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.

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.

Why do we have all this crap?

In my case the situation was particularly bad in terms of paper; I’m a natural pack rat, and file far too much paper away for my own good — a realization I came to while hauling my files upstairs.

Even after a serious purge, I still had too much paper. This is not stuff I can just throw away, but I don’t want to be tripping over it, either. Furthermore, disaster planning is a huge part of my day job, and it bothered me that in most cases I had no backup for the information in my files; one fire and it would all be ashes. The natural solution would be to scan it in, but my experience with scanners was best summed up as ’slow, gruesome toil’.

It turns out that many of the fine folks who lurk at 43 Folders were in the same boat, and some of the discussions there turned me on to the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. Given the praise heaped upon the device there, and desperate for something to remove the piles of paper, I resolved to purchase one.

These are popular devices; I’ve noticed them in use in hospitals for scanning of insurance cards and the like. However, they’re difficult to source, in my experience, Amazon was the best option. As of this writing, the street price of the current S510M model is approximately $450.

The unit is designed to not take up a lot of room. Here’s mine in the closed configuration, using my beloved red stapler for scale:

Quite compact — 6.2″ x 6.2″ x 11.2″. Not difficult at all to find a place on the desk for it, which is a key consideration; if something is difficult to get to, or so large as to require being packed away when not in use, then you’re not going to use it, which would defeat the whole purpose here.

It’s not much larger in the open configuration:

Bundled software includes Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and ABBYY FineReader OCR software. Considering the list price on Acrobat Professional, the price on this unit isn’t a bad deal. Scan rate is 18 PPM, double-sided, automatic deskew, automatic blank page elimination, with a hopper capacity of 50 pages. Rather than attempt to digest those dry numbers, instead consider the following.

Traditional scanning tends to work like this:

• load paper into scanner
• begin scanning
• clear jam
• reload job
• clear jam again
• realize input is double-sided, reload job
• watch software choke on input
• throw pile of paper across room, seek adult beverage

In contrast, scanning with the ScanSnap works like this:

• load paper into scanner
• press large one-touch scan button
• watch job scan and OCR

This thing has to be seen to be believed. It just churns through paper effortlessly, no jams, no errors, no babysitting required. The rate at which one can eliminate a pile of paper is amazing; so far, I’ve put several linear feet through it. This has dramatically reduced my inventory of dead, bleached, pressed trees, converting them to easily-searchable full-text PDFs.

This is in nearly every respect an outstanding solution. If I have one complaint, it’s that the bundled driver software is an application, rather than a driver, and as such sits in the dock. This wouldn’t be a huge deal, but for whatever reason, the developers decided that the dock icon should be overlaid with a gigantic, garish, red cross symbol when the scanner is off. I find this to be annoying in the extreme.

To address this, I’ve found Dock Dodger, donationware from Foggy Noggin Software, to be just the thing. Dock Dodger allows for the icon to be hidden while the application is running, this removing the fugly icon from the dock. The icon can be reinstated at any time by simply running Dock Dodger again.

However, all in all, the dock icon is but a small issue in what is otherwise a fantastic piece of kit. Highly recommended.

The Apple Airport Extreme had been recommended to me in the past, but I’d passed on it due to lack of gigabit ports, which were commonly available with competing products. However, this deficiency has recently been addressed, so it was time for some serious investigation.

I’ve recently subscribed to Don McAllister’s excellent ScreenCastsOnline, which is a treasure trove of Mac reviews and tutorials. Don covered the Airport Extreme in ScreenCast 87; it’s a very comprehensive overview of the product, providing details that aren’t available in other review formats — video is hard to beat in this regard.

The clincher, however, was the following warranty statement on the product homepage:

The AppleCare Protection Plan for your computer covers the AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Well, that was the sale — I’ve already got the 3-year AppleCare plan, and at the rate I’ve been going through routers, that’s at least two of them I won’t need to buy.

I live within walking distance of an Apple Store. Glorious, is it not? My need was quickly fulfilled there, and I returned home to install the new box.

The Extreme is quite minimalist compared to my various deceased routers, sporting only a single LED on the front. The requisite ethernet ports and a USB port are on the rear. The unit is similar in dimension and style to a Mac Mini.

Setup was simple enough; plug everything in, bring up the Airport utility on the Mac, and follow the bouncing ball. Unfortunately, rather than the solid green LED of joy and happiness, I was presented with a flashing amber LED, indicating some problem.

Upon investigation, the Airport was complaining that PPPOE wasn’t working. I fiddled with the relevant settings a few times, to no avail. This was a bit of a puzzler, since PPPOE had been working on the late, lamented router. In desperation, I changed the connection type from PPPOE to stock Ethernet and…presto, connection, although there was some complaint about a double NAT going on.

Weird….that wasn’t supposed to work; my ISP requires PPPOE, and where was that double NAT error coming from?

I learned a great deal in the next few minutes. My DSL modem, as is somewhat common here in the Bay Area, where RBOCs come to die, is a Siemens SpeedStream 5100B:

Interestingly, this is far from a dumb modem; it’s actually quite an intelligent device, providing NAT function and PPPOE on the modem. SBC had shipped the modem with a CD containing the usual selection of blechware; I’d installed it to configure the modem then purged it immediately when we had a difference of opinion as to what my browser home page should be. As it turns out, that initial configuration had set up the modem to do PPPOE and NAT by itself; it had no need of a router for those functions.

Now, that sounds great, and it’s a nice thing for people with simple needs who wouldn’t otherwise have any kind of protection. However, it’s problematic when a router and the need to run VPN software come into play, as the NAT tables on the modem seem to overflow periodically, causing connections to drop. I’d been having this happen for years, but had just resigned myself to accept it, as I was unaware of the issue and customer service was certainly no help (”have you tried clearing your browser cache….”).

The solution here is actually very simple once you understand the problem. Onboard PPPOE can be turned off by connecting to the modem directly at its 192.168.0.1 address, entering the hardware access code printed on the bottom of the modem, and setting onboard PPPOE to off; at this point the Airport can be configured to handle PPPOE tasks, and only one device will be doing NAT. In my case, the modem wouldn’t take the access code, but was receptive to a paperclip in the hardware reset port.

This has happily solved a number of aggravating problems for me. As but one example, VPN connections which previously could be expected to terminate with some odd error after a couple of hours now stay up indefinitely.

Odd that the old router didn’t complain about this at all. Good riddance, I suppose.

However, some good stuff is in the works. Stay tuned.

In my case, that’s a R0DE NT1-A, a nice studio condenser mic which requires phantom power.

I had a few requirements regarding an audio interface:

• External. The components in a computer generate a great deal of electrical noise; this noise gets introduced into an analog signal unless it’s well shielded. Thus, the inside of the case is quite a hostile environment in which to run analog/digital converters, making an external interface a compelling choice.
• Low-latency headphone monitoring. An entertaining party trick is to have someone speak into a microphone while they’re monitoring their own voice with a slight delay. This has the odd effect of causing the victim to dramatically elongate vowel sounds, which is fun to hear. However, it’s no fun at all to do anything serious with, so a low-latency headphone hardware monitor is key.
• Firewire connectivity. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve had the worst luck with USB audio devices; it seems as if I’m always tripping over some bug in the chipsets. The pros have been using Firewire for this sort of thing for years, so the kinks have been worked out.
• At least one Mic preamp input with 48V phantom power.
• At least two line inputs or an effects send/return; there’s a lot of very cool analog signal processing equipment available, but it’s all line-level.
• Finally, zero driver hassles. In the PC world that we’ve recently escaped, the dominant vendor in the sound card landscape can’t seem to create a reliable driver despite years of trying. Every so often, a young, vibrant, and forward-thinking company with solid, reliable drivers would spring up, only to be acquired by the dominant vendor, who would then return us to our regularly-scheduled blue screens of death. (Incidentally, this vendor finally appears to be teetering on the brink of demise; don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, chumps….)
• Cost should not be of a magnitude sufficient to generate The Look from my Lovely Wife.

Now, even with this somewhat restrictive set of requirements, options are hardly limited; ask any musician and you’ll learn that there’s just no lack of gear to spend money on. Armed with a list of my possible options, I ventured forth to Guitar Center, our local audio Mecca, there to fondle the possible choices.

I quickly settled on the Presonus Firebox.

While several gear choices met the requirements, the build quality of the Firebox was a differentiator for me. I’m a sucker for metal, which the Firebox possesses in quantity, while many competitors were mostly plastic.

Hates plastic. Hates it, we do.

However, the clincher on the Firebox was the fact that it’s a ‘class compliant device’. To the uninitiated, ‘class compliant’ should be equated with other two-word combinations, such as:

• tax refund
• winning ticket
• free beer

In short, it means that there are no drivers required for the device. Let me go over that again.

There are no drivers required for the device.

They’re built into the OS; you just plug the unit in and it all works out instantly. Words cannot properly convey my feelings on this topic after reflection on just what it was like to rebuild a Windows machine after a sound driver ‘upgrade’ went bad.

There’s a lot to like here. A total of six inputs, including two with mic preamps. It’s a 24bit/96K interface, which is certainly good enough for my needs. On most machines, it’s actually completely powered from the Firewire bus; a supplemental wall wart power supply is provided for those machines with inadequate bus voltage. Seems to have excellent A/D conversion, at least to my ears, and the monitoring has no detectable latency. Also, the headphone volume does literally go to 11, though I suspect that a depressed skull fracture and/or cranial implosion could be expected to occur in the 7-8 range.

I think the one downside to the unit is the relatively low gain of 45db provided by the mic preamps; this is apparently a Firewire voltage limitation. That’s a decent amount of gain for most mics, but it’ll be marginal for some of the quieter ones. In my case, I had to nearly max the gain to accommodate my mic.

Street price on these is presently hovering at around $300 US.

I’m quite pleased with mine. Presonus produces an array of form-factor equivalent analog equipment such as a preamp and compressor which stack with this unit, thus leaving the door open for further gear acquisition. Apparently, they’ve studied my buying habits…..

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.