My Backup Solution
This is my backup solution and process. My Laptop I have 2 external hard drives: External Backup A and External Backup B. One is at home and one is at my parents’ house. Every Monday, I plug my local External Backup drive into my laptop and clone the laptop’s data to it. I use Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac; you could use rsync on Linux or DriveImageXML on Windows. Most weeks, this takes less than half […]
What publishers will look like in 20 years
It’s hardest to see the future when the present is shifting so much. However, we can see clearly if we look at fundamentals and clearly understand the nature of change. There are 3 major individuals or groups involved in book publishing: Authors (usually one person, the creator) Publishers (which include a long chain of people, which all process the author’s work) Distributors (who get processed books to readers) Electronic […]
Foursquare is about visiting places; Schemer is about doing things
The peerless Trey Ratcliff was kind enough to offer invites to Schemer, a new Google service, and I was lucky enough to win one. Thanks, +Trey! Jennifer Van Grove emphasized Schemer’s similarities to Foursquare in her VentureBeat article, but I see Schemer as more of a location-sensitive bucket list. Foursquare is about visiting places; Schemer is about doing things. Ignoring the home dashboard, Schemer’s biggest attraction is its “Find […]
If This, Then That
Just found ifttt (If This, Then That), a site which lets you easily build a two-step workflow such as “When a news item is posted on this site, add it to my news reader” or “When I upload a post to Flickr, post it to Picasa too.” A full decade ago, a CEO was telling me that the future was in “programming for the masses,” that certain elements of programming would get easier and easier for normal people […]
The Kindle 4 Is Most Comfortably Held Upside-Down For Men
Edit: In the original version of this post, I called this a Kindle 3. Brain fart. Sorry about that! My parents kindly bought me a Kindle 4 for Christmas. It’s the new, small, light one. No touch, no 3G. Simple. I love it for many reasons, but have struggled to turn pages comfortably. My thumb just wasn’t able to press the side buttons easily. (Ah, First World Problems.) Today, I realized […]
Diaspora Thoughts
I’ve been playing around with Diaspora*, a new social network that apparently is trying to be an “open” social network — anyone can host a Diaspora* server, for example. In practice, Diaspora* looks and operates so much like Google+ that I struggled to find a difference. Even Diaspora*’s aspects, which it describes as “unique,” seem to function exactly like Google+ Circles: named groups of friends. The main difference appears […]
How to Find Channel Comments on the New YouTube Design (December 2011)
Bottom line up-front: Click on the Feed tab, then below the Post a bulletin text box, click the view button and select comments only. Your channel comments now appear. For the record, I like the new design: it’s clean and mostly clear. The information is laid out in a reasonable and logical structure. I like that stats and info are near the top of the page but grayed out. I want that information to be easily available, […]
The Infrastructure is Done
Just finished watching this thought-provoking video by Merlin Mann: His final point bears repeating: on the web, the infrastructure is pretty much done. Want to create a website? You can have a slick site in an afternoon. And that’s not just one page of black text on a white background; that includes SEO and permissions and embedded videos. Nor do you have to be a techie to do this. Google any question. The answers […]
GigaOM
Theree are so many sites and services out there that I feel Ike I’m always late to the party. A perfect example is GigaOm, a tech blog that I’d always ignored under the assumption that it was another Techcrunch–breathless articles about new smart phones or social networks. I then saw GigaOm’s founder on This Week in Tech, and he impressed me with his knowledge and deep thought. So […]
My, How Wired Has Fallen
My impression of the last half-dozen issues of Wired: Messy, cramped layout. Colors that clash and don’t add information. Tons of ads. And I mean multiple consecutive pages of just ads. Very few full pages of content. Many stories have a fearmongering aspect. A good example is the article on Simon Singh, who was sued about his work on pseudoscience. This is portrayed like a Worrying Threat To Science, as though religious nutjobs […]