I’ve seen three disks fail here on the ship in the past two days; it’s terrifying to think about computer failure during such a long time out at sea.

About 15 minutes ago, I had a drive failure scare. My Mac froze suddenly while I was working in Aperture, and I had to force a hard reboot. When it started up again, I got the dreaded flashing question mark folder, and no amount of restarting the machine allowed for a successful boot. Luckily, I travel with DiskWarrior 4 on a USB stick[^1], and it managed to rebuild the volume successfully. I was so relieved.

[^1] I don’t have an optical drive in my notebook anymore, so I transferred my copy of DiskWarrior onto a USB flash drive.

What if I hadn’t had a copy of DiskWarrior handy? I might have been seriously screwed.

In my computer bag, I travel with the following things:

1. DiskWarrior on USB flash drive
2. Mac OS 10.5 Leopard installer on USB flash drive
3. Full, bootable backup on external drive (encrypted)
4. Useful software installers on an external drive
5. Numerous external drives
6. Numerous USB flash drives

If you are a frequent traveler and don’t travel with DiskWarrior, an operating system installer disc, and an external drive to which you backup frequently, you are asking for trouble!

I’m a huge proponent of SpinVox, a service that converts voicemails to text. Messages are delivered via SMS and/or e-mail.

Currently, I’ve got two mobile numbers and one landline. All three forward busy and unanswered calls to my voicemail number at SpinVox, which means that I can “listen” to my voicemails wherever I am, without making a call. When I’m in areas without GPRS, I set SpinVox to use SMS to deliver messages, but normally, I receive them only as email. My Blackberry’s incoming mail filter marks messages from SpinVox as being “Level 1″ in priority, which highlights those messages in red and tells the phone to notify me by vibrating and beeping.

When I’m in the country, I still call in to listen to more interesting voicemails. After all, it is still nice to hear someone’s voice on the other end. SpinVox makes message retrieval easy by providing a short code for each message — you just call up, type in the code, and your message is read back to you. It also functions in the traditional manner, with queued messages played back in reverse chronological order.

SpinVox also offers a whole bunch of services similar to those that Jott provides, but I haven’t tried any of them out. It’s priced a bit high, but so is making voicemail calls from out of the country.

I think that if I only traveled to areas with good data infrastructure, I’d stick with GrandCentral, which features voicemail played through a web interface. But for me, text is better than audio.

Woopra is really cool. If you want to see what your users are doing in real-time, you should sign up now.

According to Woopra, Wetpixel typically has between 6-30 users on it at once. The free beta stops after 10,000 hits a day, but I’m still enjoying watching people on the site. :)

Microsoft has put out a video demo of SecondLight, an incredible surface display technology that adds vertical projection. It is really cool — definitely worth watching:

I wonder how long technology like this incubates in research labs before becoming practical.

I’ve been struggling with a solution to my encryption dilemma: how to I encrypt my sensitive data and still keep my machine usable for heavy media work?

I need some sort of encryption so data isn’t compromised if my computer is lost. I was initially pretty excited about PGP Whole Disk Encryption, but my benchmarks show some pretty depressing numbers. If I were an email-and-web sort of guy, it would probably be sufficient, but I do a lot of media work, and a drive that reads at just over 20MB/s is just too slow. (read more »)

My favorite “store everything” database, Evernote, has implemented offline support in its latest version for the iPhone, v1.4 (unfortunately, the blog entry announcing the news seems also to have gone offline — at least, for the moment).

When viewing a note on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll see a little gray star in left corner of the note title. Once the note is fully loaded, tap the star and that note instantly becomes a favorite. It’s now quickly accessible any time, even offline. To view your favorites, click on “Favorites” in the tab bar along the bottom of the application.

For frequent travelers, this will prove to be the most useful feature Evernote has implemented to date. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at the airport trying to look something up on Evernote (e.g. frequent flyer numbers) only to give up because EDGE is too slow — and that is assuming I even get data coverage. I travel internationally so often that I often do not have data access on my iPhone (tried it, and gave up).

Now, if only Evernote would build a native Blackberry version…

I am astounded by how much Adobe CS3’s activation process sucks. (read more »)

Buy me on eBay!

I’ve put my MTRON 32GB 2.5″ SATA SSD on eBay. It is the same one I used for these benchmarks.

This is driving me crazy. In Windoze-land, hitting Home will take you to the beginning of a line of text, and End will take you to the end of the line. I had grown quite used to this and relied on it a lot. In Mac OS X, the respective keyboard shortcuts are CMD-left arrow and CMD-right arrow.

The problem is that in web browsers on the Mac, CMD-left arrow is Go Back, and CMD-right arrow is Go Forward. The browsers are typically smart enough to detect whether or not your cursor is in a textarea, but that detection isn’t 100% reliable. Sometimes, I hit CMD-left arrow while I am typing inside a textarea, and the browser goes back a page; I usually lose everything I happened to be typing. I’ve probably lost a small book’s worth of text over the last two years.

Anyone have a workaround?

Currently, most of my sensitive data is encrypted via encrypted sparse images, but I find managing encrypted volumes to be a pain in the butt (mount, unmount, mount, unmount).

I recently purchased PGP Desktop for Mac, which (finally) features pre-boot whole disk encryption. I love the idea that my drive(s) would be encrypted, and that a password would be required even before boot, but I wasn’t sure what kind of performance hit I’d get if I used PGP on an entire volume. And so, I ran some benchmarks. (read more »)

Two OCZ Core Series v2 SATA II 120GB SSDs in a MacBook Pro

(Blah blah blah. Skip to the benchmarks.)

Six months ago, I put a 32GB MTRON MSD 3000 SSD drive in my MacBook Pro as a system drive and ran a Samsung 160GB IDE/ATA drive as a data drive in the slot normally taken up by a SuperDrive.

At the time, the MTRON MSD 3000 SSD appealed to me because it is a single-level cell (SLC) SSD, which tends to perform evenly and consistently, especially when being accessed at smaller transfer sizes. Cheaper drives use multi-level cell design (MLC), which historically has had a lower mean time between failures (MTBF), and has been less consistent in its performance. Still, big flash vendors like Samsung have recently switched from SLC to MLC for their consumer products, which suggests that a great deal of progress is being made on MLC drives. MLC drives are MUCH cheaper than are SLC drives, and most consumer solid-state drives use MLC designs, while the enterprise environment still relies on SLC. (read more »)

tweet, tweet, fail. 1pm 9/25/08.

… well, except right now.

Actually, Twitter has been pretty reliable for me lately. I’ve been much happier with the service than I was a few months ago. It’s free, so we can’t complain.

Well, we can complain because it makes us feel better. But there is no legitimacy to the complaints. :)

I’m totally sold on CoolBook, a Mac OS X utility that sets the voltage levels supplied to a Mac’s CPU at different clock speeds. I became tired of my 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro’s fan spinning up all the time, but I didn’t want to compromise by running it a clock speed. After using CoolBook and tweaking fan settings with Fan Control , my computer is now cool and quiet most of the time. I’ve even tweaked my settings so the fan rarely spins up when I’m on battery power (and the CPU stays relatively cool). (read more »)

Dual OCZ 120GB Core Series v2 SSD drives in a RAID 0 (striped)

I’m live with the new setup and have done some benchmarking. Too busy to post results now, but I will soon. :)

I discovered toonel.net shortly after I started traveling to places with crippled internet connectivity. Toonel.net’s website says that it is “an experiment in a technique for conserving network bandwidth” — but it doesn’t mention how useful the experiment actually is!

When I need to conserve network bandwidth, I use toonel for all http (web) traffic as well as IMAP and SMTP connections. I’ve had really good luck with web compression. Alongside standard text compression, toonel has the option to recompress web images. I currently have JPG images set to be recompressed to a quality level of 90 (a noticeable degradation in image quality — but it can save as much as 50% in traffic). At the moment, I’m averaging around 38% outbound and 37% inbound compression. Not bad.

Success with IMAP and SMTP has been less than perfect; I frequently get an unresponsive proxy when I connect to check mail. Still, when it does connect, compression is good.

Toonel is easy to use — you just download the java proxy client, run it, and set up port mappings and web image compression settings. The toonel website has online tutorials for how to do this on various platforms.

I’ve also been investigating e-mail solutions for satellite connectivity, since traditional email protocols require too many network round-trips to be used in high-latency connections. XGate email gateway looks to be a good solution. Anyone out there used it before? :)

I made this little video a few days ago. I’m not sure why. It may be interesting for those of you who post a lot of images online.

I continue to have 10-15 second freezes on my iPhone when I bring up the contacts list in attempts to make calls. It is really quite infuriating. Why can other phones handle hundreds of contacts without locking their users out?

To make me feel better, I’ve decided to collect iPhone fail screens.

what good is 5 bars of coverage if you can’t make a call?

I had a ton of failed calls when I was down in San Diego (as you might remember from my torrent of angry tweets), but that was before firmware 2.0, and I was unable to screenshot the fail screen even when using the jailbroken screenshot app.

UPDATE: At the moment, my iPhone doesn’t show up in iTunes when I plug it in. My Apple Bluetooth headset also now refuses to pair with anything. Massive Apple failure.

UPDATE: I reinstalled iTunes 7.7.1, and it works again.

Has anyone out there successfully calibrated and profiled Dell’s 30″ 3008WFP LCD? I recently took delivery of one, and am having a hard time getting colors to look right in a way that makes me confident. I’m using a Monaco Optix XR Pro, which I also use to calibrate my older 30″ Dell 3007FP LCD.

Because the 3007FP doesn’t have custom RGB control, I profiled the display at a native color temperature @ 2.2 gamma and only calibrated it using brightness and contrast controls. The native color temperature is actually fairly warm and is pleasing to the eye. I’m not working in the optimal lighting environment; my space is full of 3100°K halogen lights, and all I have at the moment is a single 5500°K bias light to light up my desktop area. But I’ve never been surprised by printed or web colors produced while working on the profiled 3007FP.

The 3008WFP has custom RGB control, so I thought I’d give D65 calibration a try. Adjusting custom RGB to R99, G95 B97 seemed to do the trick, and the Monaco hummed along, happily creating a D65 profile for me.

I first noticed something strange when Facebook’s gray background bars all turned pink.

The 3008WFP D65 profile by Monaco failed miserably. I set the monitor back to the “Desktop” preset, which is presumably a native color temperature, and re-calibrated and profiled using the “native” setting in the Monaco software. The colors look fine now, but are significantly cooler than are colors on the 3007FP, which sits right next to it.

Dell 3007FP on left, Dell 3008WFP on right

But which colors are accurate? I have no idea. At this point, I have faith in the color fidelity of either display. I have no idea what the 3008WFP is doing in the “Desktop” preset. I also tried setting both the monitor’s preset and Mac OS X color profile to AdobeRGB, but that had the effect of make things look a bit too saturated. Setting both to sRGB made for a very “natural” feel, but again, I am not sure if it’s accurate.

I should never I have sold my Sony Artisan.

I finally purchased a second monitor and fired up Aperture in dual-monitor mode. It’s too bad dual-monitor support is broken.

8,192,000 pixels of dual suck

My main monitor is a Dell 3008WFP 30″ LCD connected to an ATI Radeon X1900 XT in PCIe Slot-1 (x16 lane width). My second monitor is a Dell 3007FP 30″ LCD connected to an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT in PCi Slot-4 (x8 lane width).

Using Aperture in any secondary display mode resulted in the primary display exhibiting two rendering anomalies:

1. extreme posterizing in 100% (zoom) view
2. some images render as black (no image) in the “normal” fit-to-window view

The secondary display content worked fine. Screenshots of the window produced no artifacts, but the rendered display looked terrible. The crap render persisted when I dragged the main Aperture window from the primary display to the secondary display, so it isn’t a monitor or video card issue.

In frustration, I disconnected the second monitor from the NVIDIA card and re-connected it to the second DVI-D port on the ATI Radeon X1900 XT. Everyone seems to work now.

I kept the stupid NVIDIA card just so I could use it with a second monitor. Now, it appears better to have a single card than to attempt to use two.

Come on, Apple! Get your shit together. You only have to deal with, what, 4 video cards drivers on the Mac Pro? You’d think they would work flawlessly.

There should be a standard icon to augment buttons and links in the iPhone interface for “this will close the current app and open a link in Safari” I don’t know how many times I’ve opened an app and clicked on something to see what it does, only to be taken to Safari. In most cases, I wouldn’t have tapped the link / button if I had known that it would do that.