Found a reference to Mozy in PC Magazine. If you are looking to backup a small amount of files - 2GB or less - it’s absolutely free. Even at 20GB, it’s only $40/year. That’s much cheaper than the competition. They do require you to get a weekly newsletter that I bet is full of ads. Don’t know, since I haven’t gotten one yet. But that seems less obtrusive than having ads every time you read mail. ...

Lawrence Lessig has a fascinating article on how the State of California tried to simplify preparing taxes. It used payroll information to do a “ReadyReturn” that could be just signed and returned. Or they could use the info on it to make their own return. Of course, the tax preparation lobby started to pressure for the test program to be abandoned. Which is ridiculous. And some lawmakers listened. Which is more ridiculous. ...

Super-Sizing Your Meal Costs More Than You Think talks about the hidden costs of super-sizing. “Once on the lips, forever on the hips” or something like that. I stopped off at McDonald’s to grab lunch for my daughter Charlie and myself as we drove out to Nana Sue’s. To my surprise, the plain hamburger and “fancy” cheeseburger no longer seemed to be available. There was only the double cheeseburger or bacon cheeseburger. And there was now a “Mighty Kid’s meal” that’s the equivalent of super-sizing a Happy Meal. ...

Not quite sure how I ran across Fitness Hacks for Geeks but it’s a very nice article about some of the options for making it easier to exercise. I’m lucky enough to live a few blocks away from Mt. Tabor Park. It’s notable for being the only extinct volcano within city limits in the US. It’s a bit silly to call it a mountain, given that the mountain blew up many thousands of years ago. But the little (I assume) that’s left still makes for a challenging walk or run. ...

Bill Burnham has a nice summary of what Google Base in general and the real estate section in particular might mean for vertical web sites like Trulia. It’s not a lot of fun competing in a section where Google is competing. I can vouch for that first hand.

David Pogue of the New York Times writes about how images are manipulated with Photoshop. As a dad with 2 young daughters, I find this kind of thing appalling. The images in magazines are what some women (and men) compare themselves to. How in the world can they justify this? Put me down for requiring a “altered by Photoshop” logo. Or just prohibiting this altogether.

The City Council of Portland was very interested in buying Portland General Electric from what was left of Enron. Rate cuts of 10% or more were talked about. With amazing 20-20 hindsight, it’s now obvious what the City should have done: Keep PGE’s rates the same! Keeping them the same would have let them . Give rebates to other cities. Here, Gresham & Beaverton, here’s 10% of the electric bills of everyone in your city boundaries. Now be quiet. . Give money to Portland Public Schools. . Fund the tram . Stop people wondering what would happen when well-paid, unionized private sector workers became well-paid, unionized public sector workers. Did anybody expect there to be fewer people? Less pay?

TechCrunch has a nice summary of online music services. I’ve been pretty happy with the Yahoo Music service. I’ve got boxes of CDs that I need to rip some day so I often find myself using the Yahoo service to listen to songs that I have already … somewhere in a box in the attic. Using a streaming service is perfect for me, since I have no intention of buying those songs at $.99/each.

Ran across a reference to libraries using Open Source programs like Linux and Open Office. Neat. Useful, the program that the library uses, sounds neat but it has the lame “we won’t tell you the price” approach typical of many companies. At least Fonality sort of tells you a price. I really like the idea of locked-down Linux running sessions with keyboard and monitor rather than individual machines. One machine to maintain per location, hopefully. Have another couple of machines at the central library for relatively immediate replacement if a machine melts down. ...

I’ve been looking at re-arranging the partitions on my Sony VAIO desktop. They gave me a 15GB C: and a 100GB D: and even with installing everything I could to D:, it was still getting tighter and tighter. Looked at some fairly scary Linux-based partition shrinking software. Problem is that all of my partitions are NTFS, not the older FAT file system. Nothing (easy( and free that I could find would downsize D: and then increase C: ...