First I have to say that while I use multiple machines, only one of my machines is responsible for being the “keeper of data”.  I do, however, make sure that certain commonly used files are accessible across all my machines.  Since I use multiple operating systems as well I went with Dropbox to take care of my file syncing needs for those that I need access to no matter which machine I’m on.  While I am not using is as a backup per se, it does mean if one of my drives fails, those files are still safe and accessible to me on my other machines.  Right now I’ve just been using the free 2 GB version and it’s been happily running on all three of my machines.

My main work horse machine, the one on which all my important data officially resides, is my MacBook.  I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable cloned drive of the laptop on an external USB drive.  On a weekly basis I update the changed files on the cloned drive so that worse case scenario if I have to completely replace the laptops hard drive the image I can restore it with will be at most 6 days old.  I also make sure to update the cloned drive before traveling or running a system update.  I’ve been fortunate enough to never have encountered a disaster when upgrading my system, but I’ve read enough horror stories that I’m not willing to take that chance.

As a second layer of local backup my MacBook nightly runs an rsync of my home folder.  If I accidentally delete a bunch of files, or just have some data corruption that only affects my home folder I don’t want to have to restore the entire drive.  The rsync makes a copy of my home folder to an external drive that is plugged in to my Airport Extreme.  Once upon a time I ran Time Machine back ups to that drive, but I’ve had some off and on issues with Time Machine and finally gave up on it.

Those layers of backup help me to feel safe in the event that either data is lost, or a hard drive dies on me (which has happened more times than I’d like to admit).  However is something horribly drastic such as theft, or a fire struck my home all that local backup would be pretty useless.  Any backup strategy worth its salt should have an offsite component.  Once upon a time when I had a job with an office I used to keep a cloned drive there.  That’s no longer an option for me so I’ve turn to Mozy Home Backup to provide my offsite backups.  Right now Mozy is only running on my laptop and it’s currently backing up my home folder.  While having to rebuild a machine from scratch is time consuming, only the contents of my home folder are irreplaceable.   I have it set to run nightly backups, and other than once when I had Time Machine issues because of Mozy, it’s ran wonderfully for me.

I’ve lost data in the past and its helped make me be a little more paranoid about backups.  I’ve thought long and hard about the value my data has to me and take what I feel are appropriate measures to help protect that data.  There are probably better strategies, and certainly there are people far more paranoid about backups than I am.  The only other recommendation that I’d make is that no matter what your backup strategy is, do some test runs of restoring from backup.  Nothing is worse than having a drive failure, believing you’re data is safely backed up, and then learning there are issues with the restore.  Having a multi-layered approach to backing up makes sure you don’t rely on any one backup mechanism.  It’s good to have fail safes in case one particular backup procedure fails.

My first impression was “Damn is this thing small!”  My wife got a new MacBook for Christmas, and putting this thing next to it made for a striking size comparison.  An older model MacBook has been my prime machine for a couple of years now and after just a little while of playing around with the Netbook it made a 13 inch screen seem gigantic.  The machine has a 63w, 6-cell battery that makes in back heavy.  The plastic case feels nice and solid, not like a cheap little toy.  Like many people have commented it is a finger-print magnet.  For me this doesn’t detract from my overall impression of the machine as it is easy enough to keep a microfiber cloth hand to periodically wipe it.  While many people complain that it has a glossy screen rather than the less reflective matte screen, I’ve become used to using the glossy displays and actually like the more crisp graphics the provide.  Though the glossy on this screen doesn’t seem nearly as glossy as the MacBook.

Technologically speaking this machine isn’t exactly a speed demon.  Windows 7 Starter loaded fairly quick on it (though the first boot I had to jump through Windows 7 setup hoops).  While I haven’t actually tracked the boot time, it seems to go from powered off to the login screen quicker than my MacBook running Snow Leopard.  But that’s about the only time it beats it in speed.  You can certainly feel a pokiness when browsing certain webpages, or doing other tasks.  It’s not unacceptably slow though.  Going in to owning a Netbook you have to understand that you’re trading some speed capability in return for a small and inexpensive form factor.  However for most of the normally daily tasks I do online the speed of the Asus is more than adequate.

Right now I’ve been splitting my time between the Windows 7 Starter edition that came with the netbook, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10.  I’ll go in to my thoughts between the two in a separate post.  Suffice it to say, both operating systems are fairly snappy on the netbook.  Certainly no matter which way you go in terms of your OS I’d say you’d be quite happy with the performance.

The built in web camera is actually better than I expected it to be.  While in most literature it lists the webcam as a 0.3 Megapixel model, it certainly captures images that are on par with my Macbook’s 1.3 Megapixel camera.  When testing it out with Skype I was told my video was coming through clearly.  It stays fairly sharp as long as you have adequate lighting.  In dimmer lighting the image can get fairly grainy, though for most of what I’d use a built in webcam for, it was acceptable.  The microphone doesn’t have as much pick up as I’d like, and I was told during the Skype conversation that I sounded a little more muted, as if I was positioned further from the mic than when I used Skype on the Macbook.  Still, if you’re going to be doing a lot of Skyping or other types of voice chat I’d imagine you’d invest in a decent Bluetooth headset or microphone.  The speakers are fine for being small.  It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice for listening to music on, but it’s certainly no worse than a lot of FM channels from a decent radio.  It was also acceptable for most Youtube videos.

Speaking of video I tried out a few different things.  DVD’s I ripped using Handbrake’s default settings ran just fine under VLC media player.  There were only one or two little pauses during an approximately 2 hour long movie.  It certainly didn’t detract from the film.  The screen is bright and crisp and the video looked clear and attractive.  It was very easy to sit back and enjoy a movie with the netbook on my lap.  As I mentioned earlier I haven’t had problems watching Youtube videos that other’s have mentioned when reviewing this model.  I attempted to watch some videos on Hulu and this is where I ran in to problems.  Flash is a resource monster, it devours all that it can find.  While watching animated shows such as the Simpson, or Family Guy, I only noted some stuttering, watching a live action show was painful at best.  Even lowering the quality of the playback did little to alleviate the problems.  I had similar problems watching things via Netflix.  For hockey fans, I was able to watch NHL Gamecenter in fullscreen mode, though I had to drop the streaming speed to the middle setting.

The killer aspect of this machine for me has been the battery life.  I had seen the advertised 10 hour battery life for this model, which I took with a grain of salt.  My Macbook was originally rated at just shy of 6 hours, but even turning down the brightness, and keeping the wireless off I am lucky to get about 5 hours.  So I was wondering how much I’d have to throttle back the netbook in order to see anything close to the 10 hour rating.  So after installing and updating things I made sure the battery was fully charged, unplugged it, and began my normal activities(using Windows 7 Starter).  Checking e-mail, IM’ing friends, web browsing, and the occasional video – all activities I primarily wanted a netbook for.  As I didn’t have any Bluetooth devices to use with it I kept Bluetooth turned off.  The day wore on and the battery meter ever so slowly inched its way towards zero.  All told, I was able to eke out a couple minutes shy of nine hours with the machine set for battery saving settings.  Yes, some application load times, and response times were a tad sluggish, but it was a compromise I was willing to make in return for the long battery life.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised to continually see these long lasting battery times during regular usage.  The only time I saw shorter battery life was when I did heavy downloads, updates, and installation – things that were fairly hard drive and processor intensive.  Even then I was able to continually get at least 7 hours of battery life.  I can say I am quite pleased that entire workday can be had on just a single charge.

On to the smaller items.  First off the keyboard is cramped. I am happy for the nearly full sized keys, but they are pressed quite closely together.  I don’t have overly large digits, so I haven’t found it painful to do lots of typing on the machine.  When switching to or from a machine with a larger keyboard it does take me a bit of time to adjust, but overall I’m happy with the spacing/size/and responsiveness of the keyboard.  The bumpy trackpad through me off at first. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and it felt a bit odd on my fingers.  However after a little use I quickly came to find it perfectly acceptable.  The two finger scrolling doesn’t always work as well as it should.  My biggest trackpad complaint is the button.  It feels a bit on the flimsy side.  Also I would prefer a separate left and right click button, not the long button bar they provide.  While it does its job I’m not overly fond of it.  Mostly I’ve been using the tap-to-click on the trackpad as a way to avoid the button bar.

My overall impression is that this is a well designed and thought out portable computing machine.  It’s not going to be a workhorse.  I would be hard pressed to use it as my primary machine, but as a supplemental machine to use for travel (either around town or across the country) it fits the bill, and even exceeds several of my expectations about it.  As long as you understand the limitations of using a netbook, then you will find this machine a joy to use.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.  Though I still don’t think it will keep me from complaining about the lackluster internet in the US – especially when I compare it to many other countries who once upon a time we were on par (or ahead of) technologically speaking.  We’ve been back sliding for awhile now and I’m not sure what it will take to catch up.  However I will remain thankful I don’t have to resort to pigeons.

Two days later I installed the 10.5.8 update via Software Update.  It appeared that everything went smoothly.  It wasn’t until the next day I realized the little indicator for Time Machine was constantly spinning.  When I checked on its status it seemed to be stuck on “Preparing…”.  Hmmm.  This wasn’t happy behavior.  I fiddled with the settings a bit.  Stopped the backup and started a new one and again it hung on the same thing.  I decided since I had created a new cloned drive image after getting the new drive up to speed I would reformat the drive I used for Time Machine.  I don’t really deal much with incremental file versions so I wasn’t worried about losing months of access to those. (for the record I have an Airport Extreme (pre-dual band versions)with a 500GB USB drive plugged in to it that I back up to via the wireless network).  After reformatting the thing I began starting it up as a new Time Machine drive and once again it stuck on “Preparing…”.  Checking out Console.app showed it was having problems accessing Spotlight related files on the new drive image.  This of course was odd as it was a brand new sparse.image file, but all the same it could neither read/create/nor find whatever it was looking for and was throwing up several errors a minute.  Searching around the web revealed a few other people with similar problems, but no solutions at first.  After awhile some people began posting that they had that issue but let it keep going for a few hours and suddenly the backup kicked in.  The theory being that Spotlight needed time to reindex everything after the 10.5.8 update.   Okay, I could buy this.  So I started up Time Machine and let it go overnight.

Fast forward over 12 hours and the machine was still preparing.  There’s only 40GB’s in use on this drive so I find it hard to believe it was still attempting indexing.  Next I invoked  mdutil -E to the laptops hard drive to force it to index.  Spotlight showed it was indexing, and I clicked on it so I could watch its progress bar.  20 minutes later the drive was reindexed.  Awesome I thought.  Fired up Time Machine… and again it stuck on “Preparing…”  I let that go for hours before finally giving up.

Hopefully this is a widespread enough problem that Apple introduces a patch, or some instructions on fixing the problem as I would like to be able to use Time Machine again, especially after seeing how while it recovered my machine after a drive failure.  In the time being I will continue updating drive clone images with Carbon Copy Cloner, as well as continuing all my other back up practices.

Edit 1 (13:13 EST): This is the error message that I receive over and over: “8/8/09 1:13:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B)(Error) IndexCI in CIMetaInfoCreate:Tried to create index when index already existed /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B”

I’ve also gotten:  ”8/8/09 1:14:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA/0.; needs recovery “

Edit 2(August 14, 4:11 EST): Well it seems that the problem actually has to do with 10.5.8 and the most recent build of Mozy for the Mac (1.4 I seem to recall).  While Mozy was working fine it was doing some weird cosmic thing to certain sets of permissions that caused Time Machine to throw up all sorts of errors.  I uninstalled Mozy (saved the prefs) and Time Machine immediately started working like nothing had ever happened.

I looked at some apps for the iPod Touch, but most were either costly, weren’t the greatest of calendars, were overly complex and relied on accounts with too many different services, or just plain sucked.  Recently I found a website, ironically it’s one of Google’s, that has step-by-step instructions for syncing the calendar on the iPod Touch with Google Calendar.  It uses the Exchange Server syncing ability of the Touch/iPhone platform to connect with your “calendar in the cloud”.  Unlike some of the other options it allows two way syncing over the air, so you’re not required to be connected to your computer in order to retrieve updated calendar information.  When I inputted a new entry on my iPod Touch, then checked iCal on my laptop less than a minute later the new entry appeared there.  Sure, you can just access your Google Calendars using mobile Safari, but if you don’t have an internet connection handy (or if you have an iPhone and you’re not in an area where you can get a signal) you can still have access to your calendar information.  This is why I prefer having an app as opposes as a purely web-based service.  It also sync’s your contacts as well.

I can’t say why I didn’t think of actually checking Google’s website first for a solution.  The iPhone OS has been around for awhile now and I can’t believe there wouldn’t be other people out there looking for the same thing that I was.  Now, however, I have all my devices sharing information between one another so that I can have my most updated information whether at home or on the road.

Boxee took this one step further.  Boxee is an application that streams media content, bypassing the web browser.  It still had all the same ads when it streamed its programming via Hulu, but it allowed you to enjoy those shows on your television.  It completed the circle allowing the freedom of watching programming at your own leisure, with the ability to watch it on your TV as well as any other media capable device.  For people who have been finding cable companies to be more and more draconian in terms of both service and pricing it allowed us to cut our bonds with our cable provider.  Now that I could stream this legal TV content through my AppleTV it made cable, for me, obsolete (in terms of television – I still use them for internet access).

Things seemed fine and dandy until the powers that be suddenly realized that Boxee found a way to bypass a traditional media outlet.  Big business, slow to catch on, or understand new potential business models, did what it always does and pressured Hulu in to ordering Boxee to cease streaming of their service.  Perhaps if Boxee had provided viewers with a way to skip the advertising I could sympathize with this decision, but that’s not the case.  This is another instance of big media trying to dictate to the end user how they must view their programming.  It’s about control.  With Boxee someone else got to put those shows on the TV in homes across the country; that was no longer the domain of cable and satellite companies.  Not even understanding why big business had to send orders from on high to eliminate this new model.  It’s proof that the existence of Hulu was mostly just a fluke as the big business clung tight to their control.

Hulu, of course, was more than happy to point out that this decision came due to pressure from their content providers.  That this providers would have pulled their shows from Hulu, and that by ordering that Boxee quit streaming the service they were actually protecting their users access to content.  Hulu, in fact, is more than just in bed with big content providers.  Their parent corporations are big content – News Corporation and NBC.  Access for their users wasn’t what Hulu was thinking when they made the decision, they were thinking that to stand up for their users would likely cost them a large amount of revenue.  While I understand this is how the business world works, I just wish Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, hadn’t lied about his motivations when he claimed “ Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time.”  While I do believe a part of him truly is sympathetic to the people affected his actions certainly make these claims hard to believe.  Nowhere is it evident that he made any type of attempt to represent these users, instead capitulating at the drop of the hat(though I will admit this may not be true we don’t have all the information of what took place behind closed doors – it’s just hard to imagine that the user was actually advocated during any discussions).

The reality of what Hulu did is two-fold.  First the alienated their user base in order to save face with big business.  They proved that instead of being revolutionary they were no more than another outlet for the control over content and big media’s desire to control how users have access to that content.  Secondly, and more importantly from a business stand point, they reduced the overall viewership on their ad supported media.  Take note advertisers, Hulu effectively cut the number of eyeballs watching yours ads.  Is it effective to do advertising with a business who is willing to reduce their overall viewing base?  You might want to think about that one before you spend any advertising dollars on the Hulu media outlet.

In the end I guess I’m not surprised.  Big media has always been slow to adapt, more willing to fight losing control over an old business model than crafting a way in which to profit off a new one before others can do the same.  It’s a pattern that continues to repeat itself, and it is something that the industry as a whole constantly forgets.  It was nice having Hulu on Boxee, but at the end of the day I’ll carry on.  I won’t be rushing back to cable as my content provider.  I’ll seek alternative forms of entertainment, and continue to enjoy the programming that is still available via Boxee from providers who just may actually “get it”.

Still their level of locking a computer so that a user doesn’t have the final control over their own system is going too far.  With Microsoft slowly losing market share such actions certainly aren’t going to endear them in the ears of the tech-savvy public.  Fortunately for Microsoft the vast portion of their public market won’t notice any of these problems.  It certainly won’t drive throngs of people looking for alternate operating systems.  With Mac’s costing a premium, and Linux still having too steep a learning curve for the average user most people will simply accept the DRM, if they notice at all.

It’s sad though, as this would be a time for someone to step up and offer a legitimate and affordable option to Windows.  I’m not looking to see the Microsoft empire crumble.  Another valid option would force them to innovate to compete – it would force them to also evaluate and challenge outside industry influence over the level of control a user has over their own system.  It shouldn’t be Microsoft’s place to enforce whether people are compliant to applicable laws.  Microsoft should not claim ownership of the computer in your home, they should help you make things just work – that’s what you’re paying them for after all.

Edit: After doing a little more research on the issue it seems like a lot of the initial posts about this were all based off the same article created by a serious Microsoft hater who also apparently has limited understanding of how a computer actually works.  A good rebuttal to it over at Ars.

While doing a little research on To Do programs and other organizational utilities I kept running across articles talking about Windows 7  beta - so my research changed direction as I began to read more and more about the Windows 7 beta.  I was intrigued by a lot of what I was reading, especially how Microsoft with this release seemed to be focusing on stability and usability.  Or in simpler terms, they were striving to  just make things work.  As that has often been an area where I’ve been less than enamoured by Windows I decided maybe I’d give this beta a shot.  After all, nothing important was on my Windows machine, it would be no problem to simply wipe it clean and see what makes Windows 7 tick.

The installation screen was very clean and straight forward.  There was very little in the way of clutter, it’s obvious that  they really are working hard to make it so that just about anyone can install a working OS with only very limited computer knowledge.  For me the only obstacle I had to face was one that I had been expecting since my hard drive is plugged in to a PCI IDE card.  However it was nice to see that, unlike with Windows XP, 7 was willing to look at more than just the floppy drive for device drivers so that I could install the OS on the hard drive.  It’s good to see the major OS vendor has finally begun to accept that the floppy drive is dead and that many systems now ship without one.  Progress!

After a simple and straightforward install I found myself looking at a fairly alien OS.  Having not ever used Vista, I found many immediate diferences from Windows XP and had to go searching for a few things.  Fortunately most things were roughly where you expected them to be so it didn’t take long to begin to be able to customize all my settings.  In fact I found some things seemed quite natural simply because they had things in common with Mac OS X.  After poking around a bit a lot of it seemed quite familar to me and I was able to dive right in.

With XP I  had two main issues with this computer.  The first was that no matter what I did it did not want to print to my printer.  My printer is connected to a wireless Linksys print server which both my Mac, and my former Linux box were able to print to without a hitch.  Windows XP, however, wanted nothing at all to do with the printer.  In Windows 7 the printer worked.  Though it did give me a bit of a scare because at one point it seemed as if it was hung up.  There was no progress bar or any other type of indicator letting me know it was doing anything.  After about 10 minutes a screen of printer driver choices finally popped up and everything just worked.  The second XP issue I had was frequent signal drops from the wireless card.  This was most evident when playing World of Warcraft as I would get disconnected around once or so an hour.  I had always chalked it up to the dirt cheap wireless network card that I had in my PC.  I had accepted the “you get what you pay for” scenario.  Since installing Windows 7 I haven’t had a single disconnect.  In fact my transfer rates have more than tripled.  Apparently there was a big focus in the OS on network management.  I can’t tell you how impressed I’ve been by this.

I know that Windows 7 is only in beta at the moment, but in my use of it over the past several days it has been as stable, if not more stable than my Windows XP install.  In fact several things that didn’t work in XP are now working just fine.  I’ve installed several third party applications that I use daily and so far I haven’t had any issues with them.  In fact, the only negative experience that I’ve had so far is Internet Explorer.  Version 8 isn’t any more useful than previous version.  I tried writing this post with it, but everytime it saved a draft the screen would improperly redraw with various elements overlapping one another.  It seems that web standards compliance still isn’t a high priority in Redmond.  That’s okay though, because Firefox works like a charm.  Overall I’m very impressed with Windows 7 and I see a lot of potential for it.  In fact, because I’m already enjoying it on this machine so much I have a filling that when it’s finally release I’m going to have to plunk down some cash and pick up  my copy of Windows 7, which for me is just about the best endorsement I can give.

After playing with the AppleTV for a little bit it was time to get down to the business of hacking it so that it could play a multitude of video formats as well as allow the attachment of an external storage device.  There are lots of instructions online for rolling your own hacks on to a USB key, but out of laziness, and the fact I’m willing to let better qualified people do the work for me, I went with the guys at aTV Flash.  They frequently update the software which is especially helpful as some of Apple’s updates to the units firmware can tend to break the things you so meticulously went about hacking.

The 160GB internal storage of the AppleTV wasn’t going to cut it once I started making digital copies of my DVD’s to transfer to the device.  We ended up hooking up a 1TB external USB drive to it, which was a snap.  I formatted it as HFS+ Journaled, plugged it in to the AppleTV, and it was immediately recognized.  I was able to FTP in to the unit and copy files over to the external HD.  After the finished copying the were accessible through the AppleTV’s menu – specifically in the “DVD” section of the expanded menu that appears after initially hacking the unit.  For ripping the video I find that Handbrake’s default settings work quite well – a great compromise between file size and quality of both picture and sound.

One of the other benefits that came from hacking the device is access to Hulu (along with other services)through Boxee.  I’ve watched some old episodes of ALF for nostalgic purposes as well as a few other gems (Airwolf and Knight Rider in particular).  It’s hit or miss with newer episodes of some shows through Hulu, but I use it more when I don’t know what I want to watch as opposed to stay current with series I follow.  More recent series I’ve slowly been acquiring from the Apple Store.  Following the series that I do as well as purchasing a couple I haven’t seen in awhile works out to the same, if not a little cheaper than the cable bill had been.  Boxee has also enabled me to have access to every episode of South Park that has been made thus far – something I take frequent advantage of.

The AppleTV has been working great as a replacement for live TV.  Yes, I do miss popping on the occasional football or hockey game, but I can always go to a friends house or one of the sports bars in town to see those.  I certainly haven’t felt any less transitioning to this digital centered, cable tv free lifestyles.