rsync --partial
Living here in East Africa, I’m learning how to be productive with a less-than-blindingly-fast internet connection. It’s fun, really: another externally-imposed constraint that calls forth creativity.
I’ve solved most of my bandwidth problems by using desktop clients (Mail, NetNewsWire, Actiontastic) instead of web-based ones (Gmail, Bloglines, Tracks). But lately a different sort of hurdle has come downloading large files with intermittent internet access — it’s quite painful to lose half a Linux install CD when the connection drops!
Now, rsync has long been my friend, but just today I’ve found its default behavior is NOT to resume downloads midstream after a dropped connection as I’d expected — if the files don’t match, you start back at the very beginning. But, thankfully, there *is* a command line option you can use to make it right.
Which brings me to the whole point of this post:
rsync --partial matthewtodd.org:~/downloads/debian.iso .
Subscribing to Feeds
If you’d like to give the Bible-reading feeds a try but don’t know where to start, here’s a quick guide:
- Visit http://reading.matthewtodd.org/plans/discipleship-journal.
- Click “Google Reader” in the sidebar.
- Click the big blue “Add to Google Reader” button.
Then, each day, visit http://reader.google.com to catch up with the day’s reading.
Incidentally, you can subscribe to this blog in the same way. If there are a handful of sites you follow, using such a feed-reading tool will allow you to check up on all of them in the same place.
NB: This guide assumes a Google account, but if you haven’t one, Bloglines is a good choice: use the Bloglines link in the sidebar and follow your nose.
