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.

I had purchased a Logitech MX Revolution mouse when I purchased my Mac Pro. The MX is very comfortable and offers state-of-the-art functionality. I’d run into a bit of a problem with drivers, but that had been resolved by using Steermouse.

However, I’d unfortunately had an ongoing problem with the MX that’d I’d been unable to rectify; the wireless radio was susceptible to interference from Wifi, being located in the same 2.4GHz frequency range as 802.11b/g/n.

The interference caused the mouse to either fail to respond, or to jerk around erratically when large-scale data transfers were occurring on my wireless network. Moving to 5GHz 802.11n eliminated the problem, but then my g-only iPhone didn’t have network access. Bah.

Being just as pleased as it’s possible to be with the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, I decided to check out the companion mouse, the Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000.

The first thing to note about this mouse is that it’s not really designed for the laptop user. Firstly, it’s not Bluetooth, secondly, it uses quite a large radio transceiver, complete with a long USB cable. Perfect for my needs with the Mac Pro, but not something you’d want to haul around with a laptop.

Power is provided by a pair of AA batteries. The mouse has a low-battery indicator which turns green briefly when batteries are inserted to indicate that they’re good; it otherwise isn’t lit unless the batteries run low. The batteries seem to last for quite a long time.

The mouse has a pleasantly grippy, rubbery surface, much like an eraser; it feels quite good to me. The laser is very accurate, and movement is precise.

The ergonomic bit is immediately obvious in the height and angle of the mouse. Relative to other mice, it’s very tall, and quite sharply angled. As a result, the wrist is held in a neutral position when using the mouse. This is a bit odd at first; it feels very much like gripping a baseball. However, after a very short period of time one does begin to notice the comfort, to the point that using a regular mouse feels quite uncomfortable in comparison.

Let’s put it this way: after using this mouse for a few hours at home, I went back to the store and obtained a second one for use at work. It’s that comfortable.

Best of all, no Wifi interference.

Potential downsides:

• It’s a relatively large mouse. Individuals with large hands are going to like this mouse; those with small hands may find the forward and back buttons difficult to reach.
• As with many mice, it’s right-handed only.

While the mouse ships with an excellent driver, Steermouse also works perfectly with it. As I’m a huge Steermouse fan, I deinstalled the Microsoft driver, which thankfully ships with an uninstaller.

Truly, a great mouse, highly recommended.

Note the barrel distortion in the following image — there seems to be some strange gravitational effect, perhaps located behind those trees; it looks as if the water is draining toward the center of the image.

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.

Tags: Photography

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.

Tags: Photography