Category: Geek

Apparently Bebo and Meebo are not the same thing. This might explain why I recently got a funny look when I said to an employee of one (and I have no idea which), “I think I just talked to one of your coworkers.” Whoops.

 

I’ve recently become obsessed with the Tesla Roadster. It’s a fully electric sports car (not a hybrid) that gets over 200 miles per charge. If I had the money, I would order one now. Unfortunately it’s still a bit outside of my budget at $100,000. But think about how much I’d save on gas. Learn more at Tesla Motors.

I haven’t seen any other reviews from other actual customers (other than a comment on some blog), but here’s my initial impression of the service after spending an embarrassing amount of money and trying it out this week: Not ready for prime time. It’s late and I’m tired, so expect a more in-depth explanation possibly at some point this weekend. But for now I’ll tell you this: I haven’t even completed a successful initial backup yet and I’m frustrated.

Hopefully their support services will impress me and this will have a happy ending.

After weighing my options for a day, I just signed up for Transport with a 1TB drive and 100GB/month bandwidth. After I get it all set on my machines, I’ll be sharing this with five other family members. It makes sense for what I want. I’m hoping it will be a “set it and forget it” experience, and I’ll let you all know how it goes. Thanks for watching.

After I published my post on potential offsite backup solutions, I got a few comments in my moderation queue. Most of them were obvious spam, on unrelated topics such as gambling. However I did see one comment that made a coherent statement on the subject, and then recommended a site for comparing backup services. Unfortunately for the commenter, I recognized it as the same comment I saw on another blog entry about the subject. On the other blog entry, the comment stood out since it wasn’t exactly relevant to the particular type of backup being discussed, and so I assumed it was spam.

So how can you prevent these sneaky comments from appearing on your blog, without looking at everyone else’s comments? It’s easy: just go to your favorite search engine and enter a portion of the text in quotes, so it searches for the exact phrase. If it brings up results of the same comment on other blogs, you probably want to delete it.

Update: Jason also warns about compliment spam. I know I’ve seen someone fall for this until I politely pointed it out to him.

Two years ago a marketer for an online weather reporting service asked me what they can do in mobile. I suggested cars and whipped this up in a few minutes. I still think it’s a good idea. Does it exist yet?

Mobile Weather [PDF]

I think that Time Machine is one of the most important inventions of its time. There’s finally a backup system that normal users can and will use. But now that regular users are finally backing up, many for the first time, why not these backups more robust by moving them offsite? That’s the next problem that needs to be solved.

I only recently started exploring remote backup options, but never really got that far since I already store my irreplaceable files (my photos) on various online services. Everything else could be lost. I don’t really deal with local text documents, my site is obviously online, I don’t have work stuff on my personal computers, and if I lose my iTunes library I can just play the songs in my head. But what about my family? They store plenty of documents locally and don’t upload pictures online as much as I do. They’re already using Time Machine, but to local drives. It’s even worse for the laptop users, since I don’t have a wireless backup configured at home (we have an old Airport) and outside of home (college), they’re on their own remembering to connect the backup USB drive. I need something that happens online, and that doesn’t require hard-to-configure third-party software. Even if I were just backing up my own stuff, I’d want it to be easy. I’m lazy, and as soon as it gets complicated, my backups become more intermittent. So what solutions are out there, if any? Let’s take a look:

Transport
Today, I came across a service called Transport that lets you place a Time Capsule in a data center, and back up to it online. It sounds like something I would want.

A one-year contract will cost about $350, plus the cost of a Time Capsule ($300 for 500GB or $500 for 1TB). I’d have to ask my family to figure out how much space we’d need, but I’m guessing we could get away with using a single 1TB unit for all of our computers. Or maybe I’d buy a separate one for myself since I’m likely to use the most. I think this is worth it. You can’t put a price on things such as family photos, and it means more peace of mind for me since I’ll be the one who’s called if someone’s computer crashes.

In terms of security, yes, this means that private documents may be stored unencrypted in a remote facility, so it will take some evaluation to determine how much I trust the security of the service. However, anything that’s unencrypted is just as vulnerable sitting in a house or apartment, which unfortunately can also be broken into. If I really need to protect something, I’m already encrypting it anyway.

One major concern that I have (and that I forgot to ask the owner about while I was chatting with him) is that I cannot find any official documentation that Time Machine supports backups to AFP volumes. I even found a note that backups may be completely lost when the disk is full. This could certainly be a deal breaker. I’ll have to ask about this tomorrow, and if it the service is based on an unsupported hack, it should really be noted upfront! If you know anything about this, please let me know.

UPDATE: Apparently I misunderstood the AFP issue. I just got a clarification from macminicolo.net, and the hack was to get Time Machine to work with a NAS device or a drive connected to an Airport Extreme (before that support was added). Time Capsule has always supported AFP, and it’s specifically designed for Time Machine (and made by Apple). So all is good… I think Transport may be what I choose, even if it is a bit pricey compared to other options.

For now, let’s assume that I just have outdated knowledge about AFP support. I’ll be sure to check on that before making any purchases and leave an update in the comments. This seems like it should require very little work on my part once it’s set up, since it works with built-in software and happens automatically online.

Continuum
After I (incorrectly – see update above) discovered that Transport may not be as robust as I initially thought, I started searching for other solutions. Continuum, which at this point is only in private beta, has a different approach. Here’s how I understand it: Data is first backed up normally to an external drive using Time Machine, with no special hacks. Then, once a day the backup file is sent to an online storage location via the Continuum software.

Mozy
Mozy requires the use of third-party software for the entire backup process. It’s also only designed to backup certain types of files, and not the entire volume. After using Time Machine, I’d really prefer something that’s tied closer to the operating system. One major problem with third-party software is that it’s another thing to worry about with every OS update. However, it sounds really good and I might be okay with using this in conjunction with a local Time Machine backup. The pricing sounds great at first, but with an individual monthly fee for each computer that adds up quickly for a large family, and would end up costing about the same amount annually as Transport (minus the initial cost of the Time Capsule).

JungleDisk
JungleDisk also requires third-party software. Have you used it? Let me know what you think.

CrashPlan
CrashPlan is a creative idea. Instead of backing up to a some data center, you just back up to any other computer you have control of, even your friend’s computer. As long as the other computer is in a different building, I’d call that an offsite backup. What’s nice about this is if your computer crashes and you need to restore the data, you can just grab the backup drive from the remote location and restore via USB in minutes instead of downloading gigabytes of data over a DSL or cable connection. This would require some coordination, but it might be a nice solution. Of course this also falls under the unfortunate third-party software category.

So before I take the plunge and commit to one of these services, I want you to share your thoughts in the comments of this post. What do you think about the services? Are there questions I should ask first? Is there something else that’s just as easy but cheaper? Should I hold off for a better solution? Remember that I am in California and my family is in Pennsylvania, so this has to be something that I can set up once (remotely) and then forget about it.

 

I will be sitting in an airport tomorrow night when the season finale of The Office is on. After arriving in Philly, I will only be home for a short time before a 2.5 hour car ride. I’d love to kill some time in the car watching The Office. At first, I thought this wouldn’t be possible due to lack of an Internet connection and the fact that the show is no longer on iTunes.

But with my iPhone, except when I’m on an airplane, I always have an Internet connection. I’ve emailed from a chairlift in Colorado. I’ve read book reviews on Amazon in a bookstore. I always have the world’s information at my fingertips.

But, you say, there’s no Flash! How will you get it from Hulu or NBC.com? Well, fortunately it does support QuickTime (big surprise), and NBC has a special mobile site formatted specifically for the iPhone. Try visiting NBC.com from your iPhone (or change your User-Agent) and you’ll be automatically directed there. On the site, they have full episodes of The Office encoded in iPhone-compatible videos. So that’s what I’ll be downloading at EDGE speed on my way from Pennsylvania to Poughkeepsie.

I tested out a download (over Wi-Fi) and was disappointed by the video quality. The video is letterboxed 320 x 240 MPEG-4 in a 3GP container at 15 fps. The iPhone can support pretty decent video, but what NBC uses is blurry and the audio and video are out of sync. I can deal with the blurriness as they’re probably optimizing for lower download times. I’m not a huge fan of the fact that at the same time they’re wasting data and creating distracting artifacts around the edges by encoding black pixels with letterboxing, but that happens all the time and I’ve learned to accept it. It’s the sync issue that makes it a truly frustrating experience for a video geek. However, I’ll probably be tired enough when I watch on Friday that it won’t bother me.

My geeky friends won’t stop talking about this thing, and I do think there may be some cases where I’ll find it useful, so I’m going to start using Twitter. I think I’ll use it for moments when a blog entry is too broad or permanent, but I also don’t feel like bothering a group with an email. “Running late… can someone save a donut for me?” is what I expect my updates to be like.

One thing I’m confused about is how I should follow people. Until now, I’ve just been subscribing to RSS feeds of my friends’ Twitter updates. I have a different feed for each person, and it doesn’t expose my social network to the rest of the world, since the list of people I’m subscribed to isn’t public. But I notice that many people receive updates using the “follow” feature on Twitter, which then provides an aggregate feed of updates for anyone being followed. The big difference here is that anyone can then look at my “following” list to see who I’m reading. What is the advantage of using this? Should I do this?

I think this is similar to my problem with blogrolls.

I have been spoiled by a great feature of Safari. I usually start out working with one browser window full of tabs, and then at some point decide that I need to look at two pages at once. At that point, I just drag out one of the tabs to a new window. I use Firefox as least as much as I use Safari, and it bothers me every single day that I can’t do the same thing in both browsers. And while I’m sure that this functionality can be enabled with a Firefox extension, I’m not too excited about that solution since my previous experience with tab-enhancing extensions has yielded too much unexpected behavior.

Here’s what I’m talking about: (YouTube | QuickTime)

For some extra fun, hold down the Shift keywhile you perform the action.