Summary: In This Episode: The Hewlett-Packard fire that destroyed early Silicon Valley History is anything but Uncommon Sense, but you can learn from it: it’s a real “Wake-Up Call”.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * This week’s special guest is Leo Notenboom of <a href="https://askleo.com">Ask Leo</a>. Need a place to start for backing up your computer? Here’s Leo’s <a href="https://askleo.com/how_do_i_backup_my_computer/">basic plan, with links</a> to software.<br> * Here’s <a href="https://go.askleo.com/backupsvideo">Leo’s video</a> telling the story of the fire that took away much of his family history.<br> <br> <br> * There is an ongoing project to save and recover the data from old 9 track tapes of data from the pre-Apollo moon probes in the 1960s. NASA wouldn’t do it, so former NASA employees got together and funded it themselves, bringing some spectacular results. That guilted NASA into throwing a few bucks their way to complete the job, which is how the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project became an actual NASA program. The program has pretty much wound down, and their web site is still privately maintained: <a href="http://www.moonviews.com">Moon Views</a>. Wired ran a fascinating article and <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/">profile of LOIRP co-founder Keith Cowing</a>; Cowing is a longtime friend of True, and once hosted this web site.<br> * The XKCD cartoon Leo refers to is called <a href="https://xkcd.com/1909/">Digital Resource Lifespan</a>. The one I thought he was referring to is <a href="https://xkcd.com/1683/">Digital Data</a>. The idea is indeed a common concern with tech types.<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> After taking the “first season” of the podcast down for a revamp, there were certain episodes listeners said should still be available, so I’m redoing most of those. This is one of them, because it really fits the new theme, even though it starts with a tragedy, because it really is about Uncommon Sense — or, really, what people with Uncommon Sense realize, and do.<br> I’m Randy Cassingham, welcome to Uncommon Sense.<br> What follows is an interview recorded in early November 2017. One note: I say in the recording that the Show Page is on the web site as Podcast 17. That was then, this is now: the Show Page is thisistrue.com/podcast20, where you can find a transcript, and a place to comment. With that, here we go.<br> —–<br> Randy: Welcome to Uncommon Sense, the Podcast companion to the ThisIsTrue.com newsletter with the mission to promote more thinking in the world. I’m Randy Cassingham, and this week I’m joined by a special guest: my old friend Leo Notenboom of AskLeo.com, which has the tagline “Making technology work for everyone.” Welcome, Leo.<br> Leo: Thanks for having me.<br> Randy: You’ll understand in a moment why I asked Leo to join us this week, because this week we’re discussing a story from issue 1220 of the newsletter, which will be included on the show Page at thisistrue.com/podcast17. It’s called “Wake-Up Call” — and you’ll see why I called it that in a moment, if you don’t already realize why.<br> It’s about the fire storm that burned down 1 in 20 homes in Santa Rosa, Calif., recently, and it also took down a couple of “modular buildings” at ...
