Why now? I’m looking to move forward on some projects and the iPad will make doing those a lot easier. And in some cases, they wouldn’t be possible without. What are those projects?

Well first, a quick side trip:

Anonymous offscreen voice: Chuq! Don’t you work for that company that said it was going to build it’s own tablet?

Why, thank you Anonymous offscreen voice. Yes, in fact, I do. And yes, they did. And no, it’s not announced or shipping yet, and I have things to do and people to see.

In all honesty, the reality is this — everyone in the industry owns stuff on multiple platforms. If you aren’t seeing what the other guys are doing, you’re going to miss important stuff. I think the record at work is someone who carries (CARRIES, not “owns”) four platforms: webOS, Android, IOS and a Treo. I still have my iPhone, and it sits mostly in my backback and gets used as an iPod, it has it’s phone number forwarded to my main phone, and it carries the few apps that I can’t yet find an equivalent on webOS. But I dogfooded my Pre long ago, and I use the apps on it if they exist — because if you don’t dog food your own stuff, you can’t live through the pain points that need to be fixed. So I do, happily, and I think we do a pretty good job (and it keeps moving forward).

But there is no webOS tablet yet, at least not that I can admit to, carry around in public or use on a daily basis. When there is, I’ll dogfood that, too. Until that happens, I need something now that does stuff, and the iPad makes sense.

I figured I should just be up front about this, because we all know there are folks out there who look for things to take out of context and push as negatively as they can. And they probably will anyway, but I felt I could either pretend I didn’t have one (which only works until the first time someone sees me with it, and then I have some explaining to do), or I could just explain up front. So I am.  Heck, I could actually be working on some fascinating cross platform thingie that causes sparkling ponies to fly across the room, and if I am, I couldn’t tell you. In any event, the bottom line is the addition of an iPad to the family doesn’t imply anything about anything else other than the iPad is a useful tool, and when I have other useful tools, I’ll get those, too.

So, why did I buy an iPad?

At the start of the year, I made a decision to stop buying dead trees, and I shifted almost all of my book buying electronic. That’s worked out pretty well — I love the Kindle format and I’ve been doing some interesting research into e-publishing myself. It’s really clear that the iPad is a tipping point in the publishing space and I’ve been doing some interesting research into epublishing (more on that later) and I’m at the point where I needed to be able to try things out to mvoe that research forward further. But mostly, it’s because I wanted something more convenient than a laptop to carry about for my reading, and something with a bigger screen than a phone (and my 50 year old nearsighted eyes thank me!).  I like getting away from the desk, away from the keyboard and yet more and more of my “downtime” and research time is spent online. The iPad allows me to nicely sit on the couch with Laurie, or pretty much anywhere, and do that.

Another thing I’m looking to investigate is using tablets as part of my photography. I have a number of things I’m considering, but the one that’s intrigued me a lot I wrote about a few months ago. I think the iPad would be a nice way to do keywording and annotation of pictures, and I want to start prototyping up some options and see what happens. I think you could do a lot using a combination of a Lightroom plugin to handle migration, Dropbox and some custom code on the tablet to enable browsing and curation through updating the EXIF. Still a bunch of details to work out, but I’m ready to go work them out, and I can’t exactly do that without a tablet.

Finally, Project management. I’ve started doing some planning on a few fronts, trying to get back and moving on some things I’ve let sit fallow for a few months, and I needed something to help me get and stay organized. I grabbed a copy of Things, and I’m starting to figure out what I need to figure out about the projects I’m trying to reboot.

And yeah — the iPad is a damn good piece of work. but man, I miss multi-tasking of applications already.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at I have committed iPad.. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

The first thing I needed to do was install the upgraded hard drive (500 Gig, 7200 RPM). thanks to some very nice instructions from Other World Computing (where I bought the drive) and the fact that Apple made the unibody Macbook Pros easy units to swap drives in (Thank You Apple!) that took all of ten minutes.  I’ve done that enough times by now I could pretty much do it in my sleep, but it’s not always easy.

Once I did that, though, a bit of a quandry. I now have a Mac with an unformatted drive, a drive attached to nothing with MacOS X on it, and a need to get MacOS X on the new drive somehow. There are all sorts of ways to do that; I ended up using the recovery DVD and simply booting it, formatting the drive, and installing fresh from the DVD. That took about 30 minutes, very painless.

Other options: I could have wired the original drive into a housing and booted the mac onto it, then cloned the drive (or cloned the drives via my old Mac, or… or… and in reality, all of the other ways to do it would have been more complicated and taken longer, IMHO. That’s why the recovery DVD exists…

First thing I did: Cloned my old laptop drive (via Superduper) and then put that boot drive far away from potential chaos. I also took my old backup drives and put them far away as well. Before I started, I had THREE current, bootable copies PLUS my Time Machine backup. I took my secondary firewire drive and turned it off and unplugged the firewire so I couldn’t accidentally trash it (there was a 2nd current copy of that data in Time Machine). More copies a good thing when it comes to backups.

Once the OS was installed on the new drive, I booted onto it and it ran through Apple’s standard setup process. Put my old mac in firewire target mode, connected the two, and let Apple’s software copy the data. 4.5 hours later, data is copied and my new mac looks like my old Mac (except where it doesn’t… there are a couple of things to remember here….)

Then you fire up Software Update and let it download all of the updates. That took about an hour.

Then I fired up the Application DVD and fired it up (it is also the hardware test DVD in this generation of new-machine disks) – since I never upgraded to iLife ’09, I needed to restore the applications that were on the disk I didn’t use, and I couldn’t do that until after the migration was done. That took another 45 minutes or so.

One thing that isn’t done by the migration assistant is XCODE; if you have the Apple developer environment installed, it won’t migrate it. That’s not a big deal, and there was an update I needed to install anyway, so the last thing I did before crashing was start a download of the latest tools from the developer site. And then I crashed.

Started about 5:30PM, crashed at 1AM with the migration complete and the system fully functional (minus XCODE). And almost all of that time was doing things I wanted to do while the system was doing whatever it was doing. I probably spent an hour total actively working on the update, the rest was the computer doing things while I waited.

I know some people still prefer to move stuff over manually and don’t want to trust the migration assistant, and I suppose if you’re someone who’s off hacking the guts of the system, you might need to. My view is “have fun. let me know when you’re done”, and I long ago learned to trust Apple knowing how to do this better than me. I also learned long ago not to hack the parts of the system that Apple “owns” — if I need a custom version of Perl or want to run an Apache server, I create a user and install the software into that user and build my own custom versions and run those instead. That does two things: it isolated the installed system from breaking because I inadvertantly step on something it depends on, and it isolates my custom stuff from being broken at a bad time by a software update that steps on my customizations. Everyone wins — and since it lives in a user account, it’s compatible with the migration assistant. (this was a trick we learned to figure out how to build custom hacks into Perl and Apache while still being generic and compatible inside the Apple data center, so the data center could maintain the boxes and OS without impacting production systems, and we could build the tools we needed without the data center staff having to be involved or approving stuff. works great, once you get in the habit of doing it).

One thing to realize when you upgrade your computer is that a few things are going to change. In my cast, the necessary changes were that my old laptop had a DVI video out, and my new one has this new mini-video plug thing. Also, my old laptop was Firewire 400, the new one is Firewire 800. That meant a trip to Fry’s for a new video dongle and cable, and some replacement firewire cables with the new plug types. While there, I realized they had a 2Tb drive for $110, and that solved my backup problem. This all happened while my data was migrating, so it was all ready when the new machine was ready…

Next morning was installing the dev tools, upgrading a few apps I realized needed patches (especially Parallels and the XP partittion), and then setting up backups.

These things are easier if you’re careful how you store stuff on disk. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty careful about where I put my data — yes, I use Documents and Pictures and Music and Movies and I keep stuff where it “belongs”, and I limit what lives on my Desktop to active files and projects. That REALLY simplifies major migrations like this. Times like this ARE a good chance to go through your files and identify stuff that you can throw out or archive offline, and in fact, I did take about 250 Gigs of data (mostly low-quality pictures) and copied them to two separate drives, one which will live in my desk, one which will live offsite. Next time I do this kind of archiving, I’ll buy a couple of new drives, copy the data from this archive onto it, add the new archived data, and then store a copy offsite. One way to limit the “I can’t read my only copy of this” is to keep two copies, and the other important way is to refresh the archive every so often. Given you can buy 2TB drives for $110 today, there’s really no reason not to simply replace your archives with a new, really larger drive every couple of years. And so I shall. And remember, THIS is the data I never expect to ever need or touch again, but am keeping around in case I’m wrong. So I’m comfortable only keeping two copies of it…

I plopped the new 2Tb drive in the dock. I ALSO took the old 2Tb backup drive and stuck it in a static free envelope and it and the offsite copy of the archive data and my old laptop then were put far away from my working area so I wouldn’t accidentally do something to them. In the morning, when I go to work, the offsite data will go with me. In a week or so, once i’m absolutely sure I have everything I need off of it, I’ll wipe the disk on the old laptop, and then it’ll go to a friend who refurbishes them and lends them out to underpriviledged kids that otherwise wouldn’t have computers.

Backups… When you’re schlepping around half a terabyte of data, it takes time. I fired up Superduper to clone my new boot drive to the 2TB drive and set up a timed refresh for every night at 1:30AM. Once that was done, I fired up Time Machine and got it started.

DAMN but Time Machine is slow. It copied data at maybe 40% of the speed of SuperDuper, and SuperDuper is pretty much as fast as you can get. I keep finding reasons not to like Time Machine in large data environments, but not enough that I’m ready to turn it off. Just don’t depend on it as your primary backup, folks, not if you do large data sets  like this. For my mom — it’s great. For me, I get annoyed a lot.

Once my boot disk was copied (twice — once cloned, once Time Machine) I plugged in my secondary firewire and turned it on. And then fired up the backups on IT. And timed them, because I was now annoyed at Time Machine and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a performance problem with the dock. It took me 2 hours to finder copy 280 gigabytes to a 5400RPM drive in the dock. It took me over 5 hours for Time Machine to back up 165 gigabytes from that same source drive to that same dock with a 7200 RPM drive in it.

DAMN but Time Machine is slow.

And once that was done — I was done. Total time invested: about a day and a half of clock time. 7.5 hours of upgrade and migration, of which my time spent actively involved was about 1 hour. Getting backups set up and all of the data backed up? About 12 hours, of which I probably spent 2 hours actively involved and the rest of the time puttering. And about 2 hours involved in getting XCODE re-installed and doing the various updates I did (most of the time updating was getting XP patches up to date and getting the anti-virus stuff updated…)

Not bad.

Pretty much everything went as planned. there was one thing I did I want to do differently: I bought a VGA dongle and a VGA cable to replace the DVI setup I had. I don’t think it’s as crisp as the DVI was, so I’m going to go get a DVI dongle and go back to the old cable. I do need the VGA dongle as well, but it’ll live in my bag and get carried around for when I need to wire into a project for a presentation… All in all, not bad at all.

I also need to find and invest in a few really short (1-1.,5 foot) 800-800 firewire cables for neatness sake. Maybe a firewire hub; and clean up my cable monster behind the desk, now taht I know where everything needs to go…

When doing something like moving everything to a new laptop I find it’s a good time to reconsider how you use the system and what needs to be fixed or changed or upgraded. There have been a couple of projects I’ve been meaning to get to — and this seems to be a perfect excuse to actually get to them. One is that my contact list/address book has become a complete shambles; some of you are in my gmail lists, some in my Mac Address book, some in my entourage book at work, some on my phone and nowhere else. That’s long-term untenable and potential disaster, so I’m merging everything into a single list again (using gMail, and that syncs to my mac address book, and THAT syncs onto MobileMe and back out onto my phone), That’ll at least get the chaos under control for  awhile, and keep it organized to the degree that I’m smart enough to only add data to the primary address book (but don’t bet on it…).

the other is that it’s well past time to get more paranoid about online accounts and passwords and get all of that data out of the way too useful but not terribly secure browser autofill and into something a bit more — discrete. And that is 1Password, a secure wallet that can keep a set of data and make it available on my Mac and iPhone/iPod_Touch (and there’s a way to sync data out to webOS via Dropbox). I’m going to be installing it tonight and as I start hitting up sites setting them up in 1Password, changing all of the passwords (way overdue) and getting that data out of the browser. If you haven’t done that yet — you really need to think about it. Just for peace of mind, if nothing else.

The new box? awesome. Spent some time in Lightroom 3, and rendering of images is a LOT faster, which makes me happy. I haven’t done a test import, but I can definitely feel the speed difference, so I’m hopeful. We’ll see, I’m going to head out and shoot monday or tuesday and see how import speed goes.

All in all, I don’t miss the larger screen or faster CPUs at all. At this point, that seems like money well not-spent.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at New Laptop Time revisited — aftermath and more thoughts. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

So a few weeks ago my laptop started giving me hints it was thinking about retirement. It’s given me yeoman service — it was given to me when I left Apple, so it’s had a nice, long, fruitful life. It was clear, however, that I was heading towards a badly timed breakdown and I wanted to avoid that. It started with rendering glitches that indicated problems in the video RAM when I ran the thing hot for a while (lots of video, or playing Civ IV for instance). No data issues, but it was obvious that as the box heated up, a video ram chip was getting flakey.

This has been slowly progressing. I had my first random reboot while in SoCal, and I’ve had two in the last four days while working in Lightroom. No data problems, but terribly inconvenient, and I don’t want to be importing photos if the box resets. So I decided it was time to upgrade the laptop.

My current laptop is a 2.16 Core Duo laptop, 2 gigs of RAM (max possible). The upgrades to the Mac lines since this came out (late 2006 model) mean just about anything is going to be a nice improvement. So what to get?

After chewing on the options for a while and considering my options, I ordered the new laptop today, and it’ll arrive in time for me to spend the weekend migrating. I thought it might be interesting to discuss why I made the choices I made and how I think they’ll compare to what I have.

When I worked at Apple, my traditional decision for buying a new computer was to get whatever the top end was (like that’s a surprise), although I had a tended to buy the N-1 generation on closeout unless there was some key technological shift that I wanted (like the switch from ADB to USB. For you youngsters out there, Apple used to have a non-standard connection setup for keyboards before they used USB, which was before we all started using Bluetooth…) — it was a way to leverage pricing but get powerful boxes.

In all honesty, though, these days, I rarely see people using most of the capabilities of their computers — and I don’t see the logic in paying extra so my idle loop can finish sooner. I also don’t see logic in spending money on extra computing hardware that can be spent on other things, like camera gear or an iPad, and a set of smart decisions on buying the laptop could save enough money to almost pay for an iPad (or a lens, or…) — so I didn’t want to overbuy.

In analyzing my existing setup, with a few exceptions, I was pretty happy with performance. The exceptions were becoming significant, though, and the big one was image processing in Lightroom. Upgrading from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3 helped in a lot of ways (but not all), and most especially, importing a day’s photo shoot was getting seriously painful. My central coast run I recently did generated 1,000 images in a single 14 hour shooting day, and then took over 6 hours just to import into Lightroom. The large size of the Canon 7D RAW file really slowed down processing on the old CPU and made some operations difficult. I did some investigation, and from all indications, the primary limitation was the CPU, not memory and definitely not I/O. The upgrade from 802.11g to 802.11n is going to be a nice plus.

In the past, I’ve always bought the 15″ Macbook pros. My current work setup, however, tethers the mac to a large (27″) monitor at my desk at home so I was tempted by the smaller 13″ screen for weight and portability (and price). I simply don’t need the larger 17″ screen much and I prefer portability over screen size here. Besides, if I’m road tripping and I want the screen horsepower, I don’t mind stuffing a display in the back of the car for the hotel room…

So the choices were 13″ Macbook, 13″ Macbook Pro, and 15″ Macbook pro. I decided against the Macbook; it’s cheaper, but not by that much and the lack of Firewire and the lower performance video wasn’t worth the saving. I ended up deciding against the 15″ Macbook Pro — while the shift from Core Duo processors and the upgraded video would definitely have been nice, it would have added $500-600 to the final price, and I finally decided that the performance boost from my old box to ANY current laptop would be significant enough that the added boost to the faster CPUs wasn’t as important, and I really was finding the idea of the smaller form factor of the 13″ units. It oversimplifies the decision, but it wasn’t lost on me that the price of the 15″ Macbook Pro was close to the cost of the 13″ Macbook pro AND a low-end iPad, and was the speed boost of the more expensive unit worth that price?

I went back and forth — and ultimately went for the less expensive 13″ macbook. Tough call. Your mileage may vary, but realizing how much faster even the low end box was from what I currently had made the decision easier. If you look at Macworld’s historical benchmark numbers, They show the photoshop benchmark as taking about 1:45 on my current laptop, and 0:48 on the 13″ Macbook Pro, and 0:43 on the 15″ (there are more significant differences between these two current models in other benchmarks, but the speed difference between what I have and where Im’ headed is even more significant)

Final decision: which speed of the 13″? I finally decided on the low end (2.4Ghz) — I decided again the cost different wasn’t worth it for my situation, and I decided I’d rather upgrade the disk than go with a smaller, slower disk and faster processor. I’ve also ordered (from Other World Computing, where I buy most of my disks and RAM upgrades) a Seagate 500Gig 7200 RPM drive which I’ll install and clone the data to, replacing the stock 250Gig 5400 in the new unit.

I’m currently running with a 360Gig 5400 + a bus powered 500Gig 5400, (plus a desk-bound terabyte drive) and moving to a 500Gig internal will let me shift my data around and put all of it back on the 500Gig internal, use the 500Gig bus powered as a cloned backup (via SuperDuper!) and keep my secondary data on the external firewire, simplifying my life a bit and adding another redundant copy of my portable data, making my backups more robust. Never a bad idea. I never take backups for granted, in case you haven’t noticed.

I considered the new internal 1Gig drives, decided that I didn’t need the space that badly (I’m starting to like the 500gig bus powers more and more as flexible and stable and convenient), and they’re new enough I’lll let someone else field-proof their MTBF stats. I also considered SSD for the internal, but again, price won out over maximizing performance; and I can make that upgrade later if I want to.

Given I’ve been living in 2Gig forever and this box comes with 4Gig, I saw no reason to spend money to bump it to 8. I’ll leave that upgrade to later if/when I decide it’ll be worth upgrading, so there are options here down the road to boost the computer a bit along the way if I find I need it.

So my bottom line — I’m spending about $1300 (including the upgraded disk) and also a new bluetooth keyboard and a monitor dongle, and I think I have a good overall compromise among the various factors. It’ll handle my Lightroom processing and importing much better, and honestly, I don’t need an ego computer (“look! it goes to TWELVE! and belches steam!”) and other than my imaging, my processing needs are fairly modest. This should fit my needs well for a few years and then we’ll see.

Oh, one other thing. I did not buy AppleCare. I have some time before I have to make a final decision on that, but I haven’t bought AppleCare on my last three computers and I’m not leaning towards doing it here. If you do the research on extended warranties and what the margins are on them for all products, you can see why manufacturers really want you do buy them, and that’s a good reason why I don’t. So far, I haven’t regretted it; and I’ve saved enough cash on NOT buying them to probably pay for whatever goes spung when it finally does happen to me. If your computer survives the warranty period, the most likely problems you’ll have with it (he says, IMHO! IMHO!) are things that may be challenged under your extended warranty anyway, like dumping a glass of wine on the motherboard or damage to the LCD screen, so I’m just not convinced I need it. Your mileage may well vary, and if you prefer the comfort of having it, be my guest.  And to my friends in the AppleCare group back at Mama Apple, well, sorry…

So tonight I’m migrating data around to make the transition easier, and everything should arrive tomorrow. Sometime over the weekend, I’ll hopefully be on the new system, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Lightroom works on it. And when I know, I’ll let you know.

Hope this helps if you’re trying to think through the options on a systems upgrade; there are many options, and the price points are set up to make sliding up the pricing scale easy to convince youself (“hmm. For $200, I get the faster CPU, and it comes with that bigger disk. Oh, and for $200 I can go to the 15″ screen. And for $200, I can go to the faster CPU AND get 500 gigs of disk. And… And… And suddenly your $1200 computer is a $2300 computer, one upgrade at a time. So you can look at it and as yourself how much to spend to get what you want, or how little you need to spend to get what you need. And don’t forget, if you end up spending $2500 on a laptop, it’ll be a lot harder to upgrade to the NEXT one than if you can convince yourself you ONLY spent $1200 last time..Are you better off with a less expensive computer you are comfortable upgrading in two or three years or a more expensive one you think you have to hold onto for five to get the investment back on?)

And to think I once spent $2800 on a Mac IIfx. How things change..

(p.s: nope. no magic trackpad in today’s order. But it’ll be coming, don’t worry…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at new laptop time….. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

When Time Machines first came out, I bought two, one for myself, one for my mom. I’m very happy (so far) with the Time Machine with my mom, and she seems to be the appropriate use case for this product: fairly light duty user that doesn’t generate a lot of data and has modest backup/recovery needs. It’s worked wonderfully, and the couple of times I’ve had to hook in remotely and recover files for her, it’s done the job well.

My personal experience wasn’t quite so successful. I don’t like the Time Capsule in a multi-mac environment because it doesn’t seem to do well as the different macs need access to disk space; if one mac allocates disk into its backup, there seems to be no way to recover that data for use by a different mac. That means one mac could find itself with a four month set of backups and another with two weeks (as happened with us), and no way to balance that out. That seems to be a really basic flaw, that there’s now way for the system to tell time capsule to garbage collect disk out of one time capsule dataset and shift it to another that needs it more.

A bigger flaw, however, came when Laurie lost a hard disk. First thing I did was clone the Time Capsule data onto anotehr disk, not only to give me a redundant copy (“just in case!”) but because I wanted to plus that disk into the computer directly to do the restore so I didn’t have to slog it all across the much slower network. Which I couldn’t make work.

I ended up dragging out a long ethernet and wiring up a temporary physical network and doing the restore across that — which took bloody forever. The backup worked flawlessly, and the restore came back fine, but the process of restoring all of that data over the network was painful and caused a long delay, even over physical ethernet to avoid the slower WIFI/wireless. Too painful for my tastes, and there were just too many compromises, so I retired the Time Capsule as a backup device and went to a new backup system that depends on directly connected disks and a combination of superduper as my primary backup and Time Machine as the backup I use in ccase I need to restore an individual file. I don’t like Time Machine as a primary backup  for systems with heavy data requirements (i.e. anyone doing photography, video, audio or any other large data files). I’ve written about backups a number of times, and you can see more details on what I do by looking here, here, here,  and here.  And yes, one of these days, I’l consolidate all of that into an ebook and publish it in a single document that’s easy to keep updated…

But overall, I think if you fit the presumed use case for Time Capsule, it’s okay. But for many of us, our data needs stress it and I don’t want to depend on it as my primary backup in those cases. Time Machine on a directly-wired disk is better, but still, I think there are better options. It is a good way to create a set of backups to do individual file recovery, but I’d rather use a different backup setup for ercovering of a failed disk (and so I do…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

it’s way too early to do any significant analysis on the new blog design but I did a quick comparison in google analytics against some prior weeks (all of them mon-thurs and designed to avoid the holiday) to see how comparable dates differ. The early numbers are encouraging:

Total visits up 102% on average. Pageviews up 136%. pages per visit up 17%. average time on site up 81%. All really good changes. If there was one metric I wanted to change with this new design, it was the low pages-per-visit number and I looked for ways to encourage people to sample other parts of the site while they were there. It looks like I succeeded, at least initially. Whether that’s because the site is new and the regular visitors are curious or whether it’ll continue, I don’t know. I’m also seeing nice traffic on the Smugmug portfolio, much higher than I was seeing on flickr. Flickr traffic seems to be about the same, but I didn’t make it nearly as prominent on site as Smugmug, so I’m not too surprised.but I expect over time to see it increase traffic there.

all very early, but encouraging.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at early stats on the new chuqui.com. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

While talking about Flash on the iPad, Jobs said:

A more popular developer environment was HyperCard, we were OK to axe that[...] Hypercard was huge in it’s day because it was accessible to anybodyIndeed it was – many people miss it; Dale Dougherty says he wants a HyperCard for the iPad. I don’t think he does.

As Jobs himself says, we have a platform to build on for the future – it is HTML5. It’s an emerging standard that is not under the control of any one company, but is built on the Web as agreement. And even Steve Jobs can’t stop it.

Count me in as someone who still misses Hypercard, or at least what Hypercard represented. And as I’m reading Kevin’s piece, it suddenly struck me that perhaps it’s time to take a look at creating something like Hypercard again. Not Hypercard, but what it represented. What is that?

• A simple, accessible enviroment for quick hacks, simple projects and exploration.
• A place for proto-hackers and potential geeks to get started. In my day, it was Apple II’s basic. Later it way Hypercard. Today, where are the potential explorers getting their feet wet?

Today, if I need to do a quick geek, I tend to intall MAMP and haul out MysQL and PHP, or bring up terminal and write a quick perl script. I’ve been digging more into the HTML5/CSS/javascript world for some upcoming projects, though, and see a lot of potential as a geekable environment.

So what would it take to create an environment that would do these things and give people access to modern technologies? It seems like this is VERY possible. It could run cross platform, cross browser and no server needed. Take HTML, CSS, Javascript, wrap in some kind of editing/IDE/CLI environment, wrap in some libraries or a way to install libraries for things like graphics and displays… it almost feels like 90% of this project would be packaging and integration and documentation rather than coding, and most of the pieces are there.

Anyone interested in belling this cat?

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Well, that didn’t take long. AT&T was nice enough to announce this before WWDC. Lots of commentary on it, my basic cut is that I don’t have a problem with tiered  or usage-based pricing as long as the tiering is reasonable, and for the most part, the new AT&T plan is. What the new plan means is that relatively light data users (like me) are no longer subsidizing the folks who are shoving gigabytes through their phones every month. My bill will go down.

I don’t even mind the extra fee for tethering (much); I simply see that as a way for AT&T to (more or less) add a set of tiers; people doing tethering are likely more heavy data users than non-tether users, I just can’t get up a lot of angst that the heavier usage folks have to pay something extra — you’re funnelling multiple devices through the connection instead of one, so, well, shrug.

but then it comes out that the one thing you can’t to is tether an iPad to an iPhone.

Apple won’t support iPhone to iPad tethering:

Um, what? The only reason I can figure out for this is, well, to force people to pay for 3G on the iPad — require another monthly contract.

That annoys me. Fortunately for me, my most common use case here would still allow me to tether a laptop to the phone, and have the laptop create a wifi connection for the iPad; since I won’t be travelling w/o the laptop because of my photography, this doesn’t screw me over, but I’m still annoyed. But if there was ever any question on wifi or 3G for my iPad, it’s now answered: wifi. and if there’s a question of whether I’ll be enabling tethering on my AT&T contract, the answer is — not unless I absolutely know I’m going to need it, no sense throwing any dollars at this unless absolutely necessary. So I won’t. and you all probably shouldn’t , either.

I also think this pricing won’t last. But for now, that’s how they’re going to structure it.  Oh well. And here I was ready to back AT&T against the “I want it all and I want it all free” tribe that complains any time they’re asked to actually pay their fair share, and here AT&T went and messed it up by throwing some arbitrary pricing greed of their own into it.

Oh well, back to the sideline for a while. Fortunately, I can be patient before committing in to most of this…

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Now THAT would cause me to get an iPad; I keep meaning to work on my keywording. If I could do that while sitting on the couch or when I have downtime waiting for other stuff to happen? It might actually get done!

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Fraser goes on to discuss the pros and cons of the Wifi vs. 3G iPads and describes nicely a major reason why I haven’t bought an iPad yet.

Not for lack of interest; the iPad sits in a niche I’d really like to fill. I love the idea of being able to sit down on the couch and “consume content”, get the keyboard out of the way and get back to the “good old days” style model that a paper book brought, only with all of the new content types the internet brings you. That and being able to sit down and play games on the same device? I’ve found it very re-energizing (sorry, you hard core geeks out there) to unplug for a while in the evenings — just get away from the laptop, away from email and keyboards and geeking and all that stuff; just sit on the couch with laurie and either watch TV or “do something” like read or browse my RSS feeds or play sudoku or fire up the XBOX. Or just hang out with Laurie and talk through things.

I currently tend to do that with the Palm Pre, but it’s not really the right form factor. I don’t want to haul out the laptop, it’s also not the right form factor for what I want to do, and if it’s busy crunching photos or doing “real work”, it’s not necessarily available. So there’s a need for a middle ground, one with a larger screen than the mobile phone (where the primary use case is “must fit in pocket and do stuff”) but without all of the extra stuff that comes with a laptop, like the keyboard.

And the iPad fits that wonderfully. Except…

The whole connectivity thing isn’t right for me yet. Wifi is fine here at home, but on the road? I don’t do a lot of travelling, but I see myself doing more photo tripping in the future, and probably starting to do some conference trips as well, so whatever solution I get I have to understand how connectivity is going to work on the road, where “on the road” doesn’t imply “depend on hotel wifi and Starbucks”. But I’m honestly also trying to keep my gadget life as simple as possible, so I don’t want to pick up something like a Mifi (and the Mifi monthly service charge!) just for  few days a year of need. Not cost effective.

Neither is the 3G iPad — because there’s no tethering option. If the 3G iPad tethered so I could use it to connect in my other internet-enabled devices as needed, it’d be a no brainer and I’d do it in a second. But it doesn’t. That means if I’m on the road and would need to upload photos from the laptop (or, gasp, vpn in to work on an emergency) I’m still depending on hotel wifi and/or Starbucks. That’s a fail for me — I need an “on the road” networking solution, not an iPad that connect to the network.

Or I need some other tethering solution that supports the iPad — without adding in a new geek toy (and monthly service charge!) to do it. Unfortunately, my two cell phones (geek eye roll. sigh.) are my Pre on Sprint, and my (really old, really, really old) iPhone on AT&T. Neither carrier supports tethering on those devices.

So basically, I don’t like any of my options, and I just haven’t decided to jump in anyway; if I did, I’d jump in with a Wifi unit…. Which I probably will, but not until after I upgrade my aging, 4 year old laptop… I’m staying on the sidelines for now, waiting to see how various things play out.

My first hope is tethering will come to AT&T; WWDC is coming, iPhone 4.0 is coming, the tethering rumors have swirled again, and we’ll have to see. If they announce tethering for iPhone, I’m expecting we might also see it for the AT&T Pre Plus; if that happens, I can dump my Sprint phone, get a PrePlus upgrade on AT&T and turn on tethering and life is good (yes, I don’t mind paying a bit more for tethering on a phone, I do mind paying for another entire contract for another device for tethering)

It’s possible AT&T might do tethering on the iPhone and not push it out onto the PrePlus. If they do, I’ll make rude noises about their familial heritage and have to decide if I want to upgrade my AT&T contract to the new (currently rumored) iPhone and keep two cell phones (My preference is to simplify and get back to one phone on one carrier; right now AT&T is telling me to upgrade my contract to the pre is $249, so it’s actually cheaper to keep the two phones right now barring a real reason to upgrade)

If that doesn’t happen, Clear is coming to silicon valley around the end of the year. That’s what I’m currently looking at as an option to upgrade the home DSL network. they have a nice bundle that includes a home network connection and a mobile USB dongle that does uncapped 4G and falls back to a 3G connection (with a 5 gig/mo cap) if you’re out of 4G territory. There are currently some rumors floating that they’re going to refocus from Wimax to LTE, but either way, getting a home internet connection and a mobile dongle for $55/month is a good deal — once it rolls out. Assuming it works, of course. So I’m watching and willing to wait and trying to avoid things with contract terms until that hits the floor. And once it does, I’m hoping it pushes other carriers to reprice as well…

Smartphones really started pushing us into the world of ubiquitous computing; my pocket is always online, and that changes what data I keep and how I interact with it. iPad pushes that to the next level and really starts showing off online content as a commodity to be consumed; for the first time, online “stuff” is really for anyone, not just the geeky. That trend is going to continue, but the infrastructure is in transition to properly support that, and all of the pieces are just not quite there yet. And I’m just happy to be patient and give them all a chance to settle out rather than rush in and pay a few hundred bucks (and a two year contract) for something that six months from now I’ll have a much better (and cheaper) solution for… Sometimes, you dn’t have to be in a hurry.

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And so the hunt for clues began — a week after Gizmodo broke its story. By then, Hogan had deleted his Facebook profile, and presumably every other social networking profile he owned, in an effort to hide. That made the search difficult, but his attempt to disappear was already a major clue that he was in trouble.

If people take nothing away from this story, it should be this: by the time you try to erase your tracks, it’s way, way too late. Erasing your tracks merely creates new, more visible marks that point to you. Either that or you better be ready to kill all of your friends, hack into all of THEIR systems and accounts and delete all of their stuff, too.

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I missed last week’s critique notes, apologies for that, but I had a good excuse. Last weekend we hosted about 200 developers for a couple of days of seminars and instructional sessions — and then in the middle of the week my company got bought by HP (I work for Palm). That kinda complicates life without warning.

But I wanted to talk a bit about photographing a conference. I brought in my camera and carried it around and tried to photograph the event in and around the other things I was doing. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results. If you look at my photostream, you’ll see that I rarely (if ever) photograph people, so it was a good exercise to get me out of my comfort zone and try to make the images useful and interesting.

I shot with the Canon 7D and my Tamron 28-300, which overall was a very nice combination. I also started out shooting using a 580EXII flash, but discarded it because I felt it was being too distracting to the audience members.

The flash helped me control the white balance and even the lighting a bit, but I also found it complicated my ability to get the shot. I primarily was trying to bounce it off the ceiling which worked okay, but the rooms we were using for the even presented all sorts of lighting challenges, even with flash.

The flash, for instance, tended to wash out what was presented on the projection screen, leaving me with pictures of people pointing at white blobs. That was my first hint that I probably wanted to stop using the flash:

So after the first session, the flash went back in the bag, the ISO got cranked to 3200, and I decided to shot natural light and — gasp — fix it in photoshop. Well, Lightroom. The rooms were this weird mix of incandescent, tungsten and flourescent lighting and in some areas flooded with natural light — the actual session rooms had the windows shrouded, but other areas were wide open to the sun. It was the united nations of lighting complications, so I couldn’t simply set a white balance and live with it. In this case, shooting RAW with automatic balance and then fixing it in post was the ONLY way to get any kind of consistent light balance.

Second problem: background clutter. Whoever built out these rooms very nicely made sure the areas behind the speakers were cluttered by things like fire alarm boxes and light switches. Thanks, guys. I quickly realized that a speaker with a fire alarm sticking out of his head (see first photo) wasn’t going to work, so I started looking for angles and shot situations that would create at least a neutral background, or perhaps something interesting. Sometimes that was by taking advantage of what was on the projection screen:

but I also found that by taking an extreme angle to the stage and waiting for the speaker to turn in the proper direction, I could take advantage of some background imagery:

and sometimes I just had to settle for “nothing growing out of his head”:

then again, sometimes nothing worked:

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results. In many cases I was able to get the white balance to work pretty well and get what I felt were good skin tones. Not all of my images were quite good enough in retrospect. I really need to go fix this one, for instance:

there’s a color cast to that that’s now obvious (I think I was too tired while finishing these up and lost my concentration, the ones at the end of the batch are all a bit off — a good reminder to not be in too much of a hurry and don’t be afraid to take a break or come back later rather than push through and do a sub-standard job).

On a technical level, I was quite impressed with the 7D’s response to shooting at high ISO. None of those photos had any extra noise reduction processing, just basic lightroom processing. Even at that, the noise, while visible at full size, is pretty tame:

and if I were to run these things through something like DFine would clean up well. Even at 3200 sharpness was sometimes an issue because I was handholding the camera, but careful timing to shoot when the presentor was still and being careful about trying to hold the camera and brace myself helped a lot. I also dinged a lot of images as being not sharp enough, but as the event went on I got the hang of it and had a better feel for how to take acceptable shots reliably.

I got some nice experience shooting these kinds of events in a no pressure situation, and my group got some really nice images we can use for marketing and promoting future events, and I got a chance to shoot into an area I’m frankly rather weak at and learn from it. it’s always good to look for these kind of situations and take advantage of them. I know I’ll be able to shoot future events like this much better and get a more reliable image — but I’m now also more comfortable shooting this kind of material, and that’s never a bad thing.

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Steve Jobs makes the case against Flash on iPhone OS. Cogent, detailed, straightforward, brutally honest. No prevarication. Read the whole thing

Only tangentally about Flash, but….

A long time ago, in a previous life, I was sitting in a conference room with a bunch of people — PR, marketing, legal, the usual suspects. We were hashing out ideas for creating new channels for marketing and how to get our message out into the public eye and seen.

At one point I spoke up and I said I knew how to create a marketing system that the entire universe would read. The room shut up, of course.

Let’s give Steve a blog

My argument was that if we created “Steve’s blog”, the entire universe would read it, and those that didn’t would get emails pointing them to whatever Steve said. The kind of visibility you can’t buy. Steve could post his laundry lists and people would fall over each other to be the first to analyze each word for hidden meaning. And when we had an important message we wanted to get out to the public unfiltered through journalists and the rest of the group that interprets what is said into what is read, we had a ready channel waiting and primed. it’d be a perfect place for product announcements and passing along added detail after keynotes — it had unbelievable opportunity. And heck, Steve could have also used it to promote charities (or pretty much anything) and made an impact in any number of ways.

They all stopped and thought about it for a bit; there was general consensus that it’d do all of that, that it could be a huge opinion mover — and unfiltered to boot. And nobody was willing to remotely consider taking it to Steve and pitching it to him, so it went nowhere. Myself included.

But I always felt it had massive potential. I think this not from Steve, if you look at it as an experiment in this direction (which I think it might be, and should be) is a massive proof of concept success. I am willing to bet the size of the audience that read Steve’s “blog post” (directly or indirectly) dwarfs the number that looked at Adobe’s response, which was ONLY in the Wall Street Journal.

It does raise one question to me. Does this indicate that Steve and Apple are figuring out how to use the online community to communicate instead of stonewall and fight with it? If so, that could get very interesting.

Steve with his own personal bully pulpit. Not something I’d want aimed at me, that’s for sure. But I know I’d read it.

Update: Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) rightly points out that I’d talked about this before…

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See, after getting everything set up and to my liking, I found much to my annoyance that I had a glitch.

Under random circumstances, my backups would fail, usually with some kind of “can’t create directory” error.

Glitches suck, because they can be tough to debug — because by definition glitches work properly most of the time. And usually fail when it’s inconvenient to debug. Fortunately, I’d seen this one before, but I thought I’d write about it for others who might run into it.

The first thing to try in these cases is simple: Disk Utility. It’s very possible that somewhere along the way the disk got corrupted and that’s causing your problem. Tried that, but the glitch came back, so that wasn’t it.

Buried in the Energy Saver System Preference is one that says “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible”. Apple seems to default this to on. I have always turned it off; in the early days of Mac OS X there were disk drivers that had problems with it and would cause glitches. Over the years things got better, but I still have never really seen any real advantage to it.

So I turned it off.

And the glitch went away. Case closed.

But here’s what seems to be happening. When Time Machine fires up (I think I saw it once with Superduper, but in general, Superduper isn’t sensitive to this, Time Machine was VERY sensitive to it) sends out a disk write request to create the backup directory. Not sure who’s to blame for the glitch, but if the disk is spun down, Time Machine doesn’t wait and reports it as a failure. Not sure if this is the driver returning a “not ready yet, try again later” that Time Machine is seeing as an error, or if Time Machine has a timeout and if it doesn’t get the response back fast enough it errors, but either way, if you ask me, the software should really be smart enough to recognize this situation and do something useful, and “error out and abort” isn’t my definition of useful.

My recommendation: turn it off. Or at the very least, turn it off when attached to the power adaptor. And quietly ask yourself why Time Machine isn’t smart enough to deal with this situation, when, well, it’s kinda it’s JOB.

To take it a step further, what if this hadn’t fixed the gltich? what next?

For me, the next step would have been to put the drive mechanism into a different housing — it’s living in that removable dock, which is new to me, and I’d need to figure out if that housing was the cause or the drive itself (which is also new). If the glitch follows the drive, it’s probably got a problem and you ought to see about having it replaced under warranty. If it goes away in the new housing, then it’s the old housing, and you have to figure out what to do, whether it’s replace or reduce your dependence on it or whatever. There are, fortunately, only so many parts to these things, so this kind of replacement swap isn’t hard to do and can quickly help you find which piece is the core or the problem.

On a related note, Laurie’s main data disk (2x500Gb mirrored raid) filled up, so we had to find more room for her. The fast reaction was to shift her to a 750Gb drive I had handy, but we ordered 2x2Tb drives and I’ll be fitting them into the RAID this weekend and that’ll give her some room to expand. It also creates complications on her backups I’m still trying to figure out how best to solve, because her backup disks are big enough for her data set, but now for the size of the data set she’s going to grow on those new disks. We have time, but I want it solved before it’s a problem.

This has me rethinking Drobos. Drobo just announced a NAS, which looks interesting, but you can buy two “plug into the computer” Drobos for the cost of the Drobo NAS, and that’s an intriguing option as well. I’m guessing the long-term answer is a Drobo on each of our primary machines and a Drobo NAS for backups, but how to build them out and in what order, I’m not sure yet.  and honestly, there are other things I’d rather spend my money on, than backups.

But I’d rather spend money on backups than Drivesavers, ya know?

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And here we are, and I’m still trying to get Time Machine to finish the damn first backup of my disks. the data is all in there (working set size 300+ gigs), but for reasons it won’t tell me, it hasn’t decided to actually finish. It was busy purring to itself when I left for work, and here it is, busily purring to itself still.

And while I appreciate why Apple designs its stuff to not be scary to non-geeks, when things go sideways, it can be amazingly frustrating, because I have no real status info or way to figure out what it’s actually doing (or trying to do), other than watching the flashing lights on the disk and trying to decipher the insides of the .inProgress package, And that’s the occasional challenge with Apple stuff: when it works, it just works. When it breaks, it sees no purpose in helping you fix the problem. So now I’m in a quandary, do I leave it alone and see if it’ll finish? do I throw out 300 gigs of backed up (and useless) data and let it start fresh?

I compromised. I stopped it and rebooted (which I needed to do for other reasons) and restarted it. and it spent 10 minutes in “indexing backup” and is now in “backing up”, but not actually doing so and not telling me how much it thinks needs backing up. But the disk is really busy…

On the other hand, Superduper finished pretty quickly and so I have good backups, I just don’t have my versioned backups, so I’m not worried. This is the suspenders, not the belt.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball also happened to weigh in on this. He’s right, DiskWarrior is definitely something you want to have. Highly recommended. And one of the things “on my list”. He’s also right about “more copies” — you’ll notice I try to keep 3 or four copies of my key data in various places at all times, and I’m paranoid enough that I prefer some that do NOT update in real time but wait a week or so, in case there’s unfound errors that creep in. but you can buy terabyte disks for not much — $100 or less now. There’s really no excuse not to replace your drive mechanisms (there I go again!) every year or so on your high usage drives and to keep spare copies of everything. call it SneakerRAID if you want, mirroring by making copies and stuffing them in drawers and things.

He’s also right about Dropbox. It’s a nice alternative to MobileMe (and faster, and cheaper, and has VERSIONING). I have been using it for other things, but now that he mentions it, I can consolidate some stuff on a DropBox rather nicely and simplify my life in other places and save a couple of bucks I’m spending on a cloud storage thingie here and an online service there. That rocks. Not dropping MobileME, though. I like having multiple redundant email accounts in case one of them goes spung. Funny how when MobileMe came out everyone was all over it for its problems (justifiably so), but I’ve seen more gmail outages, and geeks seem to give Google a break on those. I’m Google-centric because their stuff works better with webOS for me, but it’s nice having a place I can jump to if for some reason I need to, so I don’t mind keeping two environments around, just in case…

Merlin Mann also chimes in, and he’s right on, too. Notice how Superduper keeps coming up? Because it works. and you can trust it. Trust is probably THE KEY metric for backups, folks. Not features, trust. (via Duncan).

You’ll notice there are a few of us really, hopelessly, anal about backups. That’s because we’ve all been burnt by problems that happen when you don’t, or when you think you are and they aren’t working, or when they’re happening but corrupted. And we’re really, hopelessly, anal about it because we know YOU FOLKS aren’t doing it.

Bless Apple for making backups simple with Time Machine. So many fewer excuses to not do them for people now. If I were to recommend one thing to Apple now, it’s this. Disks are really cheap. Build a mirrored RAID into every computer, so a drive failure no longer screws someone’s data. Make TIME MACHINE less necessary through data redundancy. Even your laptops. hell, especially your laptops. It’s the next step here, we should take it.

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Now, there’s one obvious problem there that I hadn’t thought about — the backup disk is smaller than the main disk. I knew about that, knew I needed to fix it, and forgot. Not a huge problem, but one of those details you need to keep an eye on or they’ll bite you at an inconvenience moment. Even though I had 3/4 of a terabyte for my backup disk, Time Machine was only storing backups for about 3 weeks, which means it was no longer large enough. It was time to update and grow and upgrade.

The biggest problem — the new Canon 7D creates much larger images. That’s good, but creates ripples. It also does video, which I’m starting to experiment with. By the time I convert the 7D RAw image to DNG and store it on disk, it grows to about 49 megabytes in size. Pile up a few hundred of those, and “Hell, disk is cheap” starts ringing a little hollow. To give an idea of the change going from the 30D to the 7D, on the 30D I use a 4Gb memory card and get 400+ images on it. On the 7D, I upgraded to 16Gb cards, and I get 500 images on one. Moderate upgrade in number of images, big upgrade in amount of disk taken. Also, since the 7D shoots 8 frames a second sustained where the 30D shot 4FPS with limited bursts, the opportunity to generate LOTS MORE images quickly exists. And it definitely happens, so at the end of the day, I have more, larger images to store. This is, as they say, a good problem to have.

The easy answer — upgrade the laptop to a bigger disk — won’t work here. The biggest laptop disks now available are 500 Gigabytes. Larger than my 320Gb, but not by that much. Upgrading delays the problem by a period of time, but it doesn’t solve it. I considered doing that, then decided to bite the bullet and shift into the “it no longer fits on the laptop” universe.

I mumbled about this on Twitter, and immediately got back the “install a NAS!” response. NAS (or Drobo, or RAID, or name your favorite disk packaging setup) isn’t a solution — it’s a technology. You don’t start by choosing a technology, you start by figuring out the solution and then choosing things that implement them well.

I’ve written about backups and my philosophy on how to do them before, check out this piece as well as this followup, as well as this piece where I talk about why I stopped using an online backup solution in favor of sneakernetting an offisite backup somewhere. I am, for the record, looking forward to when the price/performance and the network broadband make this worth doing again, but not right now…)

So for me it’s time to shift my data into a multi-disk environment. I live on a laptop, which gets carried around. If your data no longer all lives on the laptop disk, then when you need that data, you have a problem. It behooves you to then think about your data and how you use it, and figure out how to store your data across your disks so that you have access to what you want when you want it.

For my purposes, “data” can be defined as “everything on your disk”, but in practice, I see no reason to think about shifting apps out of the Application folder or similar “optimizations”. You might be able to free up a gig or two of space, but why? That’s not significant, and it can lead to potential complications later, especially if you start mucking in your Libraries, preferences, caches, etc. The savings aren’t significant — or worth the future hassles or possible compatibility issues. So for me, unless you’re a font geek with 50 gigs of fonts or something like that, just worry about the data folders: Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies. (in case it’s not painfully obvious: this info is Mac specific. General concepts work for Windows as well — the nutty details are your problem on that platform).

A few key goals

Here are a few key goals of all of this:

• Scales infinitely. Or close enough I don’t have to go through this again for a while
• My data is available when I need it, wherever I am
• Easy and intuitive. I don’t want something that’s difficult to do, or I won’t.
• Reliable and easy backups: if your backups are difficult, you won’t. Keep it simple. Make it reliable.
• Fast catastrophic recovery. I don’t want to spend days getting my data usable again
• Recover a file or a disk. Some backup schemes work best for a crashed disk, others for a lost file. you really need both.
• Backups on the road are even more important, not less. So make sure you can do them. And do.

Here’s what I ended up with. It’s not hugely different than before, but the changes create significant challenges to understand:

I took the bus-powered disk and upgraded it with a 500 gig drive. This means that instead of having 320Gb available, I now have 3/4 of a terabyte I can carry around and use without needing an electrical outlet. This is a significant detail: you really mess up the concept of a “laptop” if you have to plug it in to use it… Or worse, can’t because the data you need is inaccessible because you didn’t bring it.

Digression: for those of you about to tell me “just live in the cloud”, plesae don’t. The dataset we’re talking about is measured in gigabytes trending to terabytes, and it’s not practical. In reality I am using Google Docs and Dropbox more for some things, but for the set of things “the cloud” solves for me, they also live happily on my internal laptop disk. This is about figuring out now how to scale from having 1,000 photos in my portfolio and 10,000 in my collection to having 20,000 photos in my portfolio and 100,000 in my collection without everything collapsing in a heap, and those kind of data sets aren’t going to live online any time soon, nor do I particularly want them to.

So anyway, I now have three drives going. The internal laptop drive (320Gb) is where everything I need 100% of the time has to live. The external bus powered drive can store other files that I need access to on the road — but which I probably can live without for more casual usage. And my desktop drive (AC powered) stays at home and holds the data that I need easily accessible but don’t need to travel with.

I went through all of my data and figured out where it needed to live. There’s also an unlisted “fourth category”, which is data that lives offline, or on a disk that I maybe need access to once in a while but not keep plugged in, and I spent some time pulling all of that data off my disks and sticking it in a corner to archive into a drawer. (one could also say there’s a fifth category, the “why the hell am I hanging on to THIS?” category of things that ended up in the trash. Things like the Parallel’s virtual image of Ubuntu I haven’t booted since I installed it five months ago, which deleting freed up multiple gigabytes. And why did I feel the need for an Ubuntu disto in Parallels on MacOS, which is just a different flavor of the same thing? I don’t remember, but it seemed a good idea at the time…)

I can hear some of you groaning at the thought of sorting through all of your data. I sympathize. If you don’t want to commit the time to that, I understand — but — putting some time and energy into it now helps you understand what you have and how to organize it. It also means that moving forward you’l have a good sense on where stuff belongs, meaning you’ll spend less time thinking it through and organizing on the fly. And if you do it now, you probably won’t need to do it again for a few years. It’s little more than virtually filing everything in your office, and it never hurts to do that every so often.

It shouldn’t be assumed that you need to turn “Save File” into a “Getting Things Done” adventure — I’m definitely not interested in being that anal about all of this, but it is important to understand how you want to manage your data well enough to know if it’ll do what you need it to do and how well it scales. Scaling was the big issue for me. If I’m seriously having to worry about data in terms of terabytes, I’d just as soon not have to architect this all out again in six months. Once it’s settled down, it’s back to the “that pile on the desk is in the way, let’s put it in the files” mode again…

So here’s how I finally settled on filing things. My internal laptop disk:

And here’s what my secondary disk looks like. Note that it only has Music and Pictures folders.

The Music folder is where I’m storing the video files in my iTunes library. The audio (aka “music”) lives on the main laptop disk.  As my creation of video grows, I’ll add a “Movies” folder and split it up the way I do photos, but right now, there’s not much there.

And finally, my third disk, the one that stays at home:

The blue highlighted folders are folders on that disk that I exclude from the Time Machine backup:

which is an option more people should think about if they use Time Machine (or other backups) — some stuff you can live without if you need to, so why back it up? All it does is make it harder to do backups reliably. I flag them with color labels so I don’t forget which ones were excluded — I did that once and had to restore a disk, and spent half a day freaking over “missing data” until I remembered I’d excluded that data from the backups. Oops. It goes without saying, of course, that you should only exclude stuff you really don’t need back if there’s a failure, don’t exclude it because it’s large…

A big part of how this works (or won’t) is splitting up the photo library. In general, I split up my photos into four big piles:

• flickr or better:  images I liked enough to post to my Flickr account (and the subset of those I think are good enough for my portfolio, which I’m starting to build on Smugmug)
• 2nd tier: photos which are technically fine, but which aren’t something I think should be posted on flickr. Most of these are effectively duplicates of ones that go on Flickr (think “eight frames per second burst rate”); you want them around in case you want to use them; you stick them somewhere out of the way because you have no plans to actually do so. In theory, these photos are all good enough to publish, except I have some other photo I think is better — but yo never know when you might want some specific expression or a left profile instead of a right profile, and so they’re here if you need it.
• archive and forget: photos that are clearly not as good as the candidates I’d publish, but not bad enough to throw away. To be honest, as I’m getting more comfortable about my abilities as a photographer, I’m doing less keeping photos around that “someday I might try to fix this”. Instead, I ding them and throw them out. These are flagged to be taken offline and stored, and I fully believe I’ll never look at them again and some day throw them out. More and more, I’m comfortable with my choices and simply throwing them out and saving a step…
• dings: And finally, the dings. As I do edits, the ones that are clearly flawed get thrown out and deleted. There are people who tell you to keep everything. I’m not one of those people. Disk is cheap, but it’s not free. Maybe some day those images will be usable (or fixable in photoshop, or whatever), but the reality is I have thousands of BETTER images I could spend that time on, so why bother? So count me in the camp of tossing the crap, especially when it quickly starts turning into gigabytes and terabytes of crap. Why make it harder to find the good images by having to wade through crap, or worse, create a filing system for offline images to keep around stuff you know in your heart you’ll never use? Let it go. Just because you CAN keep everything doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s not.

This setup looks like it’ll scale for a good long time; I can, if I need to, move some flickr or better onto the 2nd disk and prioritize the internal drive to active projects; 2nd tier data easily moves to the “live at home” disk when I need to. I can subset my itunes library the same way if I want to, and the rest of my data isn’t going to grow faster than disk technology seems to be progressing, and as long as I keep my folder structure sane, I can tell at a glance what’s going on, both within the Finder and Lightroom. I can use Lightroom and Spotlight searching to find things if I need to, but with a bit of care the naming structure will let me browse into it quickly as well. It looks pretty solid.

I’ve spent the last couple of days migrating the data to this new setup and I’m now happy with it, at least for now. As I’ve settled in, I’ve made some changes – originally all three disks had Documents folders, I finally realized that either a document lived on the internal laptop or it lived on the “stay at home” drive; no need for a middle phase, it just complicated things. You’ll notice there are folders on the travelling disks to act as placeholders for the stay at home disk. This makes staging stuff to sweep over there easy, so I can stuff files places on the road and then go home and move them off of the travel disks. It may seem unnecessary or trivial, but I’ve found lots of peopple don’t think about that kind of detail, and when I explain it, they love the idea — it lets me make a filing decision at the time I’m using the data, and merely shove it into the file when I get home and not have to “remember” what needs to be filed days later. Make those decisions while you’re using something and then forget it — it’s a great hint for simplifying things.

And once my backups finally sync up and my data is fully redundant again, I’ll be happier. Currently, I have my superduper backups in place, I’m letting Time Machine sync up now. It can be butt slow at times…

Some technical details on implementing this

The drive I bought for the bus powered disk was the Hitachi Traveler 500G. I’ve been using Hitachi drives for my laptop drives for a while and find them pretty reliable. That doesn’t mean others aren’t, it means thse have worked well for me, so I continue to use them. The bus-powered enclosure I use is the Mercury On-The-Go Pro from Other World Computing. I’ve bought RAM and disk from OWC for years and have been very happy with their price, quality and service. I’ve used that enclosure for a long time with never a failure. Their stuff is well-engineered and solid and I feel it’s well priced, and I haven’t been in the mood to explore other vendors because this one works for me.

For my external drives, I use the OWC Mercury Elite-Pro housing. it’s solid, it’s build like a rock, it works reliably. As part of this rework, I’ve retired the last of my IDE systems and I only buy/use drives that have SATA interfaces.

Digression: Every so often, it makes sense to see how technology is moving and migrate away from stuff that’s aging and heading towards end of life — if you refresh your data onto modern storage, you won’t go looking for it some day and find out you no longer have a way to access it. I’m a big fan of refreshing all of my offline storage every couple of years so the chances of having a stored drive failed is minimized. I’m also a fan of keeping two copies of all offline data, preferably one offsite — just in case. Since I’m also a fan of refreshing my active drives on a regular basis (because the best way to never need your backups is to never run your disks until they die!), a nice way to do this is to replace your active drives every 18 months or so, then use the retired drives and copy all of your archived data onto them, and then take the oldest drives and stick them in your files somewhere.

Digression on the digression: I see no reason to ever give a used drive to someone else, either by selling, giving, or donating. I pull the drives out of computers and housings and file them with my tax papers and other files. Once in a while, I pull the really old mechanisms and “retire” them with a big hammer. That way, there’s absolutely no way someone can recover files off of a drive they bought in Goodwill and end up with your data — because it never leaves your hands. If you trust seven-way zeroing and are willing to spend the time to do so, bless you. I jut don’t think a used disk drive is worth the time and hassle to recycle for re-use…

The drive I’m using as my backup drive now is the 2Tb Western Digital “greenpower” Caviar Green with 64 Mb cache. There are cheaper drives out there, but this one has good reviews and is built for server service. In all honesty, there’s nothing quite so painful as finding out your backup drive has failed, especially if you find out while trying to restore something. I don’t want to overpay for this stuff, but cheaping out bites you down the road.

My backup drive is living in a NewerTech Voyager Hard Drive Dock, which allows you to insert and eject SATA drives easily. This means if I want to I can easily pull this mechanism and replace it with another if I need to “do something” with another disk. I’m just starting to use it so I don’t have reliability data on it, but so far, I like it. It’s solid and well-built at first use. I plan on using it for managing my offline archives as well, saving me paying for multiple enclosures down the road.

Geeky details on backups

The 2Tb disk is split into two partitions, one 500Gb and one 1.5Gb. I use two backup technologies, SuperDuper! and Time Machine. I love Superduper for system backups because it makes bootable clones. That makes catastrophic recovery a lot simpler: take your backup drive, plug it into a Mac, and boot from it (then make a backup of it before something bad happens!). Superduper runs nightly and refreshes copies of my two travel disks, which is why the 2Tb is split into two partitions. The 500Gb syncs up the 500Gb external disk, and the 1.5Tb is the clone of the internal boot disk and also is where my Time Machine backups live.

Superduper doesn’t do versioning or archival over time, it makes a snapshot of now. For the “I need that file I threw out two weeks ago” problem, I use Time Machine. It backs up all three disks (minus the exclusions I mention above) to the 1.5 Terabyte partition of the backup disk. Time Machine is useful for casual backups (it’s better than nothing and pretty good for get-single-file recoveries) but I don’t like it for complete disk recovery and after working with a Time Capsule for a while, I really don’t like Time Machine over a network. If anyone really cares why, that’s a whole different blog posting.

The good news is that SuperDuper and Time Machine co-exist nicely on one disk (thank you, Dave!) so I can do both easily, so I’m set up to clone my two key disks onto the backup disk, and then do a time machine backup onto it for incremental backups as well. If my boot disk crashes, recovery is (almost) as simple as booting the backup disk. Wonderful, since crashes almost always happen on deadline…

What this doesn’t cover yet…

There are a few details this new setup doesn’t cover yet. None of them are time critical, but all of them need to be considered and solved, and it’s important you know how to solve them before you implment (lest they blow up your work when you go “oh, damn, didn’t think of that” later). Fortunately, they all are solvable…

• The new setup doesn’t include “on the road” backups. Since I no longer can carry a bus-power drive big enough to back up my systems, the answer is to carry a bigger, plug-in drive. I’m not worried about Time Machine backups on the road, so the easiest solution is a 1Gb external drive in one of my Elite-Pro housings. Even better, that’s cheap, and if I set it up, gives me an easy “spare backup” setup, because I love having a set of backups I only update every week or so, just in case something corrupts that I don’t recognize right away. So that’s probably what I’ll do. The other option would be to carry the 2Tb backup disk with me in the Elite-Pro housing, which also works, but which limits the number of redundant copies I end up having. I don’t like carrying my backup on the road if I can help it, I’d rather carry a “road” backup and leave the main backup at home. But both are options.
• The new setup doesn’t make explicit the off-site backup storage. What I’m doing in the short term is taking my old backup disk offsite. In 4-6 weeks, I’ll buy a 2nd 2Tb disk, plug it into a dock, build it the same as my new backup disk, and run backups onto it, and then swap between the two (the other going offsite) every 4-6 weeks. That’ll fix this for a good while at reasonable cost.
• The setup for moving files onto offline disks (aka “in the drawer”) isn’t spelled out, but is pretty simple: buy a pair of 500Gb SATA drives, plug them into the dock, copy the files to each, carry one offsite. Iterate until full, and then either start another set or decide some of the files can be deleted (or both). Every couple of years, take all of your offline disks, copy them to new (fewer, bigger) disks, and store them again.

But what about “install a NAS?”

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of NAS in my environment, but I also realize that over time, the amount of data I’m storing on my “stay at home” disk is going to grow without bounds. My plan at this time is to convert that into a Drobo at some point, but not until I need to, so I’ll hold that off until later this year. I realize that at some point the percentage of data I can keep local to the laptop, even with 1 terabyte (500gig internal + 500gig bus powered) is finite, but I’m only using about 275Gb on those two combined right now, so I have some time before I have to worry about that…

Things like Drobo and a NAS add some capabilities, but they also add complexity, cost and new ways for interesting failures, which always seem to happen on deadline when you least can afford the issues. A NAS works best if you’re sharing data among multiple machines, since I’m not, it adds more complexity than it solves problems. Drobo is different being locally hooked up (and there’s a NAS enabler you can buy for it), but adds its own set of complexities and administration — so as long as (a) a single disk works and (b) I can back it up reliably, I’ll stick with a good single disk. Once you start getting into multiple disk environments and/or your backups start being tougher to keep reliable, the addition of mirrored RAID and some of the other features of NAS or Drobo become good to have, but again, I’m not at that point yet.

Finally — speaking of Terabytes

I’ve been around long enough that the thought of buying disk in terabyte sizes amuses me. My first hard drive was ten megabytes — MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes — and I remember a time when a terabyte would probably store all of the data at Apple, and perhaps all of the data in the state of California. Today, I’m using it for backups of my personal data set. That amount of scaling in the last 30 years or so amazes me when I step back and consider it. But then, my phone has a lot more processing power and memory and disk than my first Mac did. I think my KEYBOARD has a more powerful CPU than my first home computer did….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at What to do when you realize you’re running out of disk…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Here are the apps I keep close and handy:

• To Do Classic — relatively new to the catalog, but I like it because it’s simple. I’ve used a number of other to do apps but this one is my current favorite because I don’t need the extra power some of the other apps have. I also like GroceryList.
• gDial Pro and Visual Voicemail — connects me to google voice, which connects me to the thirty-seven-gazillion phone numbers I seem to own now.
• TVMCalc — my current favorite calculator
• Twee — my current Twitter client. Because I know you folks can’t survive without constantly hearing what I have to say, even when I’m at a hockey game.
• FourSquare — who knew? people volunteer to be stalked! (but it’s fun!); I’m also starting to experiment with FourSquare as a location tool for birding, and it looks promising.
• Where I’m At — I’m experimenting with location based services and the GPS as tools for my birdwatching. This one is my current favorite tool for grabbing location data and archiving it.
• MediaClock — my travel alarm. One less gadget I have to carry in my bag!
• StopWatch — which I use primarily for timing captures for night photography.

Below the fold, where you can’t see them:

• textPress, because a way to quickly take free form notes is amazingly useful
• Evernote, because you need a place to store your stuff. Having your stuff available on all of your devices rocks.
• The Weather Channel, because when it rains, you get wet. So go inside.
• TealTime, because when you work with people in five different timezones on a regular basis, knowing when they’re at lunch or asleep rocks.
• Parking Place, my current “where in the HELL did I leave my car this time?” app. Now, if I could just teach it to automatically figure out it needs to take a location, I’d be really happy.
• Preware and AppScoop, because we aren’t afraid of homebrew here.
• SuperSudoku, Free Klondike, and Mine Search because, well, sometimes those important staff meetings run a bit long. I’m glad my boss doesn’t read my blog.
• OpenTable, because dinner isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.
• Flashlight, because I don’t see those funky menus as well as I used to. Isn’t middle age fun?
• DOF Calculator, because I’m a photo geek.
• Yelp!, because I need to know where to get a good plumber who makes lattes.
• Tip Em!, because the pre can never have enough Tip Calculators and this is my current favorite.
• Backgrounds, because plain and grey is boring.
• Sunrise Sunset, because knowing when it’s dark is useful for a photographer for some reason….
• Friendsbook, my current favorite Facebook app
• DirecTV, so when I remember I forgot to schedule that show, I can fix it.

What’s NOT on my Pre? As most of you know, before I came to Palm I used “that other phone”, but I believe in eating my own dog food, and I’ve been chowing away. But there still are a few things on that other phone I can’t do yet. Here are things I really wish I could do on my Pre, but nobody’s written them yet:

• BirdsEye and iBird — my birding field guides. We just don’t have these resources on the pre (yet).
• Best Camera, Focalware, Magic Hour – Photography apps I use once in a while.
• Darkslide — there just isn’t a Flickr browser as good as Darkslide yet. Ditto one for Smugmug.
• TideApp — another useful thing for a nature photographer and birder, because it sucks to get your feet wet for the wrong reason…
• Sirius/XM Radio – 24 x 7 hockey sports talk, baby!

Given I own about 100 apps for “that other phone” (yes, I’m an app slut), that’s actually not bad for a new platform out less than a year. I figure it won’t take too long because I’ll have alternatives. Right, developers? RIGHT? Don’t make me hurt your dog… (and if you think about it, all but Darkslide are what you can charitably call “niche” apps for a specialty audience. they normally trail in availability while we build the audience for them…. ). My “other phone” now lives in my bag, relegated mostly to iPod duty and when I need one of the specialty apps, and if I wasn’t so lazy about it, I could move the music onto the Pre, but I just haven’t bothered…

Of course, I’m constantly trying out new apps and shifting stuff around, but isn’t that half the fun? These, however, are the ones I lean on and use on a regular basis these days.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at What’s on my Pre?. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

For the last year, I’ve been using a hacked MSI Wind as a netbook, but its keyboard played havoc with my repetitive stress injuries. Something about it made me hold my hands in a way that ultimately caused pain. I recently had the chance to type for a while on a Dell Mini 10v and found that I had no pain issues at all, so I sold the Wind and picked up a Mini 10v on sale for only $275.
Compared to my 13″ Macbook, the Mini 10 is considerably smaller and lighter, making it very usable for backcountry trips – something I would never do with my Macbook. With it, I no longer need to carry my Digital Focii FotoSafe for offloading, and I’m not stuck trying to type emails on my iPhone keyboard.

Obviously, if you’re a Windows user, you can use the Mini 10v right out of the box. If you want to use the Mac OS, though, you’ll need to perform a quick and simple hack.
NetbookInstaller is an application that will take care of the hack for you, and using it is very simple. You’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard, and a USB stick with at least 8 gb of capacity. Detailed instructions on the NetbookInstaller site will guide you through the installation. You’ll image your Snow Leopard disk onto the USB stick. and then boot off of that. The NetbookInstaller application will modify the installation to allow it to work on the Netbook.
When you’re all finished, you should have a Mini 10v running the latest Mac OS (at the time of this writing, I’m running 10.6.2). The trackpad supports tapping and two-fingered scrolling, and sleep, restart, shutdown, the web camera, and SD card reader all work fine. The model I got has a gigabyte or RAM and a 160gb drive, though both of these are upgradable. The computer weighs in at 2.6 pounds.

It’s definitely a viable option if you want to depend on an unsupported computer environment, but he neglected to mention a couple of important points:

1. If you  don’t buy a copy of Mac OS X or have a family pack, you’re pirating the software. Photographers need to be really sensitive about violating the licenses of others, or else we should shut up when people ignore our copyrights and rip off our photos. Can’t have it both ways, folks, although I know a lot of people who try.
2. Even if you do buy a copy of Mac OS X to run on your Hackintosh, you’re putting it on hardware that isn’t allowed by Apple’s EULA for Mac OS, so you’re violating their T&Cs, which depending on how you want to rationalize it means you’re pirating the software whether or not you have a paid license for it.
3. If neither of those keeps you up and night sleepless over the moral quagmire of violating Apple’s legal agreements while being hard-ass about protecting your own, it’s still an unsupported and mostly untested hardware/software configuration which may break at any moment (or which at any moment Apple might choose to “make no longer compatible” with a software update, and no matter what breaks — you have no tech support except your own sweat equity and whatever friends you can buy pizza for. And you’re using this computer in a production environment on deadline?

Wherever your choose to draw the lines in the sand in the great “How dare you do that with my photos; but I”ll do what I want with this software!” moral quagmire, you should at least stop long enough to think about it so you know how to explain it if it gets brought up by a client — or by the other party if you happen to end up in court fighting a copyright and this is mentioned to the judge. Whatever you think of them, these EULAs have been mostly upheld by courts. How are you going to react if someone uses the same rationalization for using your photos that you used for choosing to build a Hackintosh?

But I’m not judging. I have enough challenge manging my personal ethical compass, I don’t need the karma of managing yours. But I felt it was important to point these issues out so that photographers understand that this is more complications than “this is unsupported hardware”.

I, personally, would hate to be in a conference room negotiating licensing terms with a client and taking notes no a machine that has unlicensed software on it, or is running software that I knowingly installed in violation of the licensing terms. That to me seems like I’m tempting the karma gods, and they already have me on speed dial, they don’t need excuses to ring me up. You know?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Mac Netbooks. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

(quick digression; when people decide to go talking about “apple’s failures”, the common commentary is something like ‘Apple’s failed products like the Apple TV and the Cube’ — when you realize that the Cube was released in 2000 — that’s ten years ago — and people looking for anything to criticize in Apple’s product line can really only come up with two examples in a decade, well, that says a whole lot about Apple’s success, no? )

I’ve got two arguments why the Apple TV isn’t a failure. It’s subjective and certainly open to discussion, but hopefully this will cause you to stop and consider…

First: Apple doesn’t consider it a failure. If it did, Apple would have dropped the product and moved on by now. They’re still selling it, supporting it and enhancing it — so Apple clearly sees a future to it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be available to buy.

Second: I’d argue that for a product to lose, some other product has to win. The product that beat the Apple TV is…. It is… Um…

See? The answer is “nobody”.

And that’s why Apple still has the Apple TV and what gives the people who like making immediate judgements on things the quivers. The market the Apple TV is in is still forming. Nobody has won. Nobody has lost. The fight is still in the early stages.

I’m frankly a little surprised at this, I thought the market would mature and mainstream faster than it did. One component that has slowed it down is the lack of standardized interconnects — i.e. the failure to launch of the Cablecard. It’s not clear to me if Apple was ever really looking at the Cablecard as a solution here, but if they were, it didn’t happen and it never really became an option.

So Apple’s real solution here is downloadable content, and that’s dragged by the relatively slow adoption of fast/cheap broadband in the states. It’s also dragged by the owners of the video content being in no super hurry to hand over control of the market to Apple the way music was handed over to it. the music studios hate how Apple can dictate business to the studios instead of the other way around, and so there’s been this deadly and slow dance for control between the studios and Apple, and since the volume (i.e. “money”) isn’t there, the studios can take their time and push for better deals and hope for alternatives so they can play someone off against apple for leverage. So far, nobody’s really come up with something that remotely competes with iTunes in numbers and scale, though.

What can push this market forward is a change in the dynamic. Apple TV wasn’t the product to drive adoption of iTunes for video on a mass scale, so there’s no strong incentive for studios to buy in and get on board. Because of that, it’s been a slow and steady grind to get content into itunes, so things move in slow motion.

But just suppose Apple were to come out with another product, one that hooked up to iTunes, was a good experience to watch video on, was priced in a way that the general consumer would buy it — and sold a zillion units? Suddenly the studios are going to hear cash registers, and more importantly consumers complaining loudly about the things they can’t watch because they’re not in iTunes. And that creates incentive to cut deals to make it available, because now there’s demand (and revenue). And that demand (and revenue) puts titles in iTunes, so suddenly the iTunes/AppleTV option is a viable alternative to Netflix or pay per view.

So my argument isn’t that Apple TV had failed, but it was waiting. Waiting for something to come along and do what Apple TV alone couldn’t do, which was drive demand and sales and rentals via iTunes to generate revenue which attracts the studios which brings in the titles which generates more sales of units which an Apple TV can leverage because the consumer wants ot be able to watch their movie both on their — device — as well as their TV without buying it twice.

And it seems to me Apple just announced that device. And that device has the potential to create the environment where Apple and the studios can sit down and work out getting all of the content into iTunes for consumers to consume. And when they do, suddenly people will realize Apple has this device they sell where that content also will end up on their TV’s!

And gee, Apple just happens to have it sitting there, waiting for consumers to discover it. And because Apple, unlike the pundits, realized the market was still creating itself and was willing to be patient, it has a product there and ready to succeed when the market matures enough to allow it to. That’s a LOT easier than trying to create a product to catch a market as it explodes any day…

So if you ask me, Apple’s stupid like a fox here. It knew that sooner or later, it’d need the Apple TV. It put it out there, it learned from it, it let it help Apple figure out how to create and own the market and bootstrap the functionality they needed to do so (like video rentals, which now exist and are sitting there waiting for the tablet. That wouldn’t have happened without Apple TV being there to implement it for). And when the market starts to grow because tablet sales drive content sales whichget the studios on board which drives consumer interest (and tablet sales which drive content sales which….), Apple can introduce an updated Apple TV to take advantage of it and start the buzz and hype to push it into the success curve — and because they started the process years ago and were patient and didn’t cut off support of the device when it wasn’t an immediate insane success, they’ve made these next steps a whole lot easier for themselves…

Apple TV isn’t dead. It’s in make up waiting for the second act to begin.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The Apple TV has not failed…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I thought my view of what was coming that I posted last night was pretty darn close, if I do say so myself. With great amusement I’ve been watching the usual suspects say the usual things; the people who live inside the geekdom echo chamber forgetting there’s a real world out there, and Apple tends to build products for the real world, not the self-appointed geek universe.

A few themes within the critics caught my eye, all of them (I think) incorrect. One are the people who really want the tablet to be a replacement for a laptop, and because this isn’t that, it sucks.

This device is a new category, aimed not at the people who spend their life madly typing in their blog while watching a video AND listening to Pandora and madly checking ot see whether their deathless prose is being appropriately retweeted by their adoring followers. It’s aimed at people who — believe it or not — actually want to sit down on the couch or in their hotel room after a long day at work and…

gasp.

RELAX. They want to read their email. They want to browse a few web sites, check the scores of their hockey team, maybe read a book, maybe watch a movie. Take it easy and — do what people did 20 years ago before the velocity of life ratcheted up to the point where some people think that if you aren’t doing 30 things at once you’re lazy.

Well, hint: in the real world, where most people actually live, people do still sit down in the evening, unplug, and read a book or watch a movie. And actually feel guilty doing both at once. There’s a whole bunch of folks within the geekdom echo chamber who’d be a whole lot happier and less stressed if they figured this out, too. But they’re too busy blogging while watching a movie they’ll only half remember a month from now.

This is a device not for geeks, but for consumers. It’s for people who use devices, not hack them. It’s for people who consume content, which is actually most people, as opposed to geeks who want it to be something it wasn’t designed to be. So lots of geeks are disappointed and blogging about it, while I expect this thing will sell many, many copies, mostly to people who won’t blog about it, but merely use it.

Another theme I’m seeing tonight is the lack of flash on the device. No surprise. If you really want to know why, think back a few years when Apple was trying to get back on its feet, and Adobe made a decision not to support its video products on the Mac, and instead tried to convince its mac customers to switch to PCs. Apple’s response then was ultimately to bring out its own video products — final cut — and ultimately ate the market out from Adobe. Later, when Apple was making the conversion to the intel platform, Adobe’s enthusiasm for bringing out Photoshop and its flagship products was most noticable — by how late they were and how uninterested Adobe seemed in actually trying to help Apple succeed. So now, when Apple has these really successful platforms and Adobes wants a piece of them, and yet Apple shows no real enthusiasm or hurry to cooperate? Well, folks, payback’s a bitch, and if you only see your partners for what they can do for you today, well, don’t whine when they choose to return the favor when the shoe is on the other foot. Burn your bridges with thought, folks, because you never know when you might want them back. And they’ll remember.  Apple sure does. And wouldn’t it be great irony if Apple uses its platforms to turn Flash from a success to an also-ran by supporting HTML5 on platforms that are in enough demand that people who currently are building flash-based things end up recoding those things away from flash to support the platforms people are demanding? Just like — oh, say — Youtube just did? Hmm.

A final theme I’m seeing is the geeks defining products as successful or failure. The Apple TV is being tossed about as a failure, even though, every time I look at estimates on unit sales, it’s still outselling Tivo and has been almost since launch. Yet it failed, Tivo is what the geeks keep saying the Apple TV ought to be. Hmm. Apple could use a few more failures like that. Especially given that I agree with most of the geeks that much of the potential of the Apple TV line of products is still ahead of it. Maybe the Apple geniuses were busy on some other product line. Like, oh, maybe a tablet…

Finally is a recurring theme with some that Apple didn’t “blow them away” (and therefore, I guess, this sucks). Folks, you all need to reset your internal adrenalin meter back from 11. Some of you would take anything less than being personally tasered by Steve himself as “boring”. One word: decaf. Not all products and not all announcements have to be over the top. There merely have to be damn good products.

This one is. To me, it’s a perfect device for my mom, who lives and dies by email, yahoo, access to recipes on Food TV, wants her audiobooks and to read Stephen King and Jean Auel novels and watch the occasional movie (and Emeril). THERE is your target audience.

Me? I like the idea of having one. It won’t replace my carrying my laptop on the road, but it’ll give me something I can use while my laptop is processing photos in Lightroom or crunching away at some compile for a program I’m writing. I doubt I’d write a novel on an iPad, but I’d sure write a blog entry and catch up on email. It supplements why I need a laptop wonderfully, and means I won’t need to worry so much about bad cable TV in a hotel room or hauling books around when I travel. It’s a nice supplemental device for my life. For a traveller who’s content creation issues aren’t so — intense — this very well could replace carrying a laptop. If your job is about writing email, memos and presentations instead of Ruby, HTML and Photoshop, you’re probably already ragging your boss to get approval to get one. Or should.

Nope. This isn’t a sexy repackaging of a laptop. It isn’t a tablet-PC. it isn’t a “netbook done right”. It’s an entirely new type of device, and I think it’s going to be rather successful. now, two or three generations down, it well COULD become those things; I could see down the road these things having the potential to make Mac OS X obsolete and running whatever Lightroom becomes and doing the heavy hitting, but right now — it is what it is, and what it is is very good if that’s what you need.

I think it blows away the Kindle, and I wouldn’t be suprised if Amazon doesn’t quietly breathe a sigh of relief that this lets them get away from building devices and go back to what it’s really good at, which is distribution. And I think it effectively kills “unitaskers” like the Epson P-4000 and digital wallets. Why buy that when you can buy an iTab that does it ALSO? Maybe not for the high end user, but for most of the market, definitely.

All in all, I’m impressed. and looking forward to getting my hands on one. One thing I’m going to be curious to see is whether this thing is going to be allowed to take on the Mifi. If I could use it to wire up a wireless network to 3G in a hotel room (even if I can’t use the iTab for other things!) to handle the work to the office, that’s gravy. Then unplug the laptop for the night and use this beast for recreation (and to prepare tomorrow’s presentation for the sales meeting!)…

All you folks dissing the device, I think you’re looking at it wrong. Here’s a hint: Steve’s not stupid, and knows what real people want. And isn’t afraid to offer it. And this is, I think, it.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some thoughts on the iPad…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Derek Powazek sums up my — anticipations — of the product very well.

The typical run-up to the announcement, with the leakers and the guessers hyping each other into a frenzy until people start trashing the product before it’s even announced (because they’re basically tired of hearing it) is in full force. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with all of this stuff any more, except as an amused outsider. But as an amused outsider, I count myself amused, but frankly, I tuned it out days ago because it’s so over the top and silly, after a while, it just stops being interesting.

The tablet looks to be the creation of a new market segment, and I’m going to be fascinated to see how it’s positioned and how well it does — not to mention how well Apple does it. Right now, we have these broad usage capabilities:

Life in your pocket — your phone, which increasingly allows you to carry your essential stuff around without hauling a huge beast to try to manage it. That this data syncs up to other places where it’s available on your other electronic environments is great, but ultimately, this is about managing who you are and what you do in a portable format. We’ve made great strides at turning these pocket devices into information consumers as well, but the small screen makes that a set of compromises. They are also — bluntly — pretty crappy at content creation because of the compromises needed to fit in your pocket. the thought of blogging via my phone doesn’t intrigue me. The thought of writing a novel on my phone scares me.

Portable content creation — your laptop. Carry your office with you. I remember long ago when I got my first PowerMac Duo, which in many ways was a netbook 15 years before anyone thought to invent a netbook. Loved that machine, and the docks, because for the first time I could carry my life with me and turn it back into a desktop when I wasn’t mobile. I still strive for that model today, rather than keeping multiple computers and trying to keep the data in sync. Today’s laptops have enough power and a good enough screen than you really CAN turn one into a portable office with few (if any) compromises.

Desktop content creation — the iMac, the mini, the mac pros. We’ve seen this class of machine shrink out of prominence over the last few years because, frankly, laptops have replaced them for most people. Plug a laptop into a monitor and you have the best of both worlds, large screens AND portability. iMacs continue to have some popularity because there are times and situations where portability isn’t a feature (kids being a big part of that). Mac Pros exist, but are clearly a power user (or ego user) niche now; few of us really need that kind of oomph.

What’s missing here? There’s a huge class of user that’s never had a product designed specifically for them. Tomorrow we’ll see the first one.

That’s the content consumer.

Laptops are aimed at creation, they  carry a lot of “stuff” with them that are underused by a lot of people, starting with the keyboard. If your primary use of a keyboard is typing in URLs or emails, you don’t need all of the bulk and mechanics a laptop keyboard bring along (not to mention weight and power consumption and…). The iPhone model (software keyboard, etc) work fine here, but the iPhone form factor for the screen creates other compromises that make the phone tough for these people (but great for the “life in the pocket”).

The thing that kept me from buying a Kindle was simple — it’s a unitasker, and while it does it quite well (and I have the kindle software on my iPhone), I don’t want multiple devices to do the different things I want in this usage space. The reason I think the earlier attempts at PC-based tablets didn’t take off was because they were really “laptops in a tablet”, not tablets designed for content consumption — and just created a new set of compromises that most of us realized made them — compromised.

That’s where I think this tablet lies: content isn’t “books” or “newspapers”, it’s web, it’s video, it’s audio, it’s games, it’s text and content. And this device is going to be all about consuming content, and all of it in a single device.

If it is, it’s going to sell zillions. It’s going to cannibalize laptop sales to some degree, but that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of device that I have wanted for my mom, who’s primarily a consumer of infomration and doesn’t need the complexity of a Mac (much less a windows computer).

Would I buy one? Depends. I’m a content creator, and I’m rarely without my laptop. A device like this isn’t going to be optimized for the kind of things I’m doing (especially my photography, I don’t see this as a device particularly interesting for serious photography geeking), so it’s interesting only to the degree I can’t also do these things on my laptop; it’s not a replacement device, but a supplementary device. But then, I bought an Xbox 360 for gaming as a supplement to my Mac for computing, so who knows….

To the degree that this device makes using your content as painless as your phone makes managing your email/contacts/calendar, it’ll be a huge success.

One thing I’ll be fascinated to see, perhaps not tomorrow: how much of what they do on this device also ends up on my Mac. the closer they come to a “virtual tablet” on the mac (via iTunes?) the less I need one, but I can believe ultimately I’ll have one because I do like to sit down on the couch with a good book, and I’ve never really found a way to do that comfortably with a laptop.

I don’t think tomorrow’s device will solve the final problem — taking a good book with me into the bathtub for a soak. But who knows? maybe that’s a third party opportunity.

What my gut tells me: tomorrow’s announcement is going to change things significantly, is going to be hugely successful, and many people are going to trash it because they don’t get it.  This may turn out to be the biggest thing yet. And given the things that have come from Apple (and Steve) over the years, that’s saying something.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The night before the Apple Tablet…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I actually just had a quick random question about your Contact Us page on chuqui.com

I agree about not putting a phone number on a personal or small business site unless you are prepared for the idiot factor.

Since yourself and of course myself too are all too familiar with the world of spammers I was wondering why you don’t obfuscate or somehow protect your mailto: link?

It’s a serious question, as I am actually wondering if you do want to see how much spam will come to it and which types of spam?

good question, complicated answer… Part of it is that my email addresses have been “out there” for so long — I’ve owned plaidworks.com since 1995, for instance — that I assume I’m on every spam list in the universe, because, from what I can tell, I am. So why hide when it’s too late already?

I also think those obfuscators are fake-security. Anything you can build programmatically, they can unbuild programmatically. All they have to do is care enough to try. They really don’t fix things, but they make you feel better, and over time, they get compromised — so you add complexity to things and in the long run, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Or it does, for a while, but how do you know when it stops working?

I don’t see any purpose in having an arms war with someone who can out-gun you from day one. I’d rather put my time into useful things.

So here’s what I do:

I hire someone else to worry about it.

I don’t believe it’s possible for an individual to “win” a way with the spammers. Or even “break even”, or even stick with “moral victories” for long. Even if I could, I’d much rather put my time and energy into other things.

So that means having your email hosted by someone who does have the resources to fight spam. I currently have three email hosts: gmail/google, mobileme/Apple, and my personal ISP (plaidworks.com/chuqui.com). Of the three, the personal ISP has the most leak-through, but they honestly do a good job and I have no complaints, given the complexity of the task.

Apple/Mobileme uses Brightmail for filtering (unless things have changed), and Google uses Postini, which they bought a few months after I turned down a job at Postini to work for Strongmail instead. Both groups have organizations individuals can’t hope to do better than (IMHO), no matter how much the geeks think they can “better mousetrap” the problem. My experience shows it to be a situation with rapidly diminishing returns for constantly increasing resource commitments.

So let the experts handle it. Then, realize it’s never going to be 100% perfect, and don’t get your knickers in a knot when it really IS imperfect. A few pieces of spam sneaking through won’t kill anyone; the stress you get spazzing out over the spam just might.

Right now my final mailbox lives on gmail, because it works best with my webos/Pre phone. When I was living on an iPhone, I used MobileME’s mail server. Depending on where I live, I have the other servers set to auto-forward to the final repository, and everything works pretty well.

In reality, the anti-spam aspects of email work pretty well now if you’re involved with a mail host that has their act together. Many corporate environments don’t. Most geeks fighting this battle on their own don’t (and complain about it loudly, so I think the general view is it’s a lot LESS solved than it is). Living on a mail host run by pros costs a few bucks (well, it doesn’t on gmail, but you get ads. I would happily pay a few bucks to do away with them..) but I’m a lot more worried about spending time than money in most cases.

Things like mail obfuscators never really worked well; they might have been ignored by spammers, but if the spammers decided they were worth investing in cracking, they got cracked. Very few geeks who installed them actually did any kind of scientific testing on how well they worked, they noticed no spam in their boxes for a few days and declared victory. A month later? three? six? Compared to non-obfuscated control addresses?

shrug. very little science here. Including myself. What science I do have is a couple of years old and pretty thin as well, so I don’t declare myself an expert, but when I did experiment, I just didn’t see anything worth the time investment, not compared to just putting my email on a server where a staff was in charge of solving the problem for me.

The proper place to solve the spam problem is on the incoming connection; even if you do obfuscate, all it takes is one mistake to leak, or someone else to leak it FOR you (and I found those leaks everywhere when I was tracking this stuff; painfully sad) to require having to do the incoming filtering as well. If you have to do that anyway, isn’t the proper answer to focus on doing that better and not do things that ultimately don’t really help solve the problem?

My bottom line: you aren’t going to keep email addresses away from the spammers. Trying to do so is a false security solution, and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Instead, it’s keeping spam out of the incoming email stream, and if you do that well, you don’t need to worry about the addresses leaking. So I don’t.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Protecting mailto links (my advice: don’t). This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

But there were a few negatives: the cost — I was spending about $17/mo on storage costs with S3, plus about $1.50 a month to Jungle disk for their advanced features. I also worried about the occasional delays (I was only uploading about a gigabyte of fresh data a day, so a few days of heavy photo shooting could cause backlogs before the data was stored offsite; uploading the network is an option, but costs. Everything costs…) and finally the time it would take to recover via online recovery if I ever needed the backed up data bothered me.

So I decided to move to a simpler strategy: clone my disks and keep them offsite. Over the weekend I disabled and deleted the S3 store and turned off my Jungle Disk setup, and ordered a new drive.

Not an offsite drive, which might surprise you, but a new internal drive for the Macbook, a 340 Gig Hitachi 7200RPM drive. Why, might you ask?

Well, let me tell you: if you read the previous pieces, you saw where I noted that one of the best ways to never NEED your backups (always my preferred policy!) is to replace my primary disks on a regular basis; my laptop drive was (over)due, so it made sense to replace it before it failed. By upgrading to a larger internal disk, I could take the files I’m currently storing on an external firewire drive and put them back on the laptop drive.

That simplifies my computing universe — fewer spinning things hooked up to computers, fewer places to misplace data and one less “i have that data, but it’s not with me” opportunity. And it means I can repurpose that firewire drive for my offsite backup.

Amazon had a nice deal (about $75) on a Western Digital 320gig 7200RPM drive with a 16 meg cache (hmm. old phart warning: the first hard drive I ever bought — for a Mac 512K that plugged into the floppy port!) was a ten Megabyte drive that was wonderful and had more disk than I could ever think of using, especially compared to floppies… Now that drive is smaller than the performance cache on a hard drive… wow).

I could have gone as far as 500 gig, but that changes the price/performance,a nd even with copying all of the files off my secondary drive, I still have 150 gig free. By the time I start worrying about the disk filling up, the bigger drives will get cheaper, or I can simply buy a nice cheap external and split it up again. But for now, I’m happy on a single drive, a single backup drive, and a single offline external archive drive. Plus backups of each, of course.

I wired up the raw drive via USB to my laptop and used superduper to clone my primary drive. Then I let everything sit for two days with the new drive spun up, refreshing it daily with superduper — because infant mortality on your laptop drive really sucks, and giving it a couple of days before opening up the guts and swapping things is a bit of insurance. Just saying — nothing like putting your laptop back together and having it fail (or not boot).

A bonus feature of this change: the old drive in the laptop was a 5400 RPM drive. Upgrading to 7200 RPM improves the I/O characteristics and speeds the overall performance, especially if you’re doing things that eat lots of virtual memory (like, oh, photoshop or lightroom, or running both). On a mac, check /var/vm and see how many swapfiles you have and how big they are. The larger your VM set, the more your disk is going to affect overall performance, and in many cases, a slow disk is the real problem to performance, not lack of RAM. hint: people how are proud of NEVER REBOOTING THEIR COMPUTERS are never re-initializing their VM environment. Silly boys. I’ve seen major complaints about slow performance in firefox and photoshop magically disappear on computers that were simply rebooted. Just saying.

So for $75, I remove a $20/mon charge to pay for the online backups, I add enough disk to my primary computer to keep me for at least six months or longer, added a faster disk to speed up overall performance of the computer, and I really didn’t do anything to weaken my backup strategy. All I need to do is remember to bring the catastrophe disk home once a month, refresh it, and get it back offsite again; I can choose to do it more often if I finish a significant project, too. And that’s very manageable for me — just put repeating tasks in your calendar to nag you, right?

There is one other upgrade I’ll need to make, which is my bus-powered backup drive is now too small to fully backup my primary drive, but I don’t need to worry about that for another 50 gigs of data or so; that’ll cost me another $75 (or less by then) down the road.

So I now have my primary disk (320 gigs) with a time machine backup and THREE superduper cloned backups (one offsite, one nightly, one weekly); I also have a pair of 500 gig drives which store all of my long-term offline archival stored data; they’re clones of each other, and one is stored offsite. These hold the files I don’t ever expect to touch again but won’t throw out for a while just in case (the import backups of all of my photo shoots, for instance), so they are in fact more redundancy. Just in case, you know?

The old laptop drive? It goes into the anti-static bag and gets filed with all of my yearly paperwork and taxes; it’ll stay there until I dispose of this year’s paperwork down the road, at which point the drive will have a bad date with a big hammer and some other power tools and get tossed in the trash. I much prefer my hard drives not end up in hands of strangers (if I do give a drive to somene else, it’s generally after a multi-pass, multi-pattern write/erase sequence, but drives are cheap enough, I kinda feel they’re not worth losing track of until you know they’re destroyed, and there’s no sense destroying until later, because you never know when you might need it…. It hurts nothing to wait…)

So I’m following my own advice and fixing my own backups — again. Using simple technology to reduce “failure by complexity”, using as few mechanisms as reasonable, using multiple redundant backups and backing up on different time sequences to avoid the problem of corruption not found until too late — and keeping copies off site, without being anal about it.

It’s probably overkill, but disk is cheap enough now that it’s cheap insurance. And I’d rather have one too many backups than one too few.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Following my own advice on backups….. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

To map a path, you not only must know where you want to end up, you have to know where you are. In fact, you really don’t need to know your final destination — it’s fine to say “let’s get to sweden, and then we can figure out where Stockholm is, and once we get there, we can find the hotel”. But if you map your route by starting at the wrong place, you’re screwed.

I’ve been spending time studying the analytics of my existing environment and trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t, why I like and what I don’t. It was about a year ago I decided to move from typepad back to wordpress and consolidate my presence on one blog on chuqui.com (I actually made the move in January). Overall, I think that worked very well; I like the platform and I like the technologies involved. I used an off the shelf wordpress theme that I feel worked fine in the interim with limited tweaking, and I can’t complain.

The numbers on the blog are decent. Since shifting from Typepad to WordPress, feed subscriptions have grown from about 425 to 650 (+35%). 16,000 different people visited in 2009 (so far), a number I find fascinating. Traffic is split 40% referral from other sites (including clicks from twitter postings), 40% direct (primarily RSS feeds) and 20% search engine. The search engine number is too low, but I haven’t done any significant optimization for SEO.

An interesting tidbit is that 45% of the pages published get no (zero, none, nada) viewings; if you factor out pages published in 2009 and generating views based on RSS/Twitter, it’s more like 70%.

A typical posting has about a two week lifetime where it’ll get views based on being in your RSS feed or posted to twitter/facebook; after that, unless it’s got prominent visibility on the site, gets traffic from links from other blogs or search engines, it no longer exists.

In other words, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) matters, especially if you want to avoid having to constantly throw traffic out onto the RSS feed to drive views. At the same time, if you aren’t updating on a regular basis, you’re going to disappear.

My adsense advertising made me about $0.75 this year. I haven’t done any work to try to maximize this — it was literally a put-there-and-watch test — but that’s really pitiful. Part of that, I think, is that Adsense seems to work better in a non-geek audience; if your audience lives within the tech-geek echo chamber, Adsense might as well not exist. it is certainly not a panacea; hell, if anyone still thinks there’s a magic cookie where you put up a blog and money rolls in, they deserve what they get.

On the other hand, my limited (very, VERY limited) tests using Amazon affiliate links netted about $40. That won’t pay the rent, but it will buy the occasional photography book (which I can review and generate affiliate links, which…); and since it’s literally a free option for readers, there’s little downside.

About 40% of my total pageviews are to the front page (http://www.chuqui.com); I’m not entirely clear why. Adsense revenue generated by the front page: $0.00. Talk about a waste of real estate.

Most popular content: all over the place.  No real trends, which is probably good, because if my hockey writing was clearly my most popular material, that’d be bad for business.

Over on twitter, I’ve passed 1,000 followers, which just stuns me. That’s double (or more) what it was six months ago.My flickr viewing stream has a solid, regular pattern, and in fact has better SEO than my blog does — more on that later, and that’s not a bad thing, it just needs to be understood (and it can be leveraged).

My interpretations of this?

“Just posting” isn’t enough for what you publish to have an audience. The good news is that the blog format encourages conversation and allows for a less structured writing style. The negative is that if that’s all you do, most of the words or pictures will get seen for a short period of time and then effectively go away.

There are options to mitigate that. On a technical level, SEO techniques help improve visibility through the search engines. Good site design can help make content accessible to a user who visits the site, but the blunt reality is that people who visit the site don’t explore; they read what they came to see and leave. you can reduce that with careful planning of your home page and your posting-detail page, but still, expect “stick around and enjoy your stay” to be a tough sell.

I’ve decided that one way around this is repackaging. Tidbits does interesting work with their e-books, and I’ve been watching David duChemin‘s experiments with fascination, and I think this is a very interesting technique to explore. Content creation via the blog, which allows you to explore a topic in depth and over time, in a conversational and non-linear style, and then pull that content back together into an e-book where you can structure it and polish it and then publish it in HTML and/or PDF and then feature that publication on the blog entries where the content came from. The “typical” user won’t wander the blog to read the entire thread of postings, but I think if they find the content via search or from a link from another site, and the page they land on has it available as an extended article — that I think is a workable distribution for longer and more complex material.

It makes it easy for the viewer. If you make it complicated, they won’t. And you get a bit of the best of both worlds, the informality and interactivity of the blog format, and the formal “published” format for easy distribution — and for someone to come and grab later if they’re not part of the immediate conversation.

And since it is now in a tangible (albeit e-published) format, I think it is easier to make an argument that it has some value, which if you want to convince someone to exchant something of value for it, can’t hurt.

And it can be made to work with both text AND images, and adapts well for creative commons rights usage. You can get paid via an ecommerce solution as well as a donation model, depending on what you want to do, or even give it away and use sponsorship or advertising models if you want.

And that seems to be the starting point for the whole shebang, no?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Understanding the starting point. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I suppose I could decide to move to Astoria and go to work in Starbucks. That’d be a perfectly acceptable second career — and if my other plans don’t work, it might still happen. That’d take a lot less work and planning, though, so I don’t have to think about that quite yet.

What I’ve known for a long time is that whatever this is going to be, it’s going to have a strong online component, which means a well-designed and well-built web presence. I use the term “web presence” here, not web site, because while a web site is a key aspect to this, nothing stands alone in the internet any more. You always have interfaces to other services, whether it’s social networking (Facebook, twitter), or communication (gmail) or to leverage other services instead of building your own (flickr, Smugmug, Cafepress, etc).

Because building a web presence to support this second career is going to be a large and complex beast by the time I’m done, and because one option both Laurie and I are looking at in the future is “build web sites for companies in Astoria” (or “build web sites for photographers”), having a portfolio site I can be proud of is crucial, and having the documentation on the how and why of the design and build process is a useful sales tool.

Besides, the conversation I hope this generates will help make it a better and more useful site; incremental feedback and early discussion is a lot more useful in fixing and tweaking when it’s easier and early.

So this is the second track of discussion that’s going to start showing up on the blog; there is the “why” of the second career, and here, the “how”.

But neither of those matters without the most important part.

Next up: the what. Because this all has to be about something, or it’s really rather silly to do.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Designing a Web Presence. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I have never been interested in the “netbook” because I’m MacOS-centric and I saw the netbook as a series of compromises from the functionality I want in a laptop that I found unacceptable — AND I believe that 95% of what most users see as the core functionaliry of a netbook, I see as functionalty that belongs on my phone. the netbook is at best a transitional technology, and smartphonees are quickly taking on most of what netbooks are trying to do today. I don’t like the price/performance of a netbook. Hell, I just don’t like the performance very much, not when I can already do most of it on an iPhone or webOS or Android.

As a photographer, I have also never been interested in buying so-called digital wallets such as the Epson P-7000; too expensive for limited functionalty, and to me, it’s more cost effective to just buy enough cards to handle the sitaution and wait until you can get back to the laptop to offload them and make a real backup.

But I take one look at at the Chrome OS type devices and I see something that can be set up as a rather nice digital wallet — PLUS give you access to some key computing capabilities (email, web, wifi, file uploading) and suddenly, for about the cost of what you pay for a decent digital wallet today, you get something that can hopefully act as a wallet AND access to some key computing features as well? Being able to offload pictures and send a few samples online via gmail or upload to smugmug from the field?

NOW you start having something I’d consider having. Neither device alone is worth the cost of buying it to me. But Chrome OS looks like it’ll have the capability to make these two devices one, at about the same price point of either — and now I’m interested. And it’s going to be a while before phones can take on the capacity we’d be looking for to do the digital wallet capabilities, so this is something a good smartphone can’t yet do.

If I’m a product manager for a digital wallet today, I’m looking at the end of life for this type of product and trying to figure out how to move to this new merged capability before someone eats my lunch. If I’m a developer for these new Chrome OS devices, I’m looking to see how to make it act like a digital wallet, because photographers are going to want to buy this.

And if I’m a photographer, I’m watching and hoping this happens, beacuse this has the potential to be a really nice addition to the photo bag that could allow me to stop carrying my laptop in the field but still be able to do a lot of what I currently want while out shooting.

Count me intrigued and hopeful here.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some thoughts on Google Chrome OS (epecially for photographers). This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.