DesignAday

Five monitors. Three, sir!

You can never have too much screen real estate. While I was a graduate student, back in 1997, I ordered a second video card for my PowerMac 9600. At the time, it was an expensive investment for me, but it allowed me to plug in both my 16” Sony Trinitron display, and the old 12” Apple display that I had left over from the LCII I had as a college freshman. It sounds like an insignificant thing now, but let me tell you, when working in Macromedia Director, the ability to put the score on the 16” and have the stage on the 12” was a big deal! Windows wasn’t even capable of extending its desktop to multiple monitors. From that point, there was no turning back. I eventually got a 17” Apple Studio Display and then a second. I used those two matching CRTs for years. Eventually, they wore out, and I replaced them with Apple’s 20” LCD Cinema Displays. I’ve been using them for many years now.

I got myself a 27” iMac for Christmas. It’s a beautiful thing. The display is absolutely gorgeous, and it’s enormous. And it just happens to have two Thunderbolt ports on the back. You might guess where this is going. I purchased two adapters, and I now have the two 20-inchers straddling the iMac. Perhaps it is a bit decadent, but I’m loving it. You can never have too much screen real estate.

It is Time

My Verizon Triple Play 2-year contract has expired, and I’m cutting the cord. My plan is to retain a subscription to their Fios internet service with as high a bit rate as I’m willing to pay for while dropping the television and landline phone services. Instead, I’ll be hooking up antennas to pick up local HD channels and subscribing to Netflix, which I’ll play through my Apple TV. I’ll also consider Hulu Plus, but that won’t likely be necessary. Between Netflix and iTunes, I expect to have everything covered.

As part of this move, I’ll be replacing the old CRT in my bedroom with an HD LCD that I’ll get a good deal on this Friday. I’ll likely also purchase a second AppleTV to attach to it.

The biggest question is what hoops Verizon will make me jump through. I know they’ll charge more for the internet service without it being bundled, but it surely can’t be an outrageous increase. Of course, while their website provides many ways to renew or upgrade my service, it doesn’t provide any information on downgrading. And since I already have service, I can’t get pricing on internet service alone.

We’ve already explained what we’re planning to the girls, and they seem to be on board. As soon as we’re back from our holiday visits, we’re diving in.

EASy come, EASy go

Dave Malouf made a perspicacious observation in his recent blog post about the Emergency Announcement System (EAS) and its first national test.

EAS has a huge flaw. It requires being attached to a radio or TV. However, a growing critical mass of people are never on a major broadcast system and thus EAS will never get its very important message to a core unit of the population.

He’s right. Case in point, I had no knowledge of said test until I read Dave’s post, nearly two weeks after the test had been conducted. I never watch live TV. The few shows that I do watch, I record on my DVR and view when I have the time, often weeks later. Nor do I listen to the radio on a regular basis. When I’m at home, I play music from my iTunes library. When I’m in the car, or doing chores, I listen to podcasts, audio books, or music on my iPhone. I occasionally have the radio on in the car when I’m chauffeuring my kids around town. I get my news from RSS feeds, podcasts, and Twitter.

I think Dave’s suggestion for expanding the EAS to contemporary, digital media channels, such as SMS, is important. And while his suggestions for pushing messages to platforms like set top boxes and gaming consoles isn’t a bad idea, an easier first step would be to harness social media, getting the word out on Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. As is typical, the government is lagging behind the technology, designing solutions for where the puck is (or was), rather than where it will be.

Haywire

It’s a little disturbing when I’m reminded just how dependent I am on technology and how little I actually know about it. A couple nights ago, we had a short, but heavy, storm with strong winds. A tree fell over and took down some power lines, leaving our house without power for several hours. Apparently, the electricity went off and on several times before staying off. I know that isn’t particularly good for electronics, but this is the first time I’ve seen evidence of the fact.

The power was back on when I got home from a meeting at the church, but I noticed that it was rather warm, and the air conditioner wasn’t running. I checked the thermostat to find every indicator on the LCD display lit. The unit was unresponsive. I checked the manual and the website. I disconnected the unit from the wall and plugged it back in. I was beginning to believe it was fried and decided to send email to Honeywell’s customer support, as their phone support was closed. Long story short, after the thermostat sat on my desk for awhile, I plugged it back in, and it worked fine.

Then, when I went up to my bedroom, I noticed my digital alarm clock wasn’t displaying the time properly. I pressed the button that should switch modes to allow me to set it, but all it did was beep at me. None of the buttons worked. I tried removing the backup batteries, thinking they might be dead. I finally unplugged it from the wall, waited a minute, and then plugged it back it. It came back on and worked fine.

Then, a couple days later, I tried to print a document to my wireless color laser printer. After awhile, I realized that nothing had printed. In fact, the printer hadn’t awakened from sleep. My Mac reported that it couldn’t connect to the printer. I tried turning the printer off and back on to no avail. Finally, I figured out that I had to re-setup the wireless connection—something I haven’t had to do since I first took it out of the box.

These all turned out to be minor problems that were solvable in a matter of minutes, but it makes me think about all of the various devices and systems I rely on that, once you get past the user interface and intended behaviors, I have very little knowledge of. When the robot revolution comes, I’m going to be in trouble.

Back up. Do it now.

I have thousands of photographs. I have hour upon hour of family videos. I have many year’s worth of design work, writing, email, financial records—the list goes on. It’s priceless, completely irreplaceable, and it’s all on hard drives sitting right here beside me. Yes, you better believe I have a backup strategy.

I’m a faithful listener of TWIT and MacBreak Weekly. They’ve mentioned several times the “3, 2, 1 backup plan”: three copies, two types of media, one copy offsite. I got Apple’s Time Capsule not long after it was released. It’s ability to back up all of the machines in my house over the network was very attractive, and Time Machine is brilliant. It contains a 1 TB drive, which is enough to back up my Mac Pro and my daughters’ iMac, including the 300 GB external drive that contains my iTunes library. Then I got a Drobo specifically for storing my video. It’s a RAID array, so the data is protected against drive failure. It’s currently housing about a Terabyte of data. So, everything is somewhat protected, but what happens in case of a house fire, theft, or some catastrophic failure? It’s all within six feet of each other.

One of the TWIT network’s regular advertisers is Carbonite, an online backup service that is affordable and convenient. However, one of their limitations is that they will only back up the internal drive. I was hoping for a solution that would cover my video. I researched a number of options, but only found one that would give me unlimited space, including external drives, at a price I was willing to pay.

Backblaze is charging me only $3.96 per month for unlimited storage. They have a free trial, which I used to confirm that it would work. Setup is simple; retrieval works as advertised. All of my data, including the video, was backed up, in the background, in about two weeks. For a fee, you can request to have your entire archive sent to you on DVD or a thumb drive, but you can retrieve any file online at any time. It’s a no-brainer. Everyone should be doing this.

Hope for 3-D

I’ve been rather disdainful of the current 3-D movie fad. I found in Orlando that it is saturating the amusement parks as well. I remember watching Captain EO back when my parents took me to Disney World for the first time, and I thought it was cool—that was the first 3-D movie I had seen. All of the 3-D movies in theme parks are full of gimmickry. “Hey, look at me, I’m in 3-D!” They take it even further, adding air blasts, water sprays, motorized lighting, even mechanisms within your seat that poke you or make it feel like roaches are crawling under your butt. I’m their for an experience, and they deliver on that, but I’m typically not impressed with the 3-D image. We ended up in the second or third row for It’s Tough to be a Bug, and everything that was supposed to look like it was floating in front of my face was a blurry mess of doubled images.

However, I did see one thing that gave me hope. The new Star Tours ride is spectacular! The quality of the 3-D image was so good, I forgot it was a 3-D image for awhile. If they can do that for feature films, I’ll eat my words.