One of my system disks died recently, and I was once again saved by SuperDuper, which has saved my bacon twice now.

It takes some time to recover from a backup; this provides ample opportunity to reflect upon one’s backup strategy. While my personal strategy arguably borders on overkill, there was a significant chink in the armor; while I had numerous backups via a variety of techniques, they were all local. In the cases of theft, fire, or earthquake, I was basically trusting to luck.

There are some who advocate periodically copying data to a separate hard drive and placing that drive in a safe-deposit box at a bank. Not a bad strategy, but I’m pretty familiar with my own tolerance for annoying tasks, and that obviously wasn’t a strategy which was going to work for me.

What I really wanted was automatic offsite backup via the Internet, since that wouldn’t involve me hoofing disks back and forth to the bank from time to time. I was already doing some network-based backup for my really critical files to .Mac, but that solution is really only suitable for a relatively small amount of data, and what I really wanted to back up was my Aperture library, which is at present about 45GB worth of digital photos. I’d be seriously upset over losing these pictures, so any online backup service would have to handle them, with reasonable performance at reasonable cost.

There are some very cool services which only handle backup of digital pictures, but I wanted a general backup solution rather than something point-specific.

There are as of this writing three options for general-purpose online backup:

• Mozy
• JungleDisk
• CrashPlan

Each of these products provides some form of trial; I took advantage of these trials, and would encourage others to do the same. In my case, I found CrashPlan to be a perfect fit for my needs.

CrashPlan for the most part runs as a background daemon process. As such, the UI is quite minimalist, since it really doesn’t get used all that often. Here’s the main screen:

Note that backups can have multiple backup destinations, including CrashPlan Central, another computer on the LAN, or a WAN-connected friend’s computer. In my case, I’m using the paid CrashPlan Central service, whereby data is stored in an offsite data center run by CrashPlan, but the other options are free, and allow for ‘buddy backup’ using ‘friends and family’ systems located elsewhere.

Key to consider in use of a network backup facility is the fact that most home cable or DSL connections are asymmetric; that is, the upload speed is typically much slower than the download speed. For example, my DSL connection is rated as ‘up to 3Mb’ download, but only ‘up to 500Kb’ upload. Since sending data to a remote system is all upload, the initial backup is going to take a long time, much as it would take quite some time to suck a bowling ball through a garden hose. In my case, the 52GB I’m backing up took 15 days to accomplish.

That might sound like a lot, but it’s taken me 20 years to accumulate the data being backed up, and the initial backup only runs once, anyway — subsequent incremental backups only send deltas, so it’s all extremely quick once the initial backup has completed.

One very cool feature of CrashPlan is that data is available as soon as it’s been backed up; one doesn’t have to wait for the initial, giant backup run to complete — as soon as an individual file has been sent, it’s available for restore. The restore screen continues the minimalist philosophy, and is quite intuitive:

In order to not monopolize the network connection CrashPlan allows for configuration of network utilization thresholds:

Similarly, CPU utilization can also be configured. However, CPU utilization by CrashPlan on my system is so incredibly low, I doubt that anything but the smallest system would require this option. Identification of changed files and backup of changes is obviously very efficient; it’s basically unnoticeable.

Data is transmitted and stored in an encrypted format, and files are versioned, which allows one to return to a previous version of a file, much in the same way as Time Machine allows for this.

CrashPlan runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and CrashPlan running on any OS can back up to CrashPlan running on any other OS. If a destination system is used only as a backup destination, for example, an old PC that isn’t doing anything else anyway, then the software doesn’t even need to be licensed.

CrashPlan is available in a basic version for $25, and a Pro version with more features for $60. This review is based on the Pro version.

CrashPlan Central is as of this writing a little less than $1/GB/year, with a variety of storage sizes avaialble from 50GB to 1TB.

Basically, this thing is set and forget. Brilliantly executed.

 

This type of distortion tends to occur with telephoto lenses, even good ones, at the widest end of their telephoto range.

In this case, the lens is a Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G DX VR; quite a nice lens within most of its range. This particular shot was taken at 18mm, which isn’t where the lens does its best work. The funhouse mirror effect is quite unpleasant, and without correction, this shot would be garbage.

This type of distortion can be manually corrected in Photoshop, but that’s tedious, and the results are inconsistent, which is annoying, since a given lens will have predictable distortion, so the distortion should be correctable in a systematic and calibrated manner, just as in this corrected image:

This image was corrected by PTLens, which at USD $15 must be the best value in image processing available. Your $15 obtains all of the following:

• Automatic, calibrated correction of pincushion and barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective, with hundreds of lenses supported.
• A standalone Windows application.
• A standalone Mac application.
• A Photoshop plug-in for both Mac and Windows.
• An external editor for Lightroom on both Mac and Windows.
• A plug-in for Aperture 2.1 or later on the Mac.

Note that the Mac support is Intel-only; PowerPC isn’t supported.

Since I’m an Aperture user, the Aperture plug-in is my weapon of choice. The utility is fast, intuitive, and the results are excellent.

A trial download providing 10 corrections prior to requiring a purchase is available.

I don’t think there’s any better value out there in image processing; this thing is a steal at $15.

 

Pictured on the right is the Father of the Forest, a 2000-year old, 250-foot giant redwood, located in Big Basin State Park. The shot was taken about 20 feet from the base of the tree, which is 66 feet in circumference.

We are fortunate to live in an area with many of these magnificent trees, and I love to take pictures of them.

However, the incredible size of these trees poses some photographic challenges; in short, they’re just too big to take pictures of — even with a wide angle lens, it’s impossible to fit something so massive into a single picture.

In fact, using an 18mm lens, moving from top to bottom, it took 7 shots to capture the entire tree. Now, that’s neat and all, but the result is a number of disjointed shots; it’d be nice to be able to stitch them all together into a complete picture.

Fortunately, we can, using panorama creation software.

This is a surprisingly competitive segment, with a number of solutions available. Almost all vendors provide downloadable demo copies, typically enforcing the demo license via a prominent watermark in the resulting stitched image.

In my opinion, the preeminent product in this space is AutoPano Pro, from Kolor.

AutoPano uses SIFT, developed at UBC, to perform its magic, and magical it is — one simply hands AutoPano a series of images, and it does the rest; stitching, lens and camera correction, exposure blending, ghost removal, color correction, and cropping.

Basically, it’s a fully automated solution, very simple to use, and produces great results without any effort. Handles the 14-bit RAW files produced by my camera without problems.

The one downside to the program is the UI, which appears to be QT-based. This isn’t surprising, as a Windows and Linux versions of the program are also available, and Kolor isn’t a big shop; it makes sense for them to use a cross-platform toolkit. However, the result is that the UI looks a bit odd from the Mac perspective.

However, that’s but a small complaint in what is otherwise a fantastic utility.

AutoPano Pro is 99 Euros. A free, watermarking demo is available.

Highly recommended.

 

For example, a common use case is to move something from a location buried at a ridiculously deep layer in the filesystem to an unrelated and equally ridiculously deep layer. I’m certain that there are people who are completely facile with this activity in the Finder; I’m unfortunately not one of them.

Back in the days when 8088 machines with 8MHz ‘Turbo’ switches roamed the earth, we used Norton Commander, a file manager with a dual-pane interface. For my money, this interface hasn’t been bettered yet for filesystem manipulation; it’s the simplest and easiest interface for the task.

I’d tried a few of the the Norton Commander clones on Windows, but none of them held the magic for me. I was therefore intrigued to discover Forklift, a dual-pane file manager for OS X.

The tiny screenshot size available here on Blogger doesn’t really do Forklift justice; I strongly recommend visiting the site to see higher-resolution images.

Forklift is quite full-featured; I use the following features constantly:

• dual-pane interface, with tabs
• integrated archive (zip, tar, rar, etc.) support
• application deleter
• integrated FTP/SFTP support
• live preview inspector panel, with, for example, audio playback available directly in the inspector

There are numerous other features available; these are just the ones that I’m making constant use of. This utility reminds me of the iPhone announcement….

“We’re releasing a file manager, an archive utility, an application deleter, an FTP client, a preview utility, an Amazon S3 client….do you get it? It’s a file manager, an archive utility….”

Cue applause. In short, you can obtain all the functionality provided by Forklift, but with Forklift you get it all in one spot, with a beautiful Cocoa interface.

Forklift is relatively new to the market, but was rock solid during the lengthy public beta period. It’s been completely reliable for me.

A 15-day unlimited trial is available; registration cost is $29.95.

 

We used to joke that the name stood for ‘escape, meta, alt, control, shift’; emacs uses a ton of key modifiers, being from an era when spiffy window and mouse based systems didn’t exist. It took a while to get used to, but when you were finally in the groove, you could really fly with it — editing is naturally quite fast when you never have to remove your hands from the keyboard.

The Mac has taken this philosophy to a high art; there are shortcut keys for everything.

Now, I suppose after a year or so on a Mac, these will have become second nature, but as a recent switcher, I’m finding that it’s taking a while to retrain my fingers. Now, obviously, there are menu choices for everything I want to do, but that’s the slow road; for common applications, I want to get used to using the keyboard shortcuts.

Learning these via the menu entries is tedious. The act of moving the mouse, going to the appropriate menu, locating the command, and observing the shortcut key combination is just too much of an interruption for my feeble attention span. By the time I’ve done all that, my train of thought has derailed.

However, there is a very cool alternative that works quite well for me.

KeyCue is a utility which monitors the command key. If command is held down for a short time, the desktop dims and a window pops up, listing keyboard shortcuts currently available.

As an example, here’s the shortcut display window with Camino as the foreground application:

Very slick indeed. Crisp, well-organized, easy to read, and my hands are still on the keyboard. I’m starting to remember the key shortcuts quite easily now that I don’t have to jump through hoops to determine what they are.

KeyCue offers multiple themes and is very configurable. Frankly, this is just so useful, I’m surprised that it’s not part of the OS already.

One downside is that the trial period is quite short. After only a few activations, KeyCue greeks most of the displayed shortcuts and asks for registration. Personally, I find this approach to be a bit draconian, since I think the application sells itself.

It would also be nice to have the application configuration present itself as a system preference panel; at present, it’s a hidden background application.

KeyCue is $19.99 USD or Euro. Registration was painless, and a registration key was provided instantly via the checkout page. However, strangely, the key is apparently not sent to the customer email address, so it’s important to retain a copy of the checkout page. While this is good advice in any case, the lack of an email invoice and key information is a bit unusual.

 

.Mac was described to me as an email and web publishing account. I declined an initial purchase, even at a discount, since my Google hosted domain already provides these services. I was informed that the discount would remain available to me for 14 days, and that a free trial of .Mac was available.

Prior to starting my free trial, I did some research into reviews of the service. I was quite surprised by the degree of visceral hatred expressed in many of the reviews.

However, the theme of the negative reviews was a common one. To paraphrase them:

“The Man wants $99/year for this service, and it’s only 1GB of disk space; fight the power. Here’s how you can get the same thing for free by simply running these twelve different applications, only three of which are in direct violation of Google’s Terms of Service.”

Hmmm….been there, done that, no longer interested. Perhaps I’m getting old; the enjoyment I once derived from manually integrating half-baked solutions seems to be waning. My interest was piqued. To the trial!

The web publisher, iWeb, does indeed seem to be ridiculously easy to use, but it’s probably not something I’ll make any use of in the near term.

The mail service is well, mail. Simple, easy to use, seems to have quality spam filtering. Comes with a trendy @mac.com address identifying one as a member of the hip digerati. Nice, but I’ve got Gmail, so again, not something I’m likely to make much use of.

Photo sharing/publishing, nicely integrated with iPhoto, is the next component of interest. We’re always sharing pictures with the rest of the family, so this is likely something that’ll see some use. Getting warmer….

Next up, backup. Now this gets interesting. The .Mac subscription includes a very nice backup utility; I’m quite impressed by the manner in which the typical features of backup have been supplied in what is a very user-friendly application. It includes scheduling support, simple specification of backup sets, the ability to back up to disks, CDs and DVDs, and, most importantly, online backup.

Online backup is performed to the ‘iDisk’, a webdav-hosted volume located on Apple’s servers. 1GB of space is provided, initially split evenly between mail and general disk space. This allocation can be adjusted via a control panel on the .Mac site.

In my opinion, iDisk is what makes the offering compelling. The iDisk appears as a virtual drive, with locally cached synchronization similar to that provided by AFS or DFS filesystems in the Unix world. While it works as a regular filesystem, the OS also exposes APIs by which applications can synchronize data to it. As examples, browser bookmarks and passwords can be automatically synchronized to the .Mac account for safekeeping and to allow consistency of these items on different machines. While I’ve only got a single Mac, Sensei Patrick does have quite a stable of them; he does make extensive use of this feature.

The iDisk is also available to Windows systems, via both a thick-client solution and a web-based interface. Handy when traveling.

The killer feature to me was Quicken’s built-in support of .Mac, allowing for zero-intervention, automated offsite backup to be performed each time Quicken is closed.

While 1GB of storage does seem paltry these days, it suffices for my personal data — documents, source code, financial data, and other records. These are critically important, but they don’t take up a lot of space. Thus, for my important data, 1GB is generous. Seamless integration and the ability to access this data easily from anywhere makes this to me a substantial value. Further, no one seems to pay list price for .Mac; Amazon is presently selling the yearly subscriptions for $20 less than list, and seems to have done so for some time.

However, discounted or not, I spend more per year on bathroom tissue. .Mac makes offsite backup painless; the price seems reasonable to me for the peace of mind provided.

 

I’ve always enjoyed screen savers. They outlived their original purpose of preventing phosphor burn-in long ago, but they’re art, and art…don’t need no reason….

My favorite, Dream Aquarium, is being ported to OS X, but it’s not ready yet. While waiting for it, I’m enjoying Electric Sheep, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.

Electric Sheep is a free, open-source screen saver; it runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

The concept behind Electric Sheep is very interesting, using distributed processing to create amazing morphing fractal animations called “sheep”.

The sheep are beautiful and mesmerizing. You can vote on a sheep using the up and down arrows on the keyboard for ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, respectively. Popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm, producing a pleasing flock via natural selection.

Now tell me that’s not cool.

A couple of hints:

• It can take a few days for sheep to start appearing on your machine naturally, so it’s recommended to obtain a starter flock via one or more sheep packs.
• Electric Sheep can automatically play an iTunes playlist; I’ve found the dreamy soundtracks produced by pzizz to be very appropriate.

If all Electric Sheep did was display incredible fractal animations, it’d be one of the best screen savers available. Understanding what it really does is to say the least, impressive.

Baa….

 

Our new Mac Pro has 4GB, and will address a great deal more if necessary. As it happens, 4GB is very generous for our needs; the fast user switching experience under OS X is actually usable.

Really, there’s so much memory available that one never needs to close anything. This is nice, but cluttered, and I’m easily distracted when confronted with visual clutter. For this reason, I’d often use the maximize window function under Windows; there’d then be nothing else blinking at me while I was attempting to work on something.

Sensei Patrick chides me for this as DOS thinking, but I have to go with what works.

OS X does offer a zoom function, but it doesn’t work in the same way that maximize works under Windows; the differences between the UI approaches and the rationales behind them are described well at the XvsXP site.

Well, if zoom isn’t our solution to reduce visual clutter, then perhaps we can minimize the windows we’re not using.

OS X has a minimize function just as Windows does; the window does a spiffy Genie effect and descends to the dock. Nice, but it makes the dock larger, and now there’s a redundant icon in it. This reminds me of the Windows task bar, which I always had to expand to multiple rows in order to contain everything in a readable manner. Surely we can do better than this.

And we can. OS X does offer something different; showing and hiding of applications. Contained in the application menu of any running application are the entries ‘Hide’, ‘Hide Others’, and ‘Show All’. These commands are ideal when dealing with clutter. A hidden application’s windows simply vanish; the running application is still available via the dock icon or command-tab, and reactivating via these methods will restore it from the hidden state.

Perfect for our needs. To focus on a single application, just doing a ‘Hide Others’ will declutter the desktop. However, being of an obsessive nature, we can still improve on this, and some applications, for example MacJournal, do so via use of a fullscreen entry mode. This is a nice approach for something like pure text editing, but the paradigm doesn’t really work all that well elsewhere.

There’s a great discussion of this very issue on 43 Folders, including an informative video podcast. In the podcast, several utilities to assist in elimination of distraction are demonstrated; among them are Backdrop, MenuShade, and Spirited Away. These applications are freeware, and their use is demonstrated in the podcast.

These three applications do what they do well, but I’d prefer a single application to take care of it all.

There is such an application, Desktopple Pro.

Desktopple Pro combines the functions of the three freeware utilities into a single preference pane and menu bar icon. It’s rich with features, but for purposes of decluttering, the following two are just killer:

• Firstly, it monitors the activity state of non-foreground windows. When they’ve been unused for a configurable time period, they’re automatically hidden. It’s like having someone clean up after you; the developer terms this ‘Window Cleaning’. Quite nice.
• Secondly, by choosing a menu option or by using a hotkey, desktop icons are hidden, the wallpaper is smoothly replaced with something basic (I use black), and the menu bar fades into the background; hovering over the menu bar will restore it. There’s now zero visual distraction; only the application is visible.

It’s all very crisp, polished, and highly configurable; it’s evident that a great deal of care has gone into development.

Desktopple Pro is $17 USD shareware, with a 15-day unrestricted trial.

 

The final player in the codec triad is A52Codec, an A52/AC-3 audio component. AC-3 is quite a common format on DVDs, so it’s nice to be able to handle it.

A52Codec is free and open-source.

 

This assistance comes in the form of Perian, the “swiss-army knife for QuickTime”. Perian provides support for an extensive list of media types, such as AVI and DivX.

Perian is free and open-source. Donations are accepted.