Reading Klingon is Hard!

Few months ago I read an article about a new product named FreeWrite designed for distraction-free writing. That product intrigued me because I have a college-bound son who could benefit from such a product. The only trouble was the $549 price tag that seemed excessive considering its limited features. Granted, that is the whole point of the product yet I felt confident that I could build something equivalent for far lower cost. I am pleased to report that after investing only about $75 and some of my spare time, the finished product turned out quite nicely and became a very nice parting gift to my son for his journey into creative writing.

Read the rest here: LinkedIn, Medium.

RoboCopy and Buffalo TeraStation

Recently I set up a new recurring backup scheme from my PC’s main data drive to a 1TB Buffalo TeraStation II Pro NAS device but ran into a strange problem. I was planning to use RoboCopy as an easy and cheap (read: free) solution to a recurring backup. However, I was baffled by RoboCopy’s insistence on copying some files despite options instructing it to only copy changed files. No matter what I did, RoboCopy would always re-copy some files.