Tag: tech (Page 3 of 7)

When Good Plans Go Awry

June 25, 2015 / DB

For years I’ve been a Back Up Nazi. I let people know how important it is not just to back up the data that is valuable to you – photos, videos, music, important text documents – but to have more than one backup copy. One copy around the house. Then an extra hard drive at a neighbor’s home or bank safe deposit box and collect it every few months to update it. Or sign up for Crashplan or Backblaze and keep a continuously updated backup in the cloud.

And, I always lived by my suggestions. Two backup drives in the house, one on the other side of the neighborhood at my sister- and brother-in-law’s. For several years I ran Backblaze, too, just for an extra measure, although I ditched that last year when Amazon allowed Prime members unlimited storage for photos.

Two paragraphs outlining my backup system. Can you guess what’s coming next? Allow me to spell it out with an equation:

System adjustment + Drive Failure * Hubris = Catastrophic Data Loss

Long story short, as I was moving a bunch of my data around to a new local storage system, I briefly had only a single copy of my latest, most important version of my iTunes library. And, naturally, while I was running one more backup and went to grab my extra drive from around the corner, the drive holding that single copy of my iTunes library died. Died to the point I can’t access the data at all.

Shit.

Now, this isn’t a total loss. I have a copy of most of my music that is only 3–4 months old. Anything I’ve purchased since then can be re-downloaded.

The big loss is all the metadata that died with that master library. Nine years of play counts, play lists, notes typed into the comments fields, all gone.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge loss. As I said, I have most of the music files on one of my backup drives. And having used the Rdio streaming service as much as iTunes over the past three years, it’s not like all that iTunes metadata was the only record of my listening habits.

But, still, in the digital music age, where we can’t touch and feel and smell our music, they way we did in the vinyl, cassette, and CD eras, that metadata is one of the few ways available to have a relationship with our music beyond just listening to it. We can sort it, pull out the songs we haven’t heard in ages, track what we’ve listened to the most, and otherwise sort and sift through the bits and bytes to make it more personal.

For an hour or so after I realized I could not pull the data back, I literally felt sick to my stomach. That passed. Eventually. Sort of.

In a way, this comes at the perfect time. Perhaps, rather that start over with that slightly stale iTunes library, I should go all-in with streaming. Apple Music launches in just a few days. Between either that or my existing Rdio subscription, isn’t that enough to both keep up with each week’s new releases and access a deep collection of catalog cuts? I guess this is as good of a time as any to experiment a little.

So, use this as another reminder to back up your computers. And then back them up again. And when a hard drive gets over two years old, you should be prepared for it to fail at any point.

Old Films

June 10, 2015 / DB

Like many parents, we bought a camcorder around the time our first child was born.[1]

Like many parents, we recorded dozens of moments during our early years of parenting, sometimes letting the tape run long past the point when it should have been shut off because we were so utterly delighted with everything our child did.

Like many parents the camcorder slowly got used less-and-less as we added more offspring to the family. Once the first iPhone arrived in our home, we were pretty much done with our camcorder, and it has sat in its case in a closet for nearly six years now.[2]

S. had the brilliant idea last week that I charge the Sony up and give it to the girls to play with. The first step to turning it over to the girls, though, was making sure every moment we had put onto tape was safely backed up onto a hard drive. I was not about to let them destroy our only way of getting data off the MiniDV cassettes before I was sure we had multiple copies of the treasures recorded on them.

So for the past three days I’ve been hooking the camcorder up to the girls’ Mac Mini, selecting Import in iMovie, and letting the bits flow through the FireWire cable. I would occasionally sit and watch, or let the girls watch, as the movies that were being imported displayed on the Mini’s monitor. They loved it! There was much laughter and howling at their younger selves.

I loved it, too. I can’t remember the last time I watched any of the tapes. There are so many terrific moments collected on them.

A few observations:

Man do I love those babies who are in the 5–7 month range, when they’re just getting their personalities and you can get them laughing. So many wonderful moments of one of the girls laying on a couch or blanket, kicking their legs, and laughing at us making silly faces or noises at them. That’s just the freaking best.
It’s funny to see their personalities so soon. I see behavior on those videos from when the girls were 2 or 3 that exactly matches the girls they are today.
Asking babies/toddlers where their various body parts are never, ever gets old. There were probably hours of “Where are your toes? Where’s your belly?” etc. on those tapes.
Of the moments I saw, my absolute favorite was an epic 20 or 25 minute recording with a roughly four-month-old C. sitting in her excersaucer while M. played with her. The best part, though, was when I flipped the view-finding screen around so that M. could see herself while I filmed her. She freaking flipped out. She laughed as loud as I’ve ever heard her. She’d run up and mash her face into the screen, then back up and laugh again. When C. would appear over her shoulder, she’d scream “DERE C.!” And this just kept on going. I could only get her to stop mugging for the camera by asking her if she wanted to watch Big Bird. Then she quickly turned, waved backward over her shoulder to the camera, and marched toward the TV. Not good times, great times.
The girls are really looking forward to watching them all at some point this summer. And so am I. And I’m also kind of interested in what they come up with once I turn the camera over to them.

Along with the Sony Camcorder came our first Mac, since video editing was (allegedly) so much easier on a Mac. I wonder if S. wishes she could go back and rethink that buying decision. ↩

Also, as the video function on our Canon point-and-shoot camera got better, it was easier to pick it up to catch a quick video of the girls rather than go find the camcorder and wait for it to start up. ↩

Can’t Get That Song Out Of My Radio

January 28, 2014 / DB

Sad news from the radio world.

Faced with growing competition from digital alternatives, traditional broadcasters have managed to expand their listenership with an unlikely tactic: offering less variety than ever.
The strategy is based on a growing amount of research that shows in increasingly granular detail what radio programmers have long believed—listeners tend to stay tuned when they hear a familiar song, and tune out when they hear music they don’t recognize.

It’s a shame that the stagnation of radio can be blamed squarely on the lameness of the listening public.

It is crazy how long some songs stick around. The singles from Adele’s last album were in high-rotation for over two years. There are a couple songs that first got launched during the 2012 NCAA tournament that you can still hear several times a day.¹

Even my girls have picked up on the endless repetition. After a month of listening to Christmas music, we went back to Radio Disney around New Year’s Day. The hits that dominated in October and November remained the most common songs on the playlist. “They’re still playing this?” said M. one morning on the way to school. L., who spends more time in the car than her sisters, is especially sensitive to it. “We’ve heard this song three times today, Dad!” And that’s in maybe 45 minutes of total drive time in the mornings and afternoons.

I’ll keep hoping that my wide-ranging music tastes, and deep diving into each week’s new releases, will free them from the tyranny of corporate radio.

Radio’s Answer to Spotify? Less Variety

I think it’s one of those Imagine Dragons songs and the Neon Trees song. Both were in commercials that I saw 8000 times while KU advanced to the title game that year. Part of me hates them, but part of me loves them because they bring back good memories of that especially sweet tournament run. ↩

Farewell Winamp

November 21, 2013 / DB

Time, and technology, march forward. The first widely popular desktop application that played MP3 files, Winamp, is being shut down in December.

AOL Shuts Down Winamp For Good

I first downloaded Winamp in December 1997. Pearl Jam had a new single, “Given To Fly,” that was getting airplay in advance of its official release. I kept reading on Pearl Jam discussion lists how you could listen to “radio rips” of the song if you had the right software¹. I did some searching, found and installed Winamp, downloaded some incredibly compressed rips, and my digital music adventure was off and running.

I kept Winamp around for several years. In the early days, I had a collection of 30 or so Pearl Jam covers recorded at concerts. Eventually, once I discovered Napster and other downloading sites and began ripping my CDs to my hard drive, my library grew. But I believe I stuck with Winamp until our first Mac arrived in July 2004. A lot of good musical memories are wrapped up in that app.

I don’t recall it fondly because it was some great piece of software. It was pretty utilitarian, taking sound files and playing them. I was never into skinning my player the way some fans were. But it served a great purpose as I moved away from CDs and radio as my primary tools of music discovery and shifted to download sites, streaming radio, and eventually music blogs and the iTunes and Amazon music stores.

Farewell, Winamp.

I didn’t really know what a radio rip was, either. Man, were they awful back then, too. I remember the first I downloaded sounded like it was being played on a tiny speaker, shot through a cardboard tube, into a large, tiled room. In other words, it kind of sucked. ↩

For The Love Of Baseball And Radio

November 4, 2013 / DB

OK, cramming three things together that aren’t each related to the others, but I can link them enough to justify the single post. And, I know, all of these would have been much more timely a week ago. You were busy, too. Let’s get caught up together.

First, radio. Last week was the 75th anniversary of the War of the Worlds broadcast. I’ve always been fascinated by it for a variety of reasons. And I had heard many times before that the “panic” wasn’t nearly as widespread as legend insisted.

But this piece does the math, checks the historical record, and then delves into why there was a “panic” in the first place. The answer is awfully interesting.

How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Did Not Touch Off a Nationwide Hysteria. Few Americans Listened. Even Fewer Panicked.

Now, radio and baseball.

A wonderful look at the tremendous reach of St. Louis station KMOX, and how its power and the geography of baseball before expansion made the Cardinals, arguably, the most popular team in America, even at the height of the Yankees dynasties.

Supposedly, it still is, despite the proliferation of televisions and Internet access. But can it really still be heard clearly in other states, without the harsh accompaniment of static and interference from other stations trying to muscle in on the signal? Surely there must be some exaggeration.
To put it to the test, I set out in my rental car Sunday, the day of Game 4 of the World Series, between the Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, and headed south, the radio tuned to 1120 AM, to see if I could I outdrive the signal before the end of the game.

Trying to Outrun The Cardinals’ Long Reach

And, finally, just baseball.

I love the site Flip Flop Flyball. Artist Craig Robinson uses his mastery of Photoshop and his new-found love of baseball (He’s a native of England), to create kickass, 8-bit-style graphics of famous players and historical moments. He also makes cool infographics that are not necessarily 8-bit.

He currently resides in Mexico and using the Mexican sculpture style known as Árbol de Vida (Tree of Life), he created an Árbol de Béisbol: the history of baseball in one, cool, 8-bit graphic. Here is the image, but he sure to go to the page and read up on all the elements. It’s really fantastic.

arbol

Árbol de Béisbol

And while you’re over there, look at some of his other work.

Blog Change Manifesto

September 18, 2013 / DB

As promised, the long, boring, navel gazery that is the “Why I Changed The Blog” post. Feel free to skip.

First, the important things you need to know. The landing page will show the five most recent posts. If you want to read further back, just hit the Journal link over on the left and you can browse to your heart’s content. To the tune of 150 pages of blog posts!

That’s right, I’ve finally gathered most of my web writings since 2003 into one site. Notice I say most. Over the years I had deleted things here and there during other platform moves. Somehow, sometime, I lost about six months of posts from 2011. And I did clean out some posts while moving everything to the new setup. But there are nearly 1350 posts from June 2003 to today if you want to keep paging back.

The downside to that is, at this point, I have no cool search function or formal archive section. Hopefully that will come in the future but for now you have to manually work your way back.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m no longer posting pictures of the girls here. I figure they, and their friends, are getting old enough to use Google, so why post pics that can be used against to identify and possibly embarrass them. Chances are you’re a Facebook friend, so you’ll still get to see the occasional pic of them there.

I’ve also done my best to scrub full names from the site. Which took some work, because I used to use a lot of full names in posts when I first began writing on the web! How come none of you ever complained? Hopefully you will just see first names and last initials or family names, but never full names. If you find one I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll clean it up immediately.

Regarding the old posts, I gave them all a quick skim to remove full names, bad links to pictures, clean out sloppy HTML, etc. But there may be bad links or the occasional rendering error. You should get the gist of most of them, though.

Also deleted have been the old Friday Vid posts. I’ll still be posting Friday Vids, but the YouTube format I will be using here is different from what I’ve used in the past. Rather than go through and update a couple hundred posts with new code, it was easier just to delete them all.

Finally, some explanation on what exactly has changed for the other geeks out there.

Over the past ten years I’ve used Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Tumblr, and Squarespace. I liked Squarespace a lot and would still recommend it to anyone with limited technical knowledge who wants to build a website. But for all the things Squarespace was good at, it kind of sucked for the thing I care about most: getting the words in. Its web interface was temperamental at best, its mobile apps were unusable, and there were no signs they planned on upgrading/improving them any time soon.

Over the summer I began researching static, or flat-file, blog systems. An overly simplified, and possibly incorrect, explanation of these is that rather than being built with through databases, static blogs are built with simple text files. To write a new post, I open up a text editor, type in some words, save it to the appropriate folder, and the site is instantly updated. No logging in, copying/pasting into a web interface, or any of the other steps database-based systems require. Static sites should load quicker, be much easier for to update the software for, and take up less server space.

I spent a solid week reading up on static systems, another weekend playing with the Kirby system, and finally decided to go with Statamic in mid-August. Since then I’ve been collecting all my old posts into a folder, playing with a mocked-up version of the site in a virtual server, and now, here I am. In addition to the simplicity and speed of Statamic, the real beauty of it is that all the site’s content is stored in a single folder as a stack of plain text files. If/when I decide I want to do something new and different, I can just copy those files into the next system and everything will be there.

So that’s that. So far so good, and I’m pleased with how things look/work. Statamic is a fairly young platform, so while I’d like to add a few functions as it develops more, I also plan on keeping the site pretty lean. Once I can offer a good archive page, I think it will be about perfect.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Next Version

September 12, 2013 / DB

Well, it’s time.

It’s been almost two years since I’ve made any large changes to the blog.¹ The itch to change has been bugging me and it’s finally time to scratch it. Over the next three days, I’ll be picking everything up and moving it to new servers, installing new software, and hopefully by Monday, all will be working as normal again.

As always, there’s no need for you to do anything. The address you have saved will remain the same. And if, for some strange reason, you choose not to read this post and come back next week, you may think all I’ve done is tweak the visual elements of the blog again.

But if you check in the interim, you may get a surprise. I don’t know exactly when I’ll make the switch, but at some point over the weekend you’ll likely get an error message if you attempt to access the site. No worries. It’ll all be back to normal soon. I promise.

I’ll save the lengthy explanation for why I’m making the move and what kind of changes you should expect for next week. In the meantime, we’ll skip a Friday Vid this week as I tear down the old and build up the new.

Wish me luck and have a terrific weekend.

Not counting visual changes, obviously. I’ve done several of those during the roughly two years I’ve used Squarespace. ↩

A Few Digital Music Thoughts

July 19, 2013 / DB

The horse is long out of the barn.

That’s my reaction to Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke’s announcement earlier this week that he was pulling his solo and Atoms For Peace music from the streaming service Spotify to protest the minuscule royalty payments it, and other similar services, issues to artists.

I absolutely agree with his point: there needs to be a model for online music that balances the interests of artists who perform and write music and are entitled to fair compensation for their works, of consumers who want easy access to huge libraries of music, and the need for companies that serve the music up to make some money for their efforts. I pay $10/month to get access to my Rdio account on my phone or any other mobile device. I’d pay twice that, as I rarely buy singles or albums from iTunes or Amazon anymore, if it meant artists could get a more fair return for my virtual spins of their music.

But, sadly, I think consumers have been so warped by nearly 15 years of cheap-to-free music on the Internet that there is no retraining them/us how to value music properly. You can only drink from the firehose so long before anything less seems unacceptable. If Spotify, Rdio, etc. jacked up their monthly rates to $20, I bet their already meager subscription rolls would shrink dramatically. Which would be a disaster for companies that are struggling to figure out how to make a profit.

I like that Yorke is sticking up for smaller artists who, unlike him, can’t survive on broad back catalogs and expect to sell several hundred thousand copies of new albums as he can with Radiohead. It’s not going to do much to change the mind of the consumer, though, who for the first time in the history of the record business, gets the best of the give-and-take with artists and record companies in the streaming music age.

Radio is dying. The iTunes era is coming to an end. Streaming music services, if they survive, clearly can’t match radio, or even iTunes, for royalty payouts. Being a musician has never been easy. But, more than any time since the dawn of the rock era, musicians must rely on touring, merchandising, and other methods it earn a living. They can’t hope to have a single picked up nationally and then sell a bunch of albums and live of the proceeds.

I wrote this on Tuesday and never got around to posting it. Tuesday night I finally read the profile of Huey Lewis that Steven Hyden wrote for Grantland a couple weeks back. It’s great for a lot of reasons, but I also thought Huey’s view of the music industry fit in with the subject of digital music and what it means to the consumer.

” American popular music is our only art form. It’s our most important export, period. And since time began, it’s been handled not as an art form but as a commodity. I mean, all records are the same price. Books are different prices, paintings are different prices, wine is different prices, but all music is the same fucking price. And why? Because the executives in charge of the business are not real businesspeople. They didn’t go to business school, they don’t have a business vision. ‘He just managed a band that sold 8 million records. So let’s put him in charge.'”

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The Cloud’s Fatal Flaw (For Now)

August 8, 2012 / DB

This is a frightening story. Mat Honan, a technology writer, had his iCloud, Google, Twitter, and Amazon accounts hijacked, and in turn, his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook remotely wiped, destroying years of data he had not backed up. He was lucky, though, in that the hackers were only interested in having some fun rather than running amok with his financial data.

All of the big technology companies are pushing us towards exclusive use of their cloud-based systems. Syncing in the cloud is tremendously difficult, and it’s pretty amazing that the systems work as well as they do. There really is a magic to accessing a file on your phone, tablet, or computer and always having the latest version. But as hard as they are working on the sync-side of their businesses, they all clearly need to spend even more time considering the security elements of the cloud. If people can’t be sure their data will be safe, there’s no reason to use the cloud.

Amazon has already adjusted how users can reset their passwords. Apple has suspended the current system as they research a better option. This is an excellent reminder that you should take advantage of all the security options available to you when you put your data into the cloud. For example, if you use Google, by all means use their two-factor authentication option. It’s a bit of a hassle to set-up, but that’s a small price to pay for not waking up one day and finding all your accounts hacked.

Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

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iPad Vs. Macbook: The Verdict

May 14, 2012 / DB

I’ve been (almost) exclusively on the iPad + keyboard combo for nearly two weeks now. How’s it going? I’m glad you asked.

A couple years back, in the midst of the nine or ten month netbook craze, I picked up a cheap MSI netbook. I tried to use it for work, but it was just too damn small. The keyboard was cramped and applications written for screens that were at least 12″ were nightmares to use on the 9″ screen. The screen was dim and, despite its size, was also heavier than the keyboard and was prone to tipping over. After a few months of struggling with its limitations, I sold it and went back to using a full-sized laptop.

That experience was in the back of my mind as I began this experiment. Sure, the iPad can do a lot of great things, but would its limitations prevent me from using it full-time?

At least so far, the answer is no. And I believe the big difference is how iOS applications are built to take advantage of the device’s screen.

On the netbook, there was never enough real estate. I was always squinting, struggling to resize windows so I could get all the information I needed. And while I feel I’m pretty adaptive to different keyboards, the keys on it were so crowded and so small that I could never get comfortable with it. Perhaps that’s the key word in what I was looking for: comfort. Can I see what I need to see? Can my fingers do what comes naturally on a keyboard or are they getting tied up and slowing me down?

On the iPad vision isn’t a problem. Text is bigger, bolder, and brighter than on the netbook. Applications are designed to fill every pixel of screen space, and thus are perfectly proportioned for easy readability. The keyboard on my Zaggfolio isn’t full-sized, but it is big enough that my fingers have room to move. Unlike the netbook, there is space between the keys, so even if you don’t hit a key squarely, you still have a margin for error.

For fun stuff, there are plenty of ways to get things done on the iPad. My concern was could I do the tasks necessary to file a story.
As with the Mac, I’m a bit of a text editor whore on the iPad. I have a folder full of text apps, and honestly, I don’t have a favorite yet. Some are better for when I write for the blog, in which I use a language called Markdown. Others are better for writing that doesn’t need to be converted to HTML, and I’ll probably use those more when I use the iPad for work. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a blessing or a curse. I have many options for different needs. But there also isn’t one, go-to app that does everything I want. But for $1-5 an app, it doesn’t break the bank to experiment.

It’s taken some work, but I’ve moved the spreadsheets I used for stats on the Mac over to Numbers for iOS. This is where we run into the one area I’m concerned about when it comes time to cover an event on the iPad. On the Mac, I can tile windows, having a spreadsheet underneath two text windows while I put together my box score and story. That’s not possible in iOS. It’s going to take some adjustment to get used to that, and I imagine there will come a night when I’m pushing deadline and get frustrated by constantly having to switch between applications.

Which brings up the iPad’s biggest shortcoming. While iOS supports ‘multitasking’, it does so in a clunky manner that can best be described as quasi-multitasking. Or half-assed multitasking, maybe. Other mobile operating systems have come up with better ways to flip between apps you’re using, so I can hope that the engineers at Apple are working on something for the next major release of iOS. I can work with the current method but I would love something that was faster, easier, and more intuitive. Adding support for the Command-Tab shortcut from the Mac OS would be ideal.

Another area where iOS needs work is on how it supports external keyboards. It’s great that you can connet to any Bluetooth keyboard and get to work. But not all the shortcuts from the Mac OS will work in iOS. For someone like me that uses a lot of shortcuts, that slows me down as I hunt for the manual way to recreate what I used to do with a couple keystrokes. I would expect that keyboard support will get more robust as iOS evolves, but I also imagine some things that we’re used to on a Mac will never work on iOS.

That’s the great lesson from all of this. Any time you switch computer devices, you’re going to have to make adjustments. Whether you’re switching from a desktop to laptop, Vista to Windows 7, PC to Mac, etc., you’re going to have to learn some new tricks. That’s even more pronounced on the iPad. It will take patience and a lot of trial-and-error to get a new system that you are comfortable with.

For my needs, the iPad works as a MacBook replacement. I can still store gigabytes of data on the family computer and just take what is essential on my iPad. I can create text files, post to my blog, peruse newsfeeds, read and respond to email, and browse the web as I’ve done on the Mac for years. Adding an external keyboard makes all of this so much easier, adding some of the utility of a traditional laptop. While I have run into some difficulties, none of them have prevented me from doing what I want and need to do. And I’ve tried to remind myself that there are trade-offs in this experiment. I’m giving up some functions I was used to but gaining things like extreme portability, insane battery life, lower replacement cost, and a whole new area of use.

After several weeks of use I’m comfortable having only an iPad for my main computing device. Friday night I covered a softball game and had no trouble filing my story afterwards. I hope the process is as smooth in the fall when I go back to using my spreadsheets to build football box scores.

I even had a reverse confusion moment when helping my wife on her MacBook. I was trying to launch an application, and rather than use the trackpad to click on the app’s icon, I reached up and tapped the screen. I did it three times before I realized why it wasn’t responding. It seems as though the muscle memory changes are sticking.

The next time you are in the market for a computer, I can recommend the iPad to just about anyone who doesn’t have to do intense photo editing, design, or video editing. Park your old computer on a desk with an external hard drive to hold all your music, movies, and pictures and then turn it over to the kids for hours of Monkeyquest and Club Penguin fun. Get yourself an iPad and an external keyboard and you’ll never look back.

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