ctrl.altered.mind

Having switched from a desktop to a notebook as my primary computing device (not considering the PS3), being conscious about the added vulnerability of personal data is now imperative. It would be terrible if the laptop was lost or stolen, of course, but there is now the more probable risk of accidentally damaging the portable machine (not that I am sloppy, but it is reassuring to know that I am protected from hard drive damage due to dropping the laptop, or from accidentally yanking it off the coffee table).

Some habits are really worth adopting in order to minimize the pain of going through data loss and/or recovery - even more so in the case of theft (fact: about 97% of stolen computers are never recovered). There are scores of data recovery services available, but they generally seem to take advantage of the customers’ cornered situations and charge a heavy premium for fetching data from a damaged laptop (often more than the cost of a new computer). Of course, there are some pre-emptive solutions available such as PCPhoneHome or LaptopLocate.net, which can help track down machines by monitoring their location. With the iAlertU freeware application, you can even add “car alarm” or security camera protection for an iSight-equipped Apple notebook.

The first and most vital thing to do for any computer user, is to use a backup storage device. The simplest form of this would be to connect an external hard drive. Hard drives with encryption features allow locking down of personal information as all data stored on the drive is inaccessible without a master password. While it is possible to back up data on optical media like DVDs, this is a cumbersome repetitive chore and requires a lot of sorting and organization for the backed up information to be easily accessible.

External drives can play well with automated backup software, thus making what would otherwise be a daily chore an invisible background task for the computer. My external hard drive is network-attached, which eliminates the need to constantly plug it into a laptop, and additionally allows moving all media files to the external drive so they are accessible from all shared computers on the home network. On the flip side, this does have the disadvantage of not being able to access your media outside the home (unless you open up the drive for internet access).

I often find myself minimizing the kind of personal data that is stored on the notebook’s hard drive. I typically use my Gmail account as a network archive as this makes my files retrievable from any computer with an internet connection (more on how to make this process more convenient in a future tutorial). This benefits both security and accessibility, and prevents losing years of data and pictures along with the laptop. There are new web services cropping up now, that recognize this activity and endeavor to help organize data tucked away in your email attachments. Xoopit is one such service that ties in with a Gmail account.

What is your favorite strategy?

When my wireless router started faltering with alarming regularity in the past month, I realized the little device had probably reached the end of its life cycle. The Netgear router has been pretty much running 24/7 over the past two years, and while routers typically last much longer than that, everyones mileage varies.

Therefore, instead of shopping around for an alternative el-cheapo router that would get the job of letting all of my wireless-capable devices talk over the internet done, I decided to take this opportunity to upgrade all the way up - to an Apple Time Capsule.

If you’re familiar with Apple hardware, you will realize that the Time Capsule breaks no new ground - it is simply an 802.11n Airport Extreme base station with a built-in hard drive, which is also its biggest plus point. Having switched from a desktop to using just a notebook computer, a new Macbook Pro, I quickly found the need to have a wireless network hard drive solution quite imperative. It is tedious having a backup drive that constantly needs to be plugged in, to be of any benefit. The Time Capsule steps in with network-attached storage (with choices of 500GB and 1TB), and also integrates seamlessly with the one-click Time Machine backup feature built into Mac OS X Leopard. Additionally, the Time Capsule can also connect (and extend wireless capabilities) to a USB printer or external hard drive. I picked up a 500GB Time Capsule, because the storage capacity should meet my needs for now. There are also web tutorials that prove it is quite simple to upgrade the internal hard drive yourself.

I was a little concerned about rushing out and buying a Time Capsule, simply because initial reviews of the hardware have not been excellent on the Apple website. People have voiced concerns about Time Machine backups taking exceptionally long durations to complete, impact on wireless browsing performance while backups are running (forcing them to turn this off while actively using their computers), and other issues such as unusually high heat generation and wireless device incompatibilities. Having read through all these reviews, I was prepared to purchase the Time Capsule in test-drive mode, ready to return it within the 14-day period if any such issues would raise their ugly heads. Thankfully, I am extremely happy with my Time Capsule.

I have not run into any speed or wireless bandwidth issues while running Time Machine backups or generally accessing the wireless drive (I did use an ethernet connection to perform the first backup, as most would recommend). The router functions excellently, plays well with all my devices, and efficiently utilizes my high-speed connection. I have not experienced overheating issues either, although a higher heat profile is not very unusual for a NAS/router appliance.

The Time Capsule also interfaces very well with my Playstation 3. This was a very important requirement for me, as the PS3 is used heavily as my media center and not just a gaming console. Speaking of games, the console has not seen any connection issues (that I had started experiencing on my earlier router) while playing online first-person shooter games. Additionally, media streaming from my computer to the TV via the PS3 has been excellent (I use MediaLink ($20/free demo) and Mediatomb (free, open-source) for wireless streaming from Mac OS X to the PS3). One thing to note, is that the PS3 does not recognize a NAS - it only supports the DLNA protocol, and would require a computer that is running a media server application in order to access media files. The Time Capsule does not support direct Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP), so if any of your devices require this protocol the Time Capsule is not an option for you.

The Time Capsule only requires a couple of screens of configuring the first time it is used - this is done via the Mac OS X Airport Utility. Once this is done, the router is ready to serve Mac, Linux and Windows machines. The Time Capsule hard drive is also directly accessible by Windows machines, which see it appear as an encrypted, password-protected drive on the network. There is an Airport Admin Utility available for Windows that should allow configuring the Time Capsule using a Windows machine, although I have not attempted this (yet).

As it supports the 802.11n standard, the Time Capsule also allows me to fully utilize the wireless-N capabilities of my notebook. While this does not mean much for casual browsing, it does allow better local networking and is future-proof as far as wireless standards are concerned (at least for a good while).

Picking up on my last post about the slothfulness of Windows Vista on a reasonably equipped PC, here is the ultimate anecdote. PC World magazine tested many notebooks throughout the year, and concluded that the fastest machine to run Vista, is a Mac. Specifically, the strongly geared Macbook Pro trumps offerings by leading PC manufacturers that offer only Windows-based systems (except perhaps, for Dell, who recently started experimenting with Linux distributions).

From the PC World article:

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

A comparison of the twelve models featured in the review reveals the fact that the Macbook Pro is actually quite competitively priced - laying to rest the long standing tradition of Macintoshes being outrageously expensive. It is much cheaper than five of the featured notebooks, save for the fact that you have to purchase a copy of Windows separately in order to run it on the Mac.

Is there something such as perfection in user interface design? I believe one that can be used functionally by a one-year old, comes pretty darn close.

Thanks to a wonderful deal on RAM on Newegg, I’ve been able to perform the final RAM upgrade on my li’l Mac Mini, bumping the machine up to its limit of 2GB. A couple of gigabytes of memory on the Mac mean much more than the equivalent in the Windows world, where a lot of juice is required in powering the operating system itself. This final upgrade would actually imply memory only, for I’m still considering a larger hard drive - although on second thought, external storage would be a much more cost-effective option.

In contrast to the first time that I hesitatingly pried open the Mac Mini shell to switch the first DIMM of memory about a year ago, the endeavor this time was much smoother and faster, taking me only about five minutes between power cycles. If you don’t already know, the Mac Mini sports a very compact and streamlined design with no external screws. The casing is held in place by internal plastic tabs, which need to be bent inward carefully along three edges with a thin tool (a putty knife is ideal), in order to be removed. If you’re looking for a more detailed tutorial for doing this yourself, check this out.

While a gigabyte of memory has been sufficient for running applications, the extra memory should come in very handy while running Windows on the Mac in BootCamp, or via virtualization in VmWare Fusion (which by the way, I recommended over Parallels).

Each time a Mac versus Windows article hits the Web, a maelstrom of comments from each camp is whipped up on forums and discussion boards. It would be an interesting socio-psychological experiment to dissect the average fanboy mind, to understand how some people can, time after time, argue to virtually no limit about the virtues of the operating system of their choice - and enhance the pitfalls of the other in the same breath. Pick any Digg article on Mac OS X that also includes a comparison with Windows (or not!), like this one for example.

While I’m all for healthy debate, one observation cannot be discredited - significantly many (if not most) Apple OS X users are former and/or current Windows users, while very few people fighting the battle on Microsoft’s side have even used OS X for more than a few minutes. I’d guess that they are basing their beliefs about the adversary on hearsay. That said, here’s a picture that I stumbled upon, which sums up my argument on the topic as far as design philosophy for the two companies is concerned.

Dashalytics is a free Dashboard widget for the Mac that offers quick access to your Google Analytics account statistics. With their revamped interface, Google Analytics is probably the best free solution available today to monitor your website visitor statistics. While my site isn’t exactly one to attract high traffic, it does add a sense of responsibility when you get quantified results - this Dashboard widget just makes keeping a tab on things a bit easier, if you’re using a Mac. For Yahoo! Widgets users on Windows, there’s Vivalytics.

As you probably already know from my previous post, I’ve been on a mission for the past couple of days to try and recover as much disk space as I possibly can, so I do not have an strong excuse to immediately run out and buy a higher capacity Seagate Freeagent Pro drive (although that is going to happen sooner or later, right?).

I’ve been using the Disk Inventory X utility to get a better ahem, picture of the stuff stored on my drives. In doing so, I discovered that Apple actually maintains a copy of deleted data in not-so-plain sight on every HFS+ volume on the computer - this means every Apple partition and external drive connected to the system. While this might be a good feature to have for most people, I am usually sure of the stuff that I want deleted - especially from my backup drive volumes. You can recover a lot of drive space by cleaning out these hidden folders, depending of course, on what kind of files have been stored in them in the first place.

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Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X (10.3 and later). I stumbled upon this application while looking for something to profile the directory structure on my external drive (which is currently running ridiculously low on space). Disk Inventory X has a universal binary beta version, and is absolutely free (released under the GPL). Advanced Windows users might find this application quite similar to WinDirStat, and naturally so because this program was inspired by it.

This utility shows the sizes of files and folders as a ‘treemap‘.

Of all the pretty apps that come bundled with Mac OS X, Automator is probably one of the most underrated. The application does a marvellous job of setting up a drag-and-drop front-end to let users create as simple or complex a workflow as desired.

The more you play around with Automator, the more you will see the potential of the application, and the amazing set of scripts that comes with it - scores of workflow elements tied to applications and file types.

The first practical workflow that I created, is one that picks up a bunch of pdf files and merges them into one file. Automator also lets you save your workflow as either a script or an application. Mike pointed me to Mac applications like PDFPen and PDFLab (free) that let you do much more with your bunch of PDF files, but for my simple application I guess I’ll stick with Automator for now
Download my custom PDF Combinator app for Mac OS X