New backup drive for the Mini home theater.

I’ve got a Mac Mini that I use as the base for my home theater setup, which I’ve been backing up with Time Machine. In the past few months, I’ve noticed that Time Machine has been keeping backups less than a month, which was tied back to the fact that I’ve been using a 300 GB external drive to back up an internal 80 gig drive and another 300 GB external drive. Neither drive being backed up was full yet, but the math looked pretty clear: having 300 gigs available to back up 380 gigs of potential used space is a pretty bad proposition.

To fix that, I went to Best Buy this weekend and picked up a new quad-interface 500 GB Iomega UltraMax hard drive. So far, no problems and I’ll hopefully be good for another year of worry-free backups.

Green tags in Safari indicate Extended Validation SSL in use.

Since updating my copy of Safari to 3.2.x, I’ve noticed a number of vendors that offer online ordering now have a little green tag with the company’s name next to the lock icon that Safari uses to indicate that a site is using SSL.

After a little Googling, it looks like Apple has implemented support in Safari for recognizing Extended Validation SSL certificates. EV SSL certificates essentially indicate that the vendor in question has gone through an audit process with Webtrust and adopted approved standard practices for certificate validation. In other words, it’s a certificate that’s supposed to make your customer trust you more because you’ve put more effort into protecting the customer’s data from being compromised.