NaNo Technology

November is coming.
Hard drives will get eaten.
Flash drives will fail or go through the wash.
Operating Systems will turn into mush.
You'll hit ctrl-a, a random letter, and then ctrl-s.
You'll wish you had made a backup.

Email stuff to yourself. Save it on a flash drive, external hard drive, your mom/dad/sister/brother/roommate/random stranger's computer. Use Dropbox or Mozy. Make redundant copies. Never let the copy on your computer be the only one.

You'll thank yourself later.

This forum is intended for the discussion of the Technology used to write your NaNo, or support yourself while writing; Tech Help is the place where volunteers and site administrators check most frequently to answer your questions and troubleshoot problems about this website and its many functions.

If you'd like fast, useful help, then check out Tech Help, and we'll do our best to help you out!

If you'd like to recommend a program here, please do so. If you want to promote your for-sale program, then you'll need to post that in the Marketing, Self Promotion, and Stuff for Sale forum. If you are offer a free program, you are welcome to post it here. That doesn't mean that you can't post non-free options here, only that you can't pimp your own for-sale programs. ;)

Some great, often-requested resources:

NaNo Report Card for OpenOffice

Truckpoetry's Report Card + Stuff

Report Cards + Word War Spreadsheet

What kind of light source would a modern archeologist use when going into a tunnel underground? I have a image in my head from TV of some sort of plastic tube, like a fluorescent lamp, but I don't know if this is correct, nor the right name for it. Please help.

Sure, it's probably a good idea to make a dozen copies of everything you've written and scatter it across every form of storage media you can plug into your computer, but for some reason, the possibility of losing every word I've written never bothered me. Since the month began, I've only backed up my novel three times as part of my more-or-less-weekly backup of everything on my computer (the last time was last Friday).

Am I the only one in these parts who is not paranoid about their computer dying on them?

I'm not sure if this is the right forum or not but here's hoping.

I've made myself a nice pretty banner, made it the correct size, and I'm trying to put it in my sig (this is what comes of finishing early for once) but I can't work out how.

I put the code http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v172/sarahce/banner.jpg in my sig and, unless it's my browser playing up, it comes up as the url, not the picture.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I thought I was reasonably techno savvy, but it seems not...

How do you do it?

Thanks :)

I've just downloaded both writing softwares and I absolutely love them, but I can't decide which one I prefer. Which one would you recommend I use?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this or not, apologies if it isn't.

Here's info. about my NaNoWriMo Tracker.

Check it out, tell me what you think.

This is a feature I don't recall seeing elsewhere. Yay!

Grab it here: Excel 2003 version | Excel 2007 version

Has anyone else tried the software? Randy Ingermanson has come up with an actual software application based on his Snowflake workshop where you fill in the boxes and it even helps you create a barebones proposal for your novel. Each section has an audio lecture and notes that you can refer to as well. Normally he says he's going to chargs $100.00 for the software but right now he's offering it for just $20.00 and you get free upgrades for life as well. All in all it looks like a great deal to me.
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/info/snowflake_pro/96a.php

Help! My husband's been asking me what I want for Christmas. I didn't have any ideas til he mentioned he was thinking about getting me a Netbook. We're also talking about getting a new desktop computer, so that may be my present for him (or at least permission for him to go buy a new desktop).

At the moment I do most of my writing on an old laptop that is on it's last legs. The monitor flickers as if it's going to just go kaput one of these days. The springs/hinges on the screen only hold it in place some of the time. It weighs a ton and has a garbled amount of software to even make it do what we want it to do, and it's not as fast as I'd like...I often out type what it can keep up with, which is extremely annoying when I have a great steam of though going.

Our desktop is even worse for speed...

So we're to the point of needing new technology. Do I want to ask for a Netbook, or a new laptop? I need to be able to do a good word processor or some other writing program, as well as have great internet capabilities on it. I'm not sure about what keyboard size either of them would have...might get frustrated if it's got too small a keyboard and causes typos, etc.