SuperGeekery

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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Filtered by Category: How To

Another Leopard “toy” to check out: Mosaic Photo Screen Saver

As a follow up to yesterday’s iChat tabs post, if you’re new to Leopard, you’ve got a really cool new screen saver. Open your System Preferences, select Desktop & Screen Saver. Be sure you’re in the Screen Saver tab and scroll down the list of available screen savers until you start seeing your iPhoto albums. Choose any of those. Next look for the small selector labeled Display Style under the left corner of the images of the preview box. There are 3 choices there and you should select the last of them.

What you’ll see basically a slide show of your photos, but as they zoom out into infinity, you’ll see that each photo is just one pixel in another of your photos, forever and ever. Trippy, right? Check out the video below of some of mine.

Did you upgrade to Leopard? Don’t miss tabs in iChat.

I’ve talked to a few people who’ve updated their Mac to Leopard who’ve not really seen much “new” to appreciate in Leopard. This won’t change your world, but here’s one. If you’ve used Chax, a third-party upgrade to iChat for older versions of OS X, you’ve already had tabbed chats, but now Leopard users get them built into the system. You can see an example above of what they look like.

Since they are off by default, you’ll need to dig into your preferences to activate them.

When you have iChat on, open your Preferences panel and click the Messages tab. (Click the image to the left to see a full size image of what to click.) At the bottom of that panel, there is an option that you need to check called “Collect chats into a single window” and you’re set. The next time you’re chatting to multiple people, the windows will be tabbed like you see them above. Handy.

Backing Up Is Hard To Do? Not Any More.

There’s a common sentiment among geeks about hard drives. It’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, but when it will fail. That hard drive in your computer has lots of moving parts: at least one spinning platter made of metal or glass and at least one read/write head moving constantly to find the data your computer needs to function. That wear and tear will cause your drive to break. That is, if it doesn’t get stolen first.

Whatever happens, it will certainly happen at the most inopportune moment as well.

Now are you fearful of losing your treasure of family photos, financial information, job resume and, God forbid, even your MP3 collection? I won’t question your priorities but I’ll try to help you get a good routine going of making backups of your stuff. It might sound like a bit of a pain to deal with but you will thank me when it comes time to recover your stuff. Let’s get going.

Do you have a MAC?

This is going to be pretty easy.

First, find out how large the hard drive in your computer is. On your desktop, highlight the icon of the drive, probably called Macintosh HD, and then hit command-I. You can also find this command, Get Info, under the File drop down menu on the upper left corner of your screen. You’ll see a window come up with a bunch of information. Under the section labeled “General” you will see your drive’s capacity. You will need to buy an external hard drive larger than your hard drive you are backing up. If you buy a drive that has both Firewire and USB 2.0 connections on it, you will be golden. If you’ve got an Intel Mac, you’ll be find with just a USB 2.0 connection on your external hard drive. I’m using a Western Digital External Drive like you see in the Amazon ad to the right.

Second, now that you’ve got your external hard drive, let’s get you set up with SuperDuper, the software I use to make my own back ups. Visit their site to download a copy. The free version will make a full back up of your data onto your new drive. It will work forever this way for free, but I would suggest spending the $27.95 for the full version. The full version of the software includes very easy scheduled back ups so you will not need to work about manually doing this in the future.

Another feature I appreciate is that it’s got incredibly verbose descriptions of what you’re about to do when you use the software, helpfully labeled “What’s going to happen?”. You will see in the image below what “Smart Update”, an incremental back up feature of the full version of the software, will do. Nice.

What if you have a PC?

I don’t have hands-on experience backing up a PC. I run Windows XP and Vista, but only through my Mac with Parallels, so backing up my Mac in essence backs up my PC too. If you’re a PC user though, there are solutions out there for you too. For XP, Microsoft has included some backup software for you. Since I don’t use it though, I will simply point you to the page on Microsoft’s site called Windows XP Backup Made Easy. Another page on Microsoft’s site tells you how to install it from your installation disks.

If you run Vista, you’ll want to check out a different page on the Microsoft site: Windows Vista - Windows Backup and Restore Center. Unfortunately, one of my big gripes about the multiple versions Vista is sold under comes into play here.

Automatic File Backup helps to keep your files safe and is available in almost all editions of Windows Vista (it is not included in Starter and has only basic functionality in Home Basic edition).

That’s confusing, Microsoft! If you’ve got either Starter or Home Basic version of Vista, you will need to get some additional software to do your back up. Wired recommends SyncBack Free I would recommend checking out Wired’s complete PC back up article.

Offsite backups

Now that you can wipe the sweat off your brow knowing that you’ve got a back up of all your data I will tell you about another really cool service I use for off-site back up called Mozy.

Why would you want yet another backup now that you’ve got an external duplicate of your data? If someone breaks into your home and takes your laptop, do you think they’ll leave that tasty little external drive sitting next to it? It’s truly frightening to think about but, what about a fire in your home? I’m sorry to say that if you lose your computer in that situation, you’ll probably lose your back up drive as well.

Mozy will back up and encrypt your data externally so that you will be able to retrieve the files you simply can’t live without. A small program runs in the background and automatically monitors your hard drive as files change and sends only the files that have changed to be backed up over your internet connection.

You can sign up for a free Mozy account and back up 2 gigabytes of data to their servers. I pay for an unlimited home account which lets me back up any amount of data on a single computer for $4.95 per month.

Do you need both onsite and offsite backups?

Nothing is perfect. Mozy does have a downside. Since data is backed up over your internet connection, only about 9 gigabytes of data can be backed up per day. If your computer has 200 GB to back up, you’re going to need to have it running 24 hours a day for about 23 days to complete your initial back up. And, I should note, I find that very optimistic.

A external hard drive also allows you the luxury of having a bootable hard drive ready for you to get back to work in just minutes when a hard drive failure happens. A remote backup solution does not offer that. That’s why I recommend both approaches to backing up your data.

In a future entry, I will go over some hard drive maintenance and recovery software that I’ve used that will help round out your whole toolkit to keep your data yours.

Got a question about your back up? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.

This Is Your iPod Talking

I love music. You’d have a really hard time finding me with my iPod close at hand but you won’t hear much music coming from my iPod. I listen to spoken content almost exclusively. Because I’m a bit of an information junkie, I was really taken with the invention of podcasts. podcasting is simply embedding a file, usually a piece of audio content, into an RSS feed. (What’s an RSS feed? Basically a special kind of link that’s always up to date. Want to know more about RSS? Check out the article at Wikipedia.)

The variety of podcasts being produced is incredible. There are a lot of tech podcasts, probably because that’s the world podcasting started in, but you can find something for nearly ever topic. (Yes, even that thing you’re thinking of right now.) If you’ve never added a podcast feed to your iPod, I encourage you to give it a try. The easiest way to get started listening to podcasts is iTunes. The podcast directory is in the iTunes Store, but don’t worry, you’re not actually buying anything when you subscribe to a podcast. Every podcast there is free. Just enter a search in the upper right hand corner and see what you find.

I’ve got nearly a thousand individual episodes of podcasts on my iPod, so I’m won’t post an exhaustive list of what I listen to, but I’ll give you a few that I like to get you started. My favorite podcasts tend to have a Mac focus, so if you’re a PC fan, you might want to steer away from some of them. (Or you could just get it over with an buy your Mac.)

Never miss an episode:

• Mac OS Ken
• Security Now
• Mac Geek Gab
• This Week in Tech
• MacBreak Weekly

Regular listens:

• The New York Times Audio Digest (This is the only paid podcast I listen to.  It’s included with Audible Gold subscription)
• The New York Times Tech Talk
• BBC Documentary Archive

Occasional Listens:

• Ken Radio
• Please Explain
• Ask Leo!

From an advertising perspective, I think they are an incredible way of reaching a dedicated audience with a very targeted message, whether it’s a tech enthusiast or a knitting enthusiast. The problem has been that there haven’t been great tools to measure the audience for an advertiser, which makes it a difficult investment for the people who have to account for their media spending. There finally a little hope on the horizon for the creators of podcasts with the founding of the Association for Downloadable Media. (Read about it in this article from the New York Times.) This means that the variety of podcasts produced will only increase. That’s good news for everyone. 

The SuperGeekery Homepage Smackdown

What’s your homepage? Nearly every site on the internet would love for your entry onto the internet to be their site, but since there are so many decent choices, being simply decent isn’t good enough. It’s time for a home page smackdown.

Based on my experience, there are 3 contenders that stand above the others and deserve consideration: Netvibes, PageFlakes, and iGoogle. I’ve got accounts on all three, but one has become my default. Before I tell you want I use, let me tell you why first.

The primary thing I want out of a homepage is relevant information. The only way I can get the content that is relevant to the unique person I am (no, jokes there please!) is to have a page that is customizable. In modern web-speak, that means my ideal homepage needs to be able to display a variety of RSS feeds, a content aggregator. Netvibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle all do this well. Most sites offer an RSS feed, often represented by an orange icon seen in this paragraph. Depending on how your browser is set up, you can then add that page’s content to your own site.

But I also like content that isn’t necessarily available through an RSS feed. For example, I use Google Maps a lot and I’d like to have service easily accessible where I start my internet journey. Perhaps you’d like a game embedded in your homepage. That should be possible too, right? Luckily the 3 homepages I’ve chosen all offer the ability to embed widgets, basically small Web 2.0 applications, anywhere I want on their pages. Netvibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle are going strong still.

I also happen to be interested in lots of things, so efficient use of the space on my page is important. Looking at the three pages, Netvibes and Pageflakes start to take the lead. iGoogle is just not being as efficient in their design as these smaller upstarts. (Efficient use of the page is where many other homepages failed so miserably that they didn’t make it to the smack down. If you use your internet service provider’s homepage as your personal start page, I bet it’s got a big chunk of the space taken up by unnecessary junk.)

Since I’m going to be looking at my homepage quite a lot, I want to be able to customize it to suit my design sensibility. iGoogle has several nice, but limited, options. iGoogle’s options have a cool feature in that the graphics change over the course of the day to reflect the time you’ve set in your time zone. That’s nice, but their choices need to offer more freedom. PageFlakes, while a very nice looking page, has limited design customization. It just doesn’t have design customization that Netvibes has. Here Netvibes wins my vote. It’s got lots of predesigned themes and allows you to tweak each of them. You can also design them from scratch if you really want. Netvibes wins this part hands down.

One thing I love about both Netvibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle are the tabs you can add to them. I’ve got a “General” tab for my general purpose stuff--email, maps, news headlines-- and tabs that relate to special topics, like Coding, and Flash. Tabs on a homepage are nothing new, even the granddaddy of customizable homepages, My Yahoo, sadly showing it’s age now, had tabs years ago. What sets these Netvibes and Pageflakes sites apart though is the easy ability to share your customized tabs with others.

It’s probably no secret if you’ve gotten this far to know that Netvibes is my winner. I won’t scoff at your choice of PageFlakes or iGoogle though. They’re no slouches. Netvibes is just a really sweet site.

Why not check it out? To get you started down the Netvibes road with a fully geeked out tab, click here to check out my Geekery tab. (That’s right. You can even share your tabs with friends when you get them just right.) If you like it, you can keep my “Geekery” tab as part of your own Netvibes page. Pretty cool, right?