Macgasm

Backing up our data is a very important task to do. Being Mac users, we are kind of spoiled though. With Apple’s introduction of time machine with Leopard, we all improved at backing up. But that may not be your safest solution. Sure, you are taking the right steps, but offsite back up is always a good idea too. Now you may say you have MobileMe and use iDisk for your offsite back up. Ok, that is fine, I do too. But I also use Mozy for my back up needs.

Mozy.com offers affordable online backups. For just $4.95 a month, you get unlimited storage space. That’s right, whatever you can back up, you are more than welcome to back up. However, since this is taking place over the internet, speeds depend on your ISP. My initial back up took 3 days to back up. But it is worth it. Plus, Most of us don’t turn our computers off that much any ways. Mozy also offers a free back up solution but for only 2 GB or storage. The nice thing is that mozy runs in the back ground at a time you specify. You select what you want to back up and if you accidentally delete something, you can recover it for up to 30 days.

Now I am not saying to stop backing up at home on CD’s, DVD’s or external HDD’s, But it isn’t going to hurt you to have some of your stuff backed up in other places. So give mozy a shot, if any thing try out the free service and if you like it, upgrade to a premium account.

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Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner

In this episode, Josh explains our new podcast format. We’ll be releasing a new audio podcast Monday through Friday — each episode featuring a specific topic. We’ll also be releasing screencasts and roundtable episodes throughout the week. Don’t call it a comeback. We’ve been here for years.

Cool Things with Multi Monitors

I’ve got multi monitors, as I’ve stated before. Well, I came across something that’s quite neat. You have the ability to have multiple background images; one for each monitor.

In order to do this, all you have to do is go to System Preferences, Click on ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ and once you do this, make sure you click on the Desktop tab. Once clicked, the background dialog box will appear on both monitors.

At this point, each monitor is treated like a separate desktop and you can customize all of the options for that monitor. For instance, you can have one monitor that has its background change every day while the other is a static image. Or you can have one that has a solid color while the other monitor has an image. The possibilities are endless and totally up to you. It’s just a quick and simple tip, but it works.

Right now I have a picture of some lightning, a Duck Hunt background that I found on Lifehacker.

The day Visualhub died, I was deeply saddened.  A great indie developer was pulling the plug on an excellent product.  I’ve spent a lot of time scouring the internet for an application that could replace it.  Nothing really filled the shoes of Visualhub.  It was one of those things that your mother talked to you about as a kid–it’s hard to fill a great application’s shoes, and you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone (two for one deal on cliche).  We talked yesterday about ripping videos on our podcast and today I found an interesting alternative that boasts some pretty bold claims.  It’s called ‘Road Movie‘, and it acts a lot like Visualhub.  You drag video into it, and you convert away.  You can get it from the bitfield groups site.

It has an amazing feature set, and looks like it could be a real replacement for Visualhub, and it has a pretty sleek interface.

Features include:

• Add/Edit Metadata
• Smart Metadata by parsing the filename.
• Add/Edit Chapters
• Tracks Inspector
• Batch encoding
• Supports Elgato Turbo.264
• Built-in encoder Presets
• Presets for Apple TV, Cellphone, iPhone, iPod, PSP and Web and more…
• Presets for PS3 and Nintendo Wii (NEW!!!)
• Customize your own set of Presets
• Upload to FTP, SFTP, .Mac, WebDav or Amazon S3
• YouTube uploading
• Automatically add to iTunes
• Create and manage Destinations
• iDisk support in one click
• Built for 10.5 Leopard

I’ve been thinking about the size of monitors lately. We’re looking at replacing monitors at work, and currently some people are still using 17″ CRT monitors, along with some 15 inch LCD panels that we got back in 2003. While looking for new monitors,we’ve noticed that it makes more sense to buy a 22 inch monitor than it does to purchase a 19 inch monitor. At what point does a monitor become TOO big? Is it 24 inches, 27 inches, 30 inches, or 42 inches? I understand that having a huge 60 inch monitor for big conference room for presentations or to show graphs or even conduct video conferences. All of these are fully justifiable, but for a desktop when it too much real estate too much?

This is actually a dilemma I’m facing. I just placed an order for new 26 inch Westinghouse 1080p monitor. It cost $249.99 with free shipping, so it’ll take longer, but I’ll wait to save the $20 to ship it. I’m just wondering if having a 26 inch monitor is going a bit too big. I’ve heard several people say that they bought 30 inch monitors and they end up downsizing because the monitors end up being too big. Yes, it’ll be nice to have more real estate in terms of my multi-monitor setup, but will it be too much?

Is there a point where monitor sizes will stop increasing and they’ll just become a commodity like dvd-rw drives, and hard drives? Will there always be a competition because of ‘features’ like a display-port, USB Hub, or will all monitors just become the same and only manufactured by two or three companies?

I can see if you watch a bunch of movies having a slightly larger screen would be important, but just for general day to day use is this important? Is having a larger screen like having backups or hard drive space, there’s no such thing as ‘too many’ or ‘too much’?

What is everybody else’s thoughts? And what size screen do you, the readers, use on a daily basis? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Just in case you missed the “one more thing” brouhaha from the Amazon Kindle press release (no you didn’t read that wrong), Amazon unveiled that they’re going to be pushing out their books to third parties. Everyone’s falling all over themselves with the possibilities this bring to the iPhone. Rejoicing has begun around the blogs.

I’ve got a one word question for all of you rejoicers. Really?

Have you ever tried reading long form literature on an iPhone, or are you just all elated because everyone in the press is happy? I mean it’s a great idea in concept, but so was communism, and we all know how that one turned out. I’m currently on a little vacation in Europe, and one of the first things I noticed was a lack of divergences between stores. A pharmacy is a pharmacy — they don’t sell books, and candy, and soda, and bread. The grocery store is a grocery store — they don’t line the aisles with toys so parents have to give into little Johnny’s tantrums and buy him some crappy toy gun.

Now, lets employ that logic to the iPhone. Apple says the iPhone is a phone, an iPod, a gaming platform, and the saviour of mankind. Will they add Amazon support? Probably. Will iPhone users buy a bunch of material from them? Most definitely. Would you be able to read War and Peace on an iPhone? Not bloody likely.

The iPhone has a ton of great features, things that it does better than anyone else in the markets that Apple has focused on, but it’s not a better “reading” device than the Kindle. I challenge anyone who doesn’t believe me to spend an entire week rummaging through a manual on their iPhone. Without access to any other technology. No laptop, no desktop, no reference book. Tell me how intuitive it is, and better yet, tell me how long it took for your eyes to burn. I just lasted three days, and I gave in and purchased a twenty-four hour internet pass in Vienna because this PHP reference manual was pissing me off.

Convergence is not always good, and some things are better left on a separate device. The iPhone, as it currently stands, will not compete with the Kindle, and it will not provide the users with a superior experience. If Apple ever got around to releasing a tablet device, there might be a completely different argument coming out of my mouth at that point. If you want to read your books on a device buy a Kindle, and don’t rely one iota on your iPhone. Take it from me, a man stuck in Europe with an iPhone as a PDF reader for the next week. It isn’t pleasant.

He said it was as buggy as a Volkswagon dealership, but I’m pretty sure he overstated a little. We’ve talked about Dan Grover and his fantastic applications before, and the news of Shovebox for the iPhone has come at a time where he’s garnered quite a bit of buzz for his desktop application.  Wonderwarp has consistently put out amazing software.  The iPhone version of Otis made an official iPhone commercial, the desktop application was talked about extensively on Macbreak weekly, and now it’s only a matter of time before the public adopts shovebox on their iPhone.

Dan’s been in an ideological battle with twitter developer Alex Payne regarding his comments about “everything buckets”.  I tend to agree with Dan on that one.  I find it somewhat humours that someone who runs a service that could be considered an “everything bucket” for communications has a problem with the concept of stuffing an application with random snippets of information.  Whether or not it was designed as a stuff it communication repository, or whether the public turned twitter into it matters little, the fact remains that we’re constantly stuffing snippets of our lives into twitter.  Some do it with the intention of retrieving information from their life at a future date, others do it to show off to a community, but no matter how you slice it, twitters as much of an “everything bucket” as any of the desktop applications that Payne is talking about.  Anyway, I’m digressing quite a bit from th actual point I want to make.

Payne says, “One of my Rules For Computing Happiness is: do not use software that does many things poorly.” Everything Buckets violate this rule up, down, and sideways.”

So I decided to write a Shovebox for iPhone review illustrating the things that the application does effectively, and how it actually enhances my day to day operations through some examples of how it has benefitted me over the last week.

1. Need to get groceries for a particular reciepe?  Don’t want to write it out?  Why don’t you get the url from cooks.com and “shove it” into shovebox and sync it to your iPhone. Not only are you able to take that information with you, you get to save a few trees.  Sounds beneficial to me.
2. Actually, what if you’re about to take a 8 hour flight and want to catch up on all your reading from Macgasm.net, but ran out of time before you boarded a flight? Oh you can shove it to shovebox and have that one url bookmared for quick access.  Sounds beneficial to me.
3. What about bringing that recent logo design with you to a client meeting without having to lug around your computer? Well, you could send the image to your iphone through the built in sync tool.  Issue solved.  Wow, it’s starting to look like it fits into my mantra of happiness: only use software that does many things effectively (read: doesn’t fail whale me when the going gets tough).
4. The best part about the Shovebox iPhone app? It can be a private and personal twitter account.  That’s right, while I’m out on the town I can write myself a quick note about my latest crazy scheme to get rich quick (I self impose a 140 character limit). Even more impressive,  I can write down my most witty thoughts and save them for twitter later, oh who am I kidding, I’m not all that witty.

Have you ever dropped a file on an icon to have it open up the application for you, and load the file you dropped onto the icon?  I do it all the time with images and Photoshop.  Right clicking a file to select what application is going to open the program is a giant pain in the ass.  My way is better if you ask me.

Anyway, you can do similar stuff with snippets of text and information. I bet you didn’t know you could do that, and if you did, you should really be writing for us, because I had absolutely no idea I could do it until I accidentally did it tonight.

Try this.  Highlight some text in safari, and drag and drop that selected text onto your mail application.  You should get a nice little new mail window, and the text smacked into that message box.  Pretty nifty if you ask me.

Do you guys know of any other drag and drop miracles?  I’d love to know them.  Share in the comments.