The beginning of this year I re-thought my backup strategy. I’m crazy about my backups, maybe a little too much. This year I’ve actually cut back on some of my backups. Last year I got a CrashPlan family plan to back up my two main computers. It works great. I love CrashPlan. Now thanks to iTunes Match, I was able to downgrade my CrashPlan to a single computer plan.

I’ve been slowly upgrading all my music to 256 kbps, from the crappy 128 kbps that I originally ripped all my music to back when hard drive space was more limiting. It’s been great to get them upgraded without having to re-rip the 1400 cds I own. That’s another reason why I make sure to have good backups. I dread having to re-rip my cds. iTunes Match serves as a great backup too. The $25 for iTunes Match is actually saving me money. Downgrading my CrashPlan account saves me $84 a year, adding the iTunes Match fee and I save $59 a year. Plus I don’t have to upload most of the new music I buy. It is just matched, and I have a backup.

So what about my other files on my iMac that need backed up? Well, I wrote an Automator script that uses rsync to backup my documents folder over to my Windows machine, which is then backed up to CrashPlan. Everything is also backed up to my NAS. Yeah, I’m anal, but I have a great system and will never lose a file. Here is the simple shell script that I used:

rsync -aE –delete ~/ Documents/ /Volumes/Users/mace/Documents/iMacBackup/ Documents/

I made an app with Automator that runs that script and just just put it on my desktop. I could have gotten more fancy and scheduled it to run with iCal, but I’m happy enough just clicking on the app once a day. Automator is so powerful, yet underused.

It’s an exciting time for music online. They’re more ways to buy and consume music than ever. I’ve tried many of them, but I’m still on the fence with which one I’m going to use. For some people subscription services are perfect, but they’re not really for me. I paid for Spotify for a month, and it’s really cool, but sometimes I don’t know what I want to listen to, and I like to just browse my collection. It’s not as easy to do with Spotify, and many times when I knew what I wanted to listen to, it wasn’t on Spotify. If you’re more of a casual music fan, and listened to mostly popular stuff, Spotify might be for you. It’s not really for me.

The two services I’m really excited about are iTunes Match, and Google Music. I’ve been on Google Music since the first day the beta launched. It took me four months to get all my music up there with my slow ass Internet, but now that it’s up there it’s pretty cool. Like most Google products when they launch, It’s ugly looking and could use some improvement. I love the new music section in the Android Market. It will make it so easy for bands to put out their music themselves. Screw the record labels. On the Android Market they will make 70% profit. The one downside about Google Music is it’s not as good on iOS. There is a third party app that I have been using for a while to listen to my music, but it’s buggy and not perfect.

Monday when iTunes Match launched I started getting my music up into the iCloud. It’s still grinding away. I’m not sure what it’s really doing. After the first match it only matched 3000 songs, leaving me 13,000 to upload. Since then it’s timed out, and reset a bunch of time. Maybe it matched more, I don’t really know. It’s just grinding away, and will be done someday. I don’t blame iTunes though, I only get 500 Kbps up from my cable company. So far with what’s been uploaded, I really like the Apple solution. It’s nice to be able to delete all my music from my phone, yet I still have access to all of it. Their “streaming” isn’t really streaming; songs download as they play. That can be good and bad. It’s nice because you have instant, and offline access to the songs you listen to the most. The bad part is that it could start to fill your phone up, but you can easily delete songs on the iPhone now too.

For the different music services it will probably come down to whatever phone you have. Google Music will probably work best on Androids, and iCloud on iPhones. That’s not too surprising, but I’m going to keep my music in both camps. Once Google products become more mature, they are usually my products of choice. I use Google for my calendar, mail, and contact syncing. I don’t really care for any of the other iCloud products. It’s really exciting times. I’m glad I can finally have access to all my music in my pocket. It’s like we are living in the future. Where’s my flying car?

I love software upgrades. No matter what it is, I always have to have the latest and greatest. It’s like a free present. Many upgrades I have had regrets doing, but I still always get them as soon as possible.

Today was a big day for upgrades. iOS 5 came out. I upgraded my phone already, and am working on getting my iPad upgraded. I like the new features so far. Lifehacker has a great article about all of the new features.

Now it’s time to play!

Yesterday is a day I will remember forever. Like many people, I heard of Steve Jobs death on an Apple device. I was shocked, but not surprised when the news alert popped up on my iPhone. I went straight to Twitter. The Tweets were non-stop all night, and everybody had great things to say about Jobs. We knew he was in bad shape to have to step down from CEO of Apple, but I don’t think anybody expected him to go so soon.

I always have mixed feelings when everybody praises celebrities when they die. On one had, thousands of other great people that nobody knows about died yesterday too, but Steve Jobs was more than just a celebrity. He was our generations Thomas Edison. He may have just created gadgets, but his gadgets changed the world.

I don’t really consider my self an Apple fanboy, but I am surround by Apple products. I am typing this up on my iMac, with my MacBook and iPad next to me, my iPhone in my pocket, and several iPods in my drawer. I don’t buy Apple products to be part of some cult, but because they are great products. Even if you have never owned an Apple products though, your products are still influenced by Apple. Who knows what Windows would be like today without being influenced by Apple. What would smart phones be like without the iPhone? Are there any other MP3 players than the iPod? Chances are we wouldn’t have tablets. Microsoft tried to make tablets, but failed. I’ve had an iPad since day 3, and couldn’t imagine not having one.

One thing that isn’t being mentioned much, and is something we all should learn from Steve Jobs is his use of “alternative medicine” early on in his diagnosis. Steve had a rare form of pancreatic cancer that is actually quite treatable if caught soon enough, which he had. He chose to treat it with a special diet, and other alternative therapies prescribed by a naturopath. Once it was learned that that wasn’t working, he started using conventional medicines, but by then his chanced of beating it were slim to none. Would he have beat it if he used conventional medicine right away? We will never know, but his chances would have been better. Alternative medicine kills folks. If alternative medicine worked, it would be called medicine. Steve Jobs taught us all to “think different”, but when it comes to medicine, you don’t want different, you want the stuff that works.

Sent from my iPhone

In January I made a New Year’s resolution to get my computers backed up online. I’ve always been good about backups, but they were always kept local except for my pictures, which I burn to DVD and take a copy to work. There are many different online backup options these days, from Carbonite, Mozy, DropBox, and CrashPlan.

I chose CrashPlan for four reasons. They have unlimited storage, I can backup multiple computers, they are affordable, and I can use their software to backup to multiple locations. That last reason is probably my favorite. All I need is the CrashPlan software running, and it will keep my systems backed up to both my NAS, and the CrashPlan servers. No need to run other backup software for my multiple backups.

I started my backups in January and they were finally finished this week. It took nine months of continuously backing up to get everything up there, but now they are there, so it’s only incremental backups from here on. They also just recently released an iPhone app too. So now I have access to all my files from my phone too. It’s pretty sweet. I’m sure I will find many uses for it.

I’m pretty anal about my backups, and for that reason I have never lost a file. I’ve had a few hard drives die, and it’s never been much of a problem because of my backups. I hate it when I hear my family and friends losing stuff because they don’t have proper backups. Storage is so cheap these days. There is no reason you shouldn’t have multiple backups of all your important files.

Does anybody ever like their cable company? You can tell how many people around hear love our cable company by the number of dishes that popped up once local channels became available. I was one of those that dropped cable as soon at I could get my local channels on DirecTV. I just got sick of them dropping channels and raising prices, plus there were a handful of channels I wanted that our cable company didn’t have.

I still had to keep them for my internet though. I think the $55 for 5Mb down and 500Kb up is a pretty ridiculous price. In other parts of the country those speeds would probably be a $30 package.

Our cable company is now advertising a 50Mb plan, which would be sweet, but it has too many restrictions. It’s pretty much unusable for me. In fact I don’t know who it’s aimed for. It has a ridiculously low 50GB cap. Any power user would blow through that cap, and any non-power user would probably be fine with their slower 5Mb plan. Here is what my router says my bandwidth usage has been the past few months:

So I would reach the cap in about six days. That reminds me of the olden days back when I was on AOL and had a 20 hour a month limit that I went over easily in the first week and then paid an arm and a leg for internet the rest of the month.

But that’s not the only thing. Not only would I have to cut back on my podcast downloads, and Netflix watching, I would also have to get, or at least pay for cable TV, or phone service in order to get the faster speed internet. And of course they hide what the actual price even is. All they show is the introductory price, which looks good, but would still cost me $75 because I would have to pay for a service I wouldn’t use.

So it looks like I will be stuck with slowish internet for some time. It’s not like it’s terribly slow, it’s more of the slow upload speeds that are killing me. I would be happy to pay $75 for uncapped, or maybe even capped if it was reasonable, 50Mb speeds if they would ever offer such a thing. Maybe I’m just dreaming though.

So there is a big houpla going on over Google Plus user names. Google seems to be suspending accounts of people that don’t use their real name. Well, I don’t use my real name. I’m a nobody, so I doubt I will be suspended. I feel more comfortable online using a pseudonym, and have been using it for years. I want to be able to say whatever I want online, and not have to worry about employees, friends, or family finding it online. I want to be able to say I am going on vacation without worrying about somebody finding where I live and robbing me. I just feel better using a pseudonym online.

What is Google going to do if celebrities start joining Google Plus? Are they going to expect Lady Gaga fans to look for Stefani Germanotta? Charlie Sheen fans will have to look for Carlos Estévez? And the countless others that go by different names. How does anybody at Google even know a person didn’t use their real name if their aren’t popular? And what about Kevin Rose? He is forwarding his blog to his Google Plus account, but his real name is Robert Rose.

All this nonsense of making people use their real names is just stupid, and unenforceable. It’s still the early days of Google Plus though. Google is full of smart people, so I’m sure there will get this figured out soon.

Like most people, I feel like I never win anything. Well, this morning I was surprised when I checked my email to discover that I won a Roku 2 from Todd over at GeekNewsCentral.com. I’ve been listening to his podcast almost since day one. I have entered many of his contests, and many I didn’t enter because I never seem to win anything anyways. On a whim I enter this one. I thought what the hell, I would give it a shot. I could use a Roku for our upstairs TV.

I have the original Roku and love it. I have been thinking about getting one for the upstairs TV for quite some time now. I now will have one for each TV just in time for me to cancel my DVDs from Netflix since I never seem to watch them anyway.

I always have to have the latest and greatest in software. Some people hate change, but I love it. So of course I upgraded to OS X Lion yesterday. It was a pretty simple and easy upgrade. It took about 45 minutes, and Lion was up and running with all my settings intact. For the most part it works great. Nothing too revolutionary though. I’m not even sure how much I am going to be using any of the new features.

The Launchpad it interesting. It’s like an iPad look of your apps. I think it would be great on a touch screen, but don’t see the point of it on a desktop. It’s much quicker to use Spotlight, or my favorite Google Search Box to launch an app.

Mission Control is pretty looking and makes it easier to set up your multiple desktops. I like it, but I’m not a fan of the new layout of the multiple desktops. I preferred them in a grid rather than a in a line, but I can get use to it.

I don’t really understand the Full Screen Mode that most apps have now. I guess I see if you want to work distraction free, but it just blanks out my second monitor when I go to full screen. It kind of defeats the point in having two monitors.

Then there is the backward scrolling. I don’t know anybody that didn’t turn that off. Again that makes sense on a tablet or touchscreen, but not a desktop. It should have been off by default.

I also wasn’t a big fan of the new layout in Mail, but that can be quickly changed in the preferences. No big deal.

As for the new mouse gestures? I hate the Magic Mouse, so I won’t be using any of them. My Logitech mouse just feels so much nicer in my hand. Apple makes some great hardware, but for some reason they can’t make a mouse that fits comfortably in your hand.

I did have one problem with Lion. It would not connect to my NAS. A quick Google search and I found a workaround, and got it working. A few terminal commanded, a couple reboots, and I connected to my NAS.

Overall I like the look. It’s not drastically different from Snow Leopard, and they have added some cheesy animations, but overall, probably worth the $30 upgrade despite all my complaints.

I’ve been playing around with Spotify for the last couple days, and it seems pretty good for what it is. For some people I see how it can be totally cool. You can listen to almost any song you want whenever you want. It’s great for the casual music fan that doesn’t care whether they own their music or not. With the free version you are stuck to listening on a computer, which for people that work it an office, might be all they need. Currently you need an invitation to get the free version, so I’m not sure if it’s temporary, but it is ad supported. For $5 a month you can get rid of the ads, but really, if you are going to pay for it you should pay $10 a month and get the mobile features.

I don’t think Spotify is really for me though. I like to own and collect my music. I have well over 1300 cds, and I want to be able to listen to them in the future. I have my entire music library on a 160 GB iPod Classic, so I can already listen to almost anything I want whenever I want. That being said, just because I pay for Spotify doesn’t mean I have to stop buying music. It might be tougher to buy music when I know I can listen to it for free, but I will to keep my music library growing.

I think I am going to pay for it for at least a few months to get the full experience, and see how well the streaming works. Often times what I want to listen to isn’t on my iPhone because of limited space. With Spotify I will have a much greater selection of music on my iPhone. I was surprised with Spotify’s selection. For most people they will probably find everything they want, except for The Beatles. There were quite a few bands I couldn’t find, but then I tend to listen to more obscure stuff. I was mostly shocked that they only had one Punchline album. WTF? I will just have to make sure the bands they don’t have are on my iPhone. I’m sure over time their selection will be better. I remember when I couldn’t find any of my bands on iTunes, and now everybody is there.

I feel like I’m getting a little social networked out. I love the new Google Plus. I have been on it since day one, and it seems to be getting better day by day. I just don’t know exactly what to use it for. I use Facebook for my family, and people I know in person. It’s mostly non-technical people and I only check it once or twice a day. Twitter is more my throw away comments. My Twitter stream goes by pretty fast. I dip in every so often and catch what I can catch, but I probably miss 80% of the tweets that go by. Google plus on the other hand, people seem to be posting longer posts, and it’s easier for more conversation to occur there. It may threaten Twitter, and Facebook, but I think it could kill blogging. Kevin Rose has already forwarded his kevinrose.com blog over to his G+ account. I think that’s crazy, but I totally get it. People are hanging out on G+ and not kevinrose.com. Nobody really comments on blogs much anymore, but there on tons of comments on G+. People aren’t using RSS as much anymore either, so you they aren’t seeing blog updates, whereas they are seeing G+ updates.

I was thinking about putting this post on G+, but I still want control of my content. I still want my thoughts, and however lame my writing is, to be on my site. I want to be able to look back at it 20 years from now and know it’s still here. In the past I wasn’t good at preserving my archives, but now I want to more.

So what should I use G+ for? I’m not a fan of cross-posting, so I’m not interested in sending my tweets to G+. That’s one great thing about G+ now is nobody is cross posting things yet. I think it would wreck G+ if Twitter streams started showing up. If anything, I might start cross posting my blog posts to G+. Nobody really reads my blog, so it wouldn’t be that spammy.

So Facebook=real friends and family, Twitter=short throw away comments, Blog=longer thoughts I want to get off my chest, G+=somewhere between Twitter and my blog? Will I be able to keep up with three social networks and my blog? Only time will tell.

BTW this was written in the cool new “Full-Screen” feature in WordPress. Great job WordPress dudes, I love it.

My link blog that’s usually over there —> is currently down, and has been for a few days. I use Pinboard.in to run the link blog, and some of their servers are down because they just happen to be on some racks that were pulled by a FBI raid. They say it should be back up this weekend. The only reason I am mentioning this is that when it comes back online I’m expecting all my links from the past few days to spam Twitter, and I’m just apologizing a head of time.

I’m big on password security. It drives me crazy when people can’t remember their passwords. Before recently I couldn’t tell you any of my passwords if you held a gun to my head. Not because I am forgetful, but because I had crazy passwords, all over 10 digits with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. They were all stored in LastPass, so they were always filled out for me, and if I needed to know them I could just look them up. Everything was great until I listened to a recent Security Now podcast.

Steve Gibson realized that the entropy of a password really isn’t as important the length, and the use of upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols. The use of all four of those increases the character set to 96, 26 upper case, 26 lower case, 10 numbers, and 33 symbols. That combined with a long password makes it virtually impossible to brute force it unless you use dictionary words, or make it too easy.

Which password below is stronger?

D0g…………………

PrXyc.N(n4k77#L!eVdAfp9

Yep, the first one because it is longer. It would take the first one 95 times longer to crack, yet it’s simple to remember. The key is to just have a short password you can remember, and then some kind of padding system you can remember. The first one probably isn’t the best because the padding is simple, but it is simple to come up with your own algorithm for passwords.

Everybody should sit down for 5 minutes and come up with their password algorithm. You could just have four characters that you can remember like tR4$ or something followed by some simple padding like q]q]q]q]q], and you will have a 14 character password that is easy to remember and super hard to crack. My algorithm takes some characters out of the URL, so now all my passwords are long and hard to crack, but yet easy to remember.

The only problem are sites that don’t allow symbols in their passwords. I’m talking to you Verizon and Capital One. So I have a handful of passwords that can’t use my algorithm and have passwords that I can’t remember, but thanks to LastPass, I will never not be able to know what it is.

Steve Gibson has a site explaining his whole theory on why length is more secure than entropy. According to his calculations the fastest my passwords could be cracked in is 1.65 hundred centuries, and I’m fine with that.

Happy Towel Day!

I’m a huge fan of NAS drives. For those not so geeky people, a NAS is a networked attached storage device. It’s basically a hard drive attached to your network that any computer can access. Some are just basic drives, and others add a lot of other features.

I use to have two NAS drives on my network. I had an old one that I bought probably eight years ago. It was a cheapy that was basically just a drive that I used to back all my computers up. It has since died. My other NAS was a FreeNAS server I built from an old P3 computer. FreeNAS is great open source NAS software, that adds a lot more features than my cheap one had. It supports almost any protocol a person would want. I backed up my Mom’s computer, and was able to access a lot of my files over FTP. I shared music on my network with the iTunes server, and dabbled around with other features. It was great.

Once my cheapy NAS died I needed to upgrade the storage in my FreeNAS, and since it was an old computer with no SATA ports, instead of messing with a SATA card, I thought it was time to upgrade to a different NAS, so I bought a Synology NAS.

I bought the DS211 which supports two drives, and am loving it so far. It it loaded with features that I am just starting to explore. I love that it has iOS apps. I can now stream my music, view my photos, or any of my files right from my phone or iPad. I know the Drobo is a popular backup device, but for the price and features, I think Synology has them beat.

I FINALLY got an iPhone. It’s been a long four years, but I finally got one. I have probably complained far too much online about not being able to get one. With the lack of At&t service it just wasn’t available. I was all set to get an Android based phone, which are also pretty good, until Verizon got iPhones last month. Thankfully our contract was up this month, so I only had to wait a month.

It almost wasn’t going to happen yesterday. During our checkout at the Verizon store their system went down. We did some more shopping in the mall, ate dinner, came back and it was still down. We sadly went home iPhoneless. When we got home, I basically sat on Twitter until I heard when their system came back up. Thankfully it came up around 8:15, so we had 45 minutes to get back to the store before they closed. So last night was spent syncing and getting it all set up.

I’m a little bummed that I’m not going to get any experience playing around with Android, but I know the iPhone is the phone for me. I have an investment in apps, and pretty much live in iTunes. iTunes on OS X works great and isn’t the piece of crap that the windows version is.

I love that I finally have a phone with no carrier branding, or apps on it. Unlike Android phone, I will get the newest iOS updates when they come out. I will always be able to be on the latest OS until my phone is not powerful enough to run it, and then it will be time for a new phone anyway. Since it’s probably the most popular phone, I also have a huge selection of accessories along with the biggest app store. The down side is the app store isn’t as open, but I can always jailbreak, and probably will eventually.

So if you weren’t in a cave yesterday you heard about the iPad 2 announcement. Will I be upgrading? No. My iPad does everything I need it to do. Nothing in the update really excited me. I’m not one to upgrade to keep up with the Joneses. I love gadgets, but I don’t actually buy them unless I know I am going to use them a lot, and I don’t upgrade until I absolutely need to.

The iPad 2 is the iPad they should have released last year. I think they purposely left out the cameras last year just so they would have something to add this year. Apple’s yearly product updates kind of bug me. They are always trying to make last year’s products seem old so you upgrade. I don’t know why any current iPad owners would upgrade. Sure it’s a little faster, a little lighter, and has cameras, but I have never complained that mine was too slow, or wish it weighed 0.2 lbs less, or even had a camera.

To me the big news is you can now get a refurbished iPad for $349. That’s a great deal. I always buy my iPods refurbished, and may buy my next laptop refurbished. I am still rocking the 1st gen MacBook, and it’s working just fine despite a little yellowing, but the time for a new laptop is getting closer.

Another great t-shirt at Shirt.woot.com. This one sold out on me, but it’s probably for the better. I have too many woot! shirts the way it is.

Currently in my geek cave I have two desks. The one I mostly sit at usually has three computers on it, sometimes four if I am playing around on my netbook . I have a Windows 7 machine, two Macs, and my netbook runs Ubuntu Linux.

Across the room is my Wife’s old desk. Once she got a laptop she didn’t have a use for it anymore. I have two more computers over there hooked up to a KVM switch to share the keyboard, monitor, and mouse. One is my main Linux system running Ubuntu, and the other is an old junker that’s running console video game emulators. If I ever have the urge to play Super Mario Brothers, or Pitfall, that’s where I do it. I can play any Atari 2600, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Nintendo, or Super Nintendo game I want. All the video game systems of my youth.

In the near future I am going to upgrade my desk. I’m getting rid of the two I have and getting one big one that should house all five of these computers. I have looked around town, and haven’t found crap for computer desks, but I have found some pretty sweet ones online. I am going to switch from a corner desk to a L shaped desk with two keyboard drawers. It should give me plenty of room after I upgrade that big ass 19” CRT monitor.

I am so eager to make the upgrade, but I kind of have to wait until I make room on the garage for my old desks. The garage is a pretty sloppy mess now being winter, and having the snowblower and other crap in there.

I hope I will be able to sell my desks quickly on Craigslist. They are both high quality and in pretty good shape. I love them both, but it’s time for an upgrade. Once my new desk is in place, then I will have a whole half of room to figure out what I want to do with.

The iPhone announcement was over a week ago, and I haven’t blogged about it yet. How many other countries got the iPhone before North Dakota? It’s nice that it’s finally an option. I would probably be more excited if it had happened a few years ago. Now there are some very good Android phones that would be good choices too.

My contract is up in March, and I have been debating over Android vs. iPhone for the past week. I have pretty much settled on the iPhone now though. I live in the Apple universe. I already have tons of apps, and don’t hate iTunes. I don’t understand all the iTunes haters, but maybe the Windows version is different.

Many people hate the iPhone for not having a physical keyboard, but my Blackberry has one and I hate it. I can type much faster on my iPod Touch. So that is another thing. I know I would like the iPhone keyboard, not as sure about the Android. Some people want removable storage on there phone so they can add more storage and have their entire much library with them. I don’t really care much about having music on my phone. That’s what my iPod Classic is for. It’s 120 GBs is actually enough to hold it all. Maybe my mind will change when I get a decent phone, but for now 16 GB is probably plenty and I would have no need for removable memory.

Now the problem is do I just get an iPhone 4 in March, or wait until the iPhone 5 comes out later this summer — assuming Verizon is going to get the iPhone 5 this summer.  I’m not really a fan of waiting because you could wait forever. No matter what, there is always something bigger and better right around the corner. Honestly I don’t really see any big changes coming to the iPhone 5. What else could they really add? The only thing I can think of is 4G, but that’s not coming to Fargo anytime soon — Verizon says by 2013. I am sure something will come out, but all the iOS updates should all work on the iPhone 4 too.

I’m sure waiting is probably the right thing to do. I’ve waited four years for this phone, what’s a couple more months. I probably wont wait though. I suffered with a Blackberry the last two years, I’m sure I won’t be suffering as much with an iPhone 4. We will just have to wait and see what the iPhone 5 rumors are during the next two months.

I bought an iPad two days after they became available.  I usually don’t buy version 1 products, but the iPad looked so good I couldn’t wait.  So I have been using it now for seven months and totally love it.  It’s the perfect couch computer.  It’s so handy to have on the couch to either look something up on IMDB, check sports scores, or check up on Twitter.  I also think it’s a great ebook reader.  I have read many books on it, and prefer it over paper books.  I have never read a book on a Kindle though.  The smaller size, and non-backlit screen may be your thing, but I love the color screen and multiple uses the iPad has.  It has pretty much replaced my laptop on short trips.  Longer vacations I need my laptop, but if I just want to keep up with my RSS feeds, my iPad does the job.

Yesterday the long awaiting iOS 4.2 came out.  I was looking forward to it coming out since the day I bought my iPad.  It finally brings the much needed folders, and multitasking.  My iPad now seems even more useful.  The update does one stupid thing though.  It changes the screen orientation switch into another mute switch.  It boggles my mind why they did this.  I use to use that switch all the time.  Now it takes four button pushes to lock the screen orientation.  Holding the volume button down for a second or two has always muted it.  Why do we need another mute switch?  There are only four buttons on the damn thing, why do two of them have to be mute?

We will see if I miss the old screen orientation lock.  If I miss it too much, I will might just have to jailbreak it again.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought a new printer.  The ink for my old printer was getting harder and harder to find.  Target was the only place that had it, and last time I bought some it was covered in a layer of dust.  Yeah, it wasn’t a very popular ink cartridge.  I figured the days of easily finding ink for that printer are numbered.  I was low on both black and color ink, so —for almost the price of the ink— I just bought a new printer.

If I remember correctly this the fifth printer I a have bought, and every time I am always amazed at the new one, and kind of shocked how crappy my old one was.

The first printer I bought was back in the early 90s.  It only printed in black.  I was amazed at how crisp and clean the black was and, gasp, it could print different fonts.  It was much better than those dot matrix printers we had in school.

A few years later I bought my first color printer.  It could print color, but really couldn’t handle pictures.  Just some basic color in documents.  It was my first and only HP printer.  After that I started buying Epson printers, and that is all I have bought since.

My third printer was my first Epson and I was amazed how good of photos it could print.  Looking back at those photos now, they are pretty crappy.

My fourth printer is the Epson printer that I am getting rid of now.  It prints pretty good photos.  I can’t really tell the difference between my printed photos, and printed photos from stores.  Nowadays though, it’s easier and probably cheaper to just get photos printed at stores, so I seldom print photos at home.

My new printer is an Epson WorkForce 633.  I’m sure the print quality is better than my old printer, but honestly I can really see a difference.  Printers have gotten so good now that print quality really doesn’t matter much anymore.  It’s other features that I love about my new printer.

It’s an all in one printer, like most of them are nowadays.  It’s nice to have a scanner again, since mine went to hell a few years ago.  I don’t really scan much, but it’s nice to be able to.  It has a nice document feeder too, so I can copy or scan multiple of pages easily.  The thing I really like about it is it’s paper try.  I can put a half of ream of paper in it, and not have to worry about paper levels for a long time.  Plus it holds the paper flat, so it doesn’t get all curled up. 

It’s WiFi, but I don’t really see a benefit to that.  It still has to be plugged into my computer to scan, so it didn’t eliminate and wires.  The only advantage I can see of it is that other computers on the network can print when my main computer is shut off, but my computer is never shut off, so who cares.  It’s probably more of a feature for noobs that don’t know how to share a printer on the network.

My favorite features are probably the speed —It prints super fast— and that it can print double sided.  It’s pretty cool how it prints one side, sucks it back in, and then prints the other side.

Have I really typed this much about something as unsexy as a new printer?  Holy crap.  Well, I don’t by printers too often, so I guess I really notice the changes when I do.

I’m sure everyone by now has heard that Benoît Mandelbrot died over the weekend.  He basically invented/discovered fractal geometry.  Math was always one of my favorite subjects in school, but I had to work hard at it.  It didn’t really come natural to me.  I am always amazed by smart people, who think different.  Of course the only reason I even know of Benoît Mandelbrot is from the great Jonathan Coulton song.

I am also a big fan of smart songs.

I started blogging in late 2000 when I first got broadband internet.  Sometimes I wish I knew the exact date, or even had some of my old archives, but I didn’t bother taking that stuff with my when I switched to different platforms over the years.

It’s kind of amazing looking at all the different platforms out there now.  When I started blogging there was basically Blogger, or you ran blogging software on your own server.  I started with blogger, but it was a little limiting back then, and it didn’t even allow commenting.  Now with Twitter and Facebook is seems like people are blogging less and less, and probably commenting less too.  I rarely ever comment on blogs, and really couldn’t care less if I had commenting on my blog now.

Blogger has greatly improved since last time I used it, and there are many other blogging options now.  If I was to start blogging right now services like Posterous, Tumblr, or Squarespace would be very tempting.

Posterous has been trying to get people to switch to them these past couple weeks.  I really like Posterous, but I just use it to easily post things here.  It has made it much easier for me to quickly share stuff on my blog that I otherwise wouldn’t bother to spend the time.  That’s really the reason I blog anyway.  I don’t consider myself the best writer, or even like writing all that much, but I love sharing cool things I find in the interwebs.

I’m not going to switch blogging services though.  As tempting as it may be, I like the greater control I have running my own server.

I had a little free time this weekend, so I thought I would try to wrap my head around Final Cut Express. Video editing and photo editing are both things I want to learn to do better, but I don’t do it enough to learn. I am hoping to get a bunch of video from Hawaii and hopefully put together some good videos.

In the past iMovie was just fine for me, but the new version drives me crazy. It’s nice for quick and easy things, but it just feels much more limiting than the older version was. So it was time for me to upgrade to Final Cut Express.

When I first started playing around with Final Cut Express I was lost, but I found an incredible free tutorial online over at IzzyVideo.com. He has a free beginners guide course, and it was so good it made we want to be a subscriber to get his paid videos, but his prices are a little more then I want to spend on something I don’t do all that often.

With the help of the tutorial I feel I can use Final Cut Express as proficient has I did the old version of iMovie, but I still have a lot of learning and playing around with to do. I just need to get off my butt and make more videos so I have more to play around with.