normal! And collaborative features are also included should you need to share your files with others. While these alone would likely increase your company’s efficiency, the returns for secure off-site back up are priceless!

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When we are working on our blogs, we tend to focus on a very narrow range of browsers , because these browser are likely the ones that we found installed on our computers when we bought them:

IE6.0 or 7.0 on windows machines; Konqueror on Linux; and Safari on Mac….

But what about the visitors who use different browsers on different machines? What happens to them?

If my stats are anything to go by, visitors come from a variety of browsers , and about 4.5% of my own visitors come from outside the top 2 browsers. That’s a fairly large community of users.

Perhaps you can try out this service called BrowserShots. It’s not a particularly quick service as once submitted, your website is put in a queue. I’m still waiting for mine to be processed.

But, after nearly 50 minutes the shots came back and here is what the page looks like for the selected browsers:

I chose one image for you to look at showing this blog below, but in fact you can click download all options for you to compare yourself. This is the image of my blog in Safari on a 2000 system. It looks okay, right.

It didn’t load so well on Konqueror or on IE5.01 (not surprisingly). On Konqueror, the problem lay in some missing plugins.

But the purpose of this website is to allow users to see how their blog would look on machines, systems and browsers that they themselves may not have. While the range isn’t comprehensive, most of the general browsers are there that are currently used and a few older ones, too.

I was browsing on StumbleUpon this evening when I came across this rather unique specimen which is claimed to be the smallest Linux computer in the World. I personally can’t verify this claim, but it is a unique product.

“The picotux 100 is the world’s smallest Linux computer, only slightly larger (35mm×19mm×19mm) than an RJ45 connector.”

It runs a form of Linux called uClinux, but I’m just not sure what consumers could do with this product. It hasn’t got much of a user interface…

What would you do with one of these? I guess in a few years, we’ll be seeing entire pcs with operating systems mounted in these devices!