LightScribe is HP's new, long-delayed, and still-not-shipping technology for labeling recordable CDs and DVDs. Basically, you have to buy special discs coated on the non-data side with a dye, and special drives. Then, after you burn your disc, you flip it over and use special software that uses the drive laser to burn a "silkscreen-quality" monochrome graphical label into the disc.

Unfortunately, what appears to be a botched press release from MKM/Verbatim is contributing to the ongoing stumbling introduction of LightScribe, since it says they'll be selling "stampers and ink" for LightScribe-enabled drives.

I've written about the mess here:
What is LightScribe Ink?

Some people with downed Florida ISPs are switching ISPs as though they've really solved the problem. Of course, every ISP in every part of the country is vulnerable to being knocked out for an extended period of time. If your web site needs to survive extended downtime, you really need a backup plan designed to let you relocate your website to another ISP within a matter of hours.

Of course, most users deserve at least a modest amount of offsite backup, and we all mean to do it, but just don't get around to it. That led me to think of using hurricane season as a reminder to create or verify your offsite backup plan, just like fire departments use the daylight savings time switch to remind us to check our fire alarm batteries.

www.backupcritic.com/articles/hurricane-online-backup.html

I've written an article to remind myself of the pros and cons of paying for the extra hardware to do disk mirroring (RAID-1) in a home computer (as opposed to a workstation or server).

The link is: http://www.backupcritic.com/articles/raid-for-home.html