Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

I used to have an offsite machine where I could easily sync backups off my laptop to (I like to have both local and offsite backups), but since that server is no longer in play I had been going for awhile without offsite backups.  While poking through some home inventory forms (you know, in case there is some home disaster), I realized that I no longer had any of my data offsite so I began looking at some various options for backing up data to an offsite location.  Right now I am playing around with Mozy.  It’s been one of the most reccomended services that I could find.  I’m playing with their free account which allows me to backup 2GB’s of files.  It runs in the background on my machine and backups up files from selected folders when any changes to them are made.  Eventually I want to backup all my photos as well but that will require something more than 2GB’s.  Fortunately I can upgrade the Mozy account to one with unlimited storage for only $4.95 a month.  Tht’s pretty hard to beat.  I’ll play around with the free account for awhile to see if this is the service I want to go with.  Feel free to comment with your Mozy experiences or any other backup service I should take a good hard look at.

My bright and shiny new Apple TV arrived today.  I’ve been looking at them ever since they came out, and decided I wanted one after the Take 2 software was released.  Finally the day came to actually purchase one.  I have to say that initially pairing it with a computer can get a bit wonky.  Right off the bat it wanted to suddenly synch all my media files via iTunes.  I had to cancel that and dig throuhg a few menus to eventually figure out what I wanted.  The synching is quite like it is for my iPod Touch.  After clicking through a few menus I was able to synch only what I wanted, and keep it from displaying the items that I didn’t synch (it does this in case you want to stream files from your computer directly from your computer).  If you’re going to be syncing via a laptop I suggest you have both the laptop and the Apple TV plugged directly in to your router rather than using wifi as the wireless connection can be slow if sync’ing an entire media library.

Once I had some shows on it, it ran like a champ.  Denise and I watched National Treasure 2 which I purchased through the iTunes store on my laptop while we were in Maui.  It ran smoothly and both the picture and audio were great.  I didn’t get the lagginess some people say they experienced during action scenes in movies.  There was no pixelization either, just clear DVD-looking quality video.  Now we’re watching an episode of Torchwood that I converted with a great program called VisualHub.

My initial reaction to it are pretty positive.  The biggest cons I’ve found is the limited selection of video formats that it can play (this can be fixed by hacking the machine.. something I’ll be looking in to), and the fact that you can’t simply plug in a big external hard drive for additional storage (again, something that can be accomplished with a little hacking).  I’ll follow up more after I’ve played with it more.