aaron c beals

photo management
i’m always looking for good photo management software and methodologies. Picasa is close to what i’m looking for, but has a few key features i’d like to add/change, especially around tagging. also tied into this is how to import, store, and back up photos. a lot of programs do all three (Picasa, for example), but so far, i’ve been doing all 3 manually and just having Picasa watch the directory. am just i being a stubborn DIYer (same reason i drive a stick shift) or is it that the current offerings don’t quite give me what i want (same reason i brew my own beer)?

off-site data backup
for a serious computer nerd, i’m unbelievably bad at backing up my data. i help Laura manage the digital photos for her business, and we have a killer backup strategy there, but i can’t seem to apply that same level of rigor in backing up my own files. i’ve toyed with the idea of using a service like Mozy or Carbonite, which are reasonably priced (~$5/month for unlimited storage), but they don’t allow you to back up network drives, so they’re not really an option. there are other programs (like Jungle Disk) based on Amazon’s S3, but Amazon charges you $0.15/GB/month for storage. if you’re storing more than 35GB of data, S3 loses out to Mozy/Carbonite.

as an alternative form of off-site storage, i could also burn DVD’s (annoying, manual) or set up mirrored hard drives (coming way down in price) and ship them off to a friend or family member’s house. i’m seriously considering this path, though it’s still manual, and doesn’t really work well with incremental backups.

so what do i have to back up, anyhow? there are four main types of information:

1. documents — few GB (if that), high value (cannot replace), steady additions
2. music — many GB, low value (can replace, as I have the original CD’s. if those are destroyed, i can always re-purchase.), batch additions
3. digital photos — many GB, extremely high value (cannot replace), batch additions
4. emails — several GB, high value (cannot replace), steady additions

as you can see, there’s a struggle of requirements — storage size, value of data, and incremental additions differ from information type to information type. generally speaking, i care most about documents and photos; the emails would be nice, but most of my email is in GMail and i use my local disk only as a backup (just POP the mail off).

so in light of the different requirements, perhaps the best strategy is a mixed-mode off-site backup: Mozy Free (2GB free) or JungleDisk for documents and emails (since they’re continually added), do a hard drive swap for music (mainly for convenience since the CDs are a physical backup and can be replaced with insurance money), and use Smugmug for photo storage.

Firefox has plenty of extensions, but it’s not clear how to get them working on Firefox’s stripped-down, ultra-cool friend: Prism. to the rescue, there’s a great writeup over at the Lucky Disasters blog:
http://www.luckydisasters.com/2008/06/10/heres-how-to-make-an-extension-compatible-with-prism-two-ish/

i’ve been using Gmail for a while, and have bought completely into their UI (tagging, conversations, search etc). as i mentioned in an earlier post, i even installed Mozilla’s Prism so i could use Gmail as more of a stand-alone app. however, one feature i’ve really missed is the ability to display all non-HTML emails as monospaced (fixed-width font). other mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird) have this capability, and Gmail even lets you compose emails in a fixed-width font, but doesn’t display them that way as you’re reading them.

why fixed-width fonts? well, for hackers like me, code and “ascii art” display properly in a fixed-width font. fonts like Arial and even Times use different widths for different charaacters, screwing up the original formatting of certain emails. for instance, this:


+ Col1 + Col2 +
---------------
| data | data |
| mmmm | mmmm |
| wwww | wwww |
| oooo | oooo |


ends up rendered like this:

+ Col1 + Col2 +
—————
| data | data |
| mmmm | mmmm |
| wwww | wwww |
| oooo | oooo |

recently, they added a feature through “Gmail Labs” that toggles monospace, but it has to be turned for each and every time you read an email. a global setting would have been much nicer.

so i went searching, and this is what i found:

1) if you use Firefox, just install the “Stylish” extension and add a style for it.
2) if you use Prism, go to the unpacked bundle of the gmail webapp (the one on the Prism site unpacks to a directory called “google.mail@developer.mozilla.org”). in there, create a file called webapp.css (you should see webapp.ini and webapp.js already). add the following to that file:

.geTjV, .ArwC7c, .iE5Yyc, .uQLZXb > textarea {
font-family: courier !important;
font-size: 10pt !important;
}


enjoy.

starting off, as so many web 2.0 addicts do, with Gmail, i slowly started to gather more and more web-based-applications, and now i have a core group that i use regularly:

1. Gmail (personal)
2. Gmail (work)
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Docs
5. Google Groups
6. Facebook
7. LinkedIn
8. Google Reader
9. Remember The Milk
10. Joes Goals

for a long time, i used Firefox’s tabbed interface to manage multiple applications at once. on the plus side, all of my webapps were in one convenient location. unfortunately, this also meant that one application could dominate/crash the browser (i’m looking at you, google docs). i also like to alt-tab through my list of applications. the one flaw that really sent me searching for a solution was how difficult it was to log into two Gmail accounts at one time. the ietab plugin worked well while i was in Windows (ietab uses a separate set of cookies), but i’m running Kubuntu full-time at work, so that option became less practical.

eventually, i found an under-hyped offering by Mozilla Labs: Prism. web 2.0 applications have removed the need for many of the typical “web” features — link bars, navigation buttons, etc — and have started to look more and more like desktop applications. the goal of Prism is to start bridging that gap, and to achieve that goal they have provided a “browserless” browser interface in which you can run your webapps. it’s ultra-fast, clean, and each Prism instance provides its own cookies/cache/etc. the only vestige of a web browser that remains is the status bar at the bottom, but that’s just a good idea, as you’d like to see where you’re heading when you click on that link.

pretty much everything you need to know to get going with Prism is in their wiki (and there’s not much to know). give it a try and let me know what you think.

in the same vein as LEGO Mindstorms and the Robolab intiative, a New York-based company called Bug Labs has built a modular system for constructing and programming your own gadgets. the programming IDE looks pretty slick and there are a couple of excellent modules so far (GPS, LCD screen, camera, motion sensor) but the real power is in the ability to create your own hardware modules. that’s right: they’ve opened up the schematics for their hardware.

i first read about these guys in the Tech Review, but have since seen product buzz on sites like Gizmodo. check out the video on the Gizmodo link — seeing this thing in action is the best way to understand how fantastic this little device is.

finally, if you’re as psyched about this thing as i am and can’t wait to get more information, check out the Bug Blogger.

so the other day i mentioned that i was working on fixing the fan noise in my Thinkpad laptop. originally, i investigated some stand-alone software (tpfancontrol) for fan control, but i was really looking for something to hook into Notebook Hardware Control (NHC), so i could manage all operational aspects of my laptop from one console. in fact, NHC claimed to cover fan control (or at least monitoring), but I couldn’t find that information anywhere in the NHC interface. turns out that i just needed to go to the “Settings” tab and click “Show all NHC options and settings”… voila! tabs galore, including the “ACPI” tab i needed for fan monitoring and control.

the next step was to find the ACPI control scripts for my T42 Thinkpad — or else write my own from scratch. luckily, i found the scripts required thanks to Aaron Tiensivu’s blog. just download this zip and follow the instructions in the readme file.

the default mode for the script is to turn on ACPI control through NHC, so that the fan is tied to the CPU and HDD temperatures (which makes sense, right?) — and the default temperature settings seem conservative. i have been monitoring the CPU temp closely to make sure everything is working as promised, and so far i haven’t been frying eggs on the keyboard.

the only odd thing is that NHC cycles through the fan speeds on startup and when you come back from sleep mode, so if you’re not prepared for that, it’s a little strange. the fan will rev up to top speed and then drop back to zero, which as far as i can tell is used to check that all the speed levels are valid.

in the end, the whole ACPI-script process took me about 3 minutes, and now my laptop’s fan is working normally and sanely.

for a while now, my t42 thinkpad has had issues with the chassis fan — it turns on at the slightest hint of continuous CPU utilization, eventually kicking into a “high gear” mode that involves mind-numbing whirring with an occasional pulse. i’m still working on manual control of the fan, which is normally handled by the BIOS, via an open-source fan control utility. in the short-term, what i needed to do was to hunt down the source of the CPU utilization.

first stop: process explorer, available from SysInternals. from this tool, i was able to determine that the at-fault svchost.exe was tied to the “HP Network Devices Support” service. the service apparently has a bug that HP hasn’t yet fixed. the service doesn’t do much other than locate your networked printer on a DHCP network. ideally, i’d be able to lock the IP address of the printer, but my newer router doesn’t let me do that the way my old Netgear did. so for now, i’ve made the service “Manual” and will turn it on only as needed. result:CPU utilization returned to normal and the fan died down.

next: better management of power and clock settings. in my search for a fan-control utility, i stumbled upon this gem: Notebook Hardware Control. i know that the domain name seems a tad sketchy, but the software does everything promised, with minimal overhead. NHC allows you to track and set clock speeds, power saving modes, and internal temperatures. if you have a laptop, i highly recommend installing NHC and giving it a try.

just in this morning: Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at a $31/share price premium over last night’s market price. apparently talks of this nature have been going on for a while, but to see something like this go down (and not have Yahoo! immediately throw it back in the face of M$) is astounding.

so let’s say that it does happen. there are so many questions. what will Google’s response be? will they finally purchase a big enterprise shop (my buddy Rob pointed me to this list, which is conspicuously missing enterprise companies/products)? will M$ keep both the hotmail and Yahoo! mail interfaces as separate entities, or merge them while keeping people’s addy’s the same? whose search will win? will Yahoo!’s impressive fantasy sports leagues die a miserable death in the no-fun offices of Redmond?

during the course of my recent investigation into the local startup scene, i came across FlyLite, a non-traditional software(ish) startup. their value prop is simple: flying with luggage is a pain in the neck, so eliminate the luggage and have what you need waiting for you.

to start, you send them a suitcase full of all the things (clothes, toiletries, etc) that you might need on a business trip. they inventory your things and make the list accessible via a web interface. before a trip, you select all the items you plan to use, and they pack up the suitcase and have it waiting in your hotel room. when you’re done, pack it back up and send it off again (they pick it up). as far as i can tell, they even launder your clothes.

i think it would take a rather heavy frequent flier lifestyle to justify this sort of service, but it certainly promises to make your life easier. though i guess your clients may wonder why you dress the same way every time you visit…