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I was flipping through some news the other day and read a story about how a BestBuy employee was expecting to be fired after releasing a video which in didn't mention BestBuy, didn't he was an employee of BestBuy, and didn't even mention his name.  For this, I figured I should at least watch the video since he gave up his job for it.

This classic tale tells the story of an typical Apple customer asking for an iPhone and can't tell you why or listen to any evidence that the iPhone isn't the greatest thing ever.  Well worth the three minutes to watch it.

On a related note, if you don't watch Futurama, you should.  The last episode, "Attack of the Killer App" was awesome.  They really got the essence of the nonsensical hype that is apple.

This isn't the best part, but I love the observations that since it is Twitter and not Tweeter, a message isn't a tweet, it is a twit, right?

Futurama	Thursdays 10pm / 9c
The Twit Worm
www.comedycentral.com
Futurama New Episodes Futurama New Episodes It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

In case you got home with your new iPad and then realized that you can't really do much with it, there is some hope.  Although Apple doesn't think you need to be able to print anything anymore (they are very forward thinking remember), HP has created a new all in one printer/scanner/copier that is compatible with the iPad.  While not officially supported by Apple, it is your best option for printing from your iPad.


Enjoy your iPad!!!

The iPad has now been released now and as "neat" as it is, I'm not sure why people are putting down $500 to $1000 for a new device that doesn't replace anything and just sets you up to spend more in the future.  Lee Brimelow, a Platform Evangelist at Adobe put together a great graphic demonstrating the "entire" web that Apple delivers.  One point that he hit in his rant against Apple is this, "APPLE DOES NOT WANT THE FLASH PLAYER TO PERFORM WELL. They don’t want you to go to Hulu or play Flash games because they worry that you won’t buy their apps."

I'm really not sure why people think Apple is so great, they are all about restricting choice, limiting functionality, and above all crushing their competition by any means possible (except of course by letting consumers decide).

For those of you who are planning on buying a new iPad, here is what you have to look forward to...



If you have a few minutes, I recommend reading Lee's article.

Last fall I purchased a network storage device (NAS) to store all of my music and pictures in my house.  This allows for Jenny and I not to duplicate what we have on our computers and instead share everything.  This is also a great place to run our backups to.  The NAS is running RAID 1 so my data will be safe even if one of the drives fails.  Hard drives will fail so you need to plan accordingly.  Anyone who writes their data to only a single drive (especially an external drive that they move around) is just asking for trouble.

Once I got this online and moved my data and my backups to the new NAS, I felt much better knowing my data was secure.  However, I realized that a fire or flood would destroy both drives as well as my computers so I still wasn't really safe.  One feature that I'm glad I had on my NAS was a built in FTP server.  Actually, me having it is nice, but my brother's NAS having FTP is what is really great.  With a built in FTP server, I'm able to FTP my really important files to his NAS in California and he is able to do the same to D.C.  It is really pretty cool that we are able to do this without any real cost.  Now even if one of us has a fire and we lose everything, we will still have some important files (like insurance documents or scans of important paperwork).  Now except for Clan Warfare, I'm pretty ok.

One really important component of my remote backup plan is the use of Cobian Backup.  I first found out about Cobian while at school at Carnegie Mellon.  I figure if it is used there, it must be decent.  It is a great freeware backup program (no longer open source, but Cobian seem to be well supported none-the-less).  In Cobian, I setup a job to backup everything on my computer to the NAS each night as an incremental backup with a full backup once a week (and since I have the space, I keep a few full backups).  I then setup another job to do a full backup once a week with differential updates each night that is zipped up, encrypted, and FTPed to my brother's NAS.  It seems to work pretty well and it was surprisingly easy to setup.  So easy in fact, my brother and I are setting up our parents' and grandparents' computers to do that backups as well.

Now if you don't have someone you can trust with your backups, you can always use a service like Mozy or Carbonite that allow you to backup to the cloud.  This seems like a good option as well, but at around $60 a year, it is cheaper to just backup to back up to a friend's NAS that is already paid for.  If I had a lot to backup, the unlimted space that is offered by these companies does seem to be reasonable priced.

Another alternative that a friend of mine mentioned was using a GMail Virtual Drive to backup to.  If you created a new GMail account just for your backups, this would give you 8GB of free storage.  The down side to this is that this may not be compliant to the terms of service of GMail, but since they haven't stopped this ustility from working in the past five years, you should be ok.  If they do turn it off, you should still have access to the files, you just wouldn't be able to write any new backups to GMail.

To the point, spend the $0 and get Cobian (or something like it), and do a remote backup somewhere either to Google or to a friend NAS that isn't in your house.  If you run a business, this is even more important.

A couple of months ago I downloaded the public beta of Office 2010.  Overall it seemed fine although it was difficult to see what was really changed.  Most of the apps looked essentially the same as in Office 2007 except I did notice that Groove was renamed to SharePoint Workspace.  It seems to work the same (with some small enhancements) but overall, it looks the same to me. 

The one exception to this was Outlook 2010.  It didn't sync correctly with my BlackBerry so I couldn't use it for long and had to revert to Outlook 2007, but the one feature I really liked was the Social Network integration.  This is similar to how smart phones sync with Facebook (and how Linked In should) so the profile picture and phone numbers stay in sync with what your contact has listed on the site.  This is a great feature to help ensure you don't have stale email address or phone numbers which both seem to change a little too often now a days.  In Outlook 2010, Microsoft allows 3rd party developers to create connections between Outlook and what ever internet service they want to help sync the information. 

This integration is made most obvious through the "Person Pane" (see to the right) in an Outlook mail message although you will see it when you open a contact directly as well.  This single feature would have pushed me to upgrade to 2010, but Microsoft did something unexpected that will make me rethink that...

They released this feature as a free add-on to older versions of Outlook.  You can download the beta version of Outlook Social Connector which works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 (and of course this is built into Outlook 2010).  Once you have the Social Connector installed, you can get the connector for LinkedIn from their site for free as well.  You can expect that a connector for Facebook will be forthcoming after the release of Office 2010 (or perhaps even earlier), but for now, I'm happy with LinkedIn since those are the contacts I'm not concerned with anyway.

If you have traveled through any airports lately you may have noticed that several airports have free WiFi (through January 15th) thanks to Google (via what appears to be a partnership with Boingo).  It is interesting to me that included on the list of airports Google is providing WiFi for is San Diego and Pittsburgh both of which already had free WiFi.  I've only traveled through a few of the airports on the list where I've tried to use the internet, and although I know Dulles (Washington, D.C.) and Austin do not normally have free WiFi, my sampling shows 50% of the airports already had free WiFi.  It is also interesting that while Google is getting a lot of press for this "benevolent" action, there are others (like E-Bay) that are sponsoring free internet in other places but not getting much press.

A few weeks ago, I was traveling through Austin and when I connected to Google's sponsored connection and got a clue as to why they are really doing this.  Here is a screen shot of what I saw:

While at first this looks like a normal Terms of Service agreement that you have to click on to get onto a public network, it really is a way to grab some more market share for Chrome.  While people are just trying to get on-line in a hurry, they are going to download Chrome because they think they need it to continue onto the internet.  I almost clicked on it and I'm a pretty technical person, I would love to see how many people Google tricked into downloading Chrome and having it automatically become the default browser.

If GMail didn't make Google Evil, Chrome certainly did.

On a side note, while trying to find the list of airports that Google is providing the WiFi for, I searched for "google free internet" and came across Google's free at home internet, TiSP.  If you search either Google or Bing you'll see this comes up first.  So while Google is Evil, at least they have a sense of humor.

A couple of months ago I bought an Iomega ix2 Network Attached Storage device.  While Iomega's name isn't what it was back in the day of the zip drive, since they are now owned by EMC, I figured the quality must be ok.  Overall, I think I got what I paid for, but the drives are a little slow when serving pictures and music.  It works fine for my back ups, but I think I'll buy something a little faster next time to at as a home media server.

The major thing I wanted to accomplish with my new shared storage was to get all the pictures and MP3s that I had on my laptop, desktop, a my wife's desktop into a central location that was backed up and accessible to all the systems.  The Iomega NAS worked great but once I got everything in one location, I realized that I had a lot of duplicate pictures between the three systems I merged together.  I started looking into writing an application to help de-duplicate the files but before I got too far, I took a look at what freeware was out there. 

I tried a few of the applications out there, but quickly settled on Duplicate Cleaner.  It is a nice little app that quickly searches your directories for duplicates based on different (and configurable) criteria.  While there were some other apps the specialized in images and others in music, this handles music, pictures, videos, and documents.

The guys at DigitalVolcano really saved me some time compared to writing something and I appreciate they didn't try to charge me $50 for something I only need to use every once in a while.  Some of their other apps on the site seem a little odd, but what ever floats their boat.  This one is a nice light weight app.