Some of my favorite things.

Here is a short list of some of the things I am using that I really like.

1. Canon PIXMA MX7600 inkjet all-in-one printer

I recently replaced my office all-in-one printer. I got the Canon PIXMA MX7600 inkjet all-in-one and absolutely love it. It has a much smaller footprint than the printer I had previously, the print quality is amazing, it is quiet, and it has built in duplex printing, copying and scanning.

Yes, all three processes are duplexed. I had a hard time believing this when I read the specs on the printer.

It is the best office printer I have ever used. Another thing I really appreciate about it is that the software that comes with it actually works. With certain other popular brands of all-in-one printers, you buy it, get it home, and then discover that when the box says it works with OS X, that means it PRINTS with OS X, but scanning and faxing aren't supported "yet." All the features are supported on the Canon.

I paid about $350 for it.

2. Skype

I started using Skype on the advice of a pastor friend of mine before we took a trip to Fiji last August. Since I seem to be doing a lot more international work lately, it was always a hassle to make phone calls from other countries. You could find decent internet just about anywhere (including Iraq and Afghanistan) but you were still stuck paying $2.50 a minute on the cell phone or having to use a calling card.

With Skype, you can use your internet connection to make phone calls. You install the software and with a US account, you can call other Skype users for free. For a few bucks a month you can get a phone number on Skype that will let you call US phone numbers for no additional cost, too (so if you have a Skype account with a phone number, you can call other phones for free, too, with no limit on the number or duration of calls.)

Skype also has texting (like IM) and video conferencing which seems much more robust than iChat or AOL's video chat and seems to work at much lower bandwidth. You can also send files, photos, or other docs over Skype, too.

3. ThinkTank's Shape Shifter laptop backpack

As I rapidly rack up airmiles, I have been continuing to hone what I carry and how I carry it.

I have a closet full of laptop bags that almost do what I need them to do, but not quite. Either they are great for a light load, but won't fit everything I need for a road trip, or they will hold lots of stuff, but not be padded well enough for the bumping around that happens on the road, or they are padded well and hold lots of stuff but won't fit under the airplane seat and have no means to lock the compartments.

Thinktank Photo has created the near perfect bag with the Shapeshifter.

It holds everything computer related. It will also hold either one of my laptops (17" MBP or 13" aluminum MacBook) and all the chargers, converters, card readers, backup hard drives, and all the little bits and pieces. You can also unzip an inner area of the bag to expand its size so it can also accommodate a couple full sized DSLR bodies and lenses. If you don't need to carry that much, you can zip the inner area closed and you have a very thin, streamlined laptop solution.

It is also padded in an intelligent way. It is not puffy like the Michelin Man, but has the right amount of protection in the right places.

The outside pockets don't have a lot of padding, but I am putting the more rugged things in those pockets, pens, biz cards, headphones, card readers, cables, etc.. The laptop area is well protected, including on the bottom, (which many laptop makers seem to forget that we do set the bag down once in a while).

The pockets where you would put camera gear are very well protected with a denser foam that is quite thin, the advantage of this is that it protects what is inside (and keeps what is inside from beating up anything around it) but is thin enough that when you close that pocket, it is not a big puffy blob in the middle of the bag.

The key pockets also have reinforced zippers with the locking holes on them so you can secure them and the bag. It won't prevent a determined thief from getting to what is inside, but it will probably deter the causal crook that is looking for an easy unsecured target of opportunity. It comes in black, black, or uh, black and is about $250.

4. Drive Genius 2

There are lots of solutions for Mac Drive/Data recovery. Techtool, Disk Warrior are the two biggest. I have used both, and found both to be lacking. Techtool often finds problems that aren't really there and other times has created new problems. It also seems like it is always a step behind on compatibility. It takes them a long time to release updates when there is an OS update or a new Mac released.

Keeping up with these is important because a big part of their pitch is the ability to use a boot disk or other device to boot your Mac when it is having trouble. I got suckered in a few years back when they came out with a version of TechTool that you could install on a firewire flash drive and it never worked as advertised. It never was able to boot up my Macs and when you talked to tech support they would try to talk you into their annual subscription to get all the updates... huh? Pay for the software and then pay for updates? I tried it... the firewire solution still didn't work and so I swore off Techtool.

Drive Genius I really like. It is simple and works well, but they too are way behind the curve on keeping up with current Mac hardware. As of the writing of this, they still don't support the aluminum MacBook (which was released more than three months ago!) So if I have a problem with my MacBook, I can't boot up with their disk. What is the point?

I found Drive Genius 2 about a year ago. It works as advertised. It works will all my Macs, they seem to update it fairly frequently, or at least when there is a need for an update, and everyone else I have turned onto it loves it also. It has a simple interface, keeps things working the way they are supposed to, and doesn't offer a lot of garbage that you are most likely not going to use.

It can be found for $99

Until next time...

(The photo at the top is from a project I shot in Fiji in Aug 08. It is just a photo that I like... it has nothing to do really with photo or Mac stuff. The fellows in the image are Fijian sugar cane farmers. )

Backing up Your Mac - Short Term Backups

Backing up your Mac is important. Hard drives fail, software can mess stuff up, or a rogue four-year-old can go from playing Reader Rabbit to putting desktop files in the trash and emptying it because the unnamed child liked the satisfying sound the computer made as they trashed each file.

No matter how it happens, data loss can range from being a simple annoyance to a very expensive business-altering-disaster depending upon how well your data is backed up.

And there are a lot of people that don't back up. Some are lucky and haven't had a problem...yet. But it is not a question of will you suffer a data loss at some point, it is just a question of when.

One thing that proves that point is the number of companies that exist to recover failed hard drives. Here is a Google search on "Hard Drive Recovery." The reason there are that many companies in business is because there are a lot of people who suddenly discover their data is hosed and don't have any backups so they have no choice but to shell out to try to save their data.

Most of these companies are reputable and do good work, but you can expect to pay thousands of dollars to recover your hard drive and depending upon why it failed you could get all of your data back as one giant folder with all the files contained on the drive. You then get to spend days figuring out what they are and where they go. Or you could end up with little or nothing off the bad drive like this poor guy's experience. Needless to say, it could be a really bad and expensive situation.

Now if you really like to live dangerously, you can try what this guy did and rebuild the drive hardware, but it's not something I would suggest.

So if you aren't actively backing up, the first thing that you need to figure what data should be backed up. Things that usually fall into this category should include your photos (duh), invoicing, documents, estimates, contacts, calendars, bookkeeping, software installers and serial number, music, movies, passwords, and anything else that you would be lost without. Many of these items reside in your User folder, but double check that things aren't parked in other parts of your hard drive(s) that should be backed up.

There are two types of backup you need to think about; short-term and long-term.

Your short-term backups are for day to day backup of files that you use all the time and things that are important. If they stop working or disappear, you can go back to the version from yesterday, or the days prior and get back to a working copy of the file. Programs like Backup (for 10.4 or 10.5 users) and Time Machine (for 10.5 users) are best for this type of backup.

If you are on a desktop Mac, you can designate on of your other internal drives* as a backup. I prefer using an external drive so that if that machine dies, you can unplug the external drive and plug it into another Mac, and immediately recover the data you need until your main Mac is fixed.

One thing you never want to do is use your main (boot) drive or any partitions on it for backups. If you do that and the drive fails, there go your files and your backups. The same goes for any other drive that has critical info on it. You want the backup on a separate drive from where your originals are stored.

With Apple's Backup, you have to do a little work to decide what you want backed up and how often you want it backed up, but once you've done that it pretty much will run automatically in the background at the scheduled times. I like to have Backup run early in the morning (like 2am) when I am most likely not sitting at my computer, but I also set my computer to never go to sleep. If you have your computer sleep when you aren't using it and this happens during a scheduled backup time, it will run the scheduled backup next time your Mac is awake.

When the drive is full it will stop backing up and let you know that you need to replace the drive or erase it and start over. External hard drives are inexpensive enough that I would strongly suggest buying another drive, unplug the old one, label the dates archived on it, plug in the new one and safely store the old one just in case you ever need any of the data on it.

With Time Machine, you just tell the computer which drives you want backed up and it will do hourly backups to make sure everything is where it is supposed to be. After a few days it condenses things to one backup per day, and if you go back a month or two, it condenses them weekly. The idea being that most likely if you lose something, you will know it pretty quickly and be able to recover the most recent version of the missing file(s) but if you are going back weeks, it is probably a file that is not being updated frequently anyways.

One thing that Time Machine will eventually do if you are not careful is start delete your oldest backups when the backup hard drive gets full. Before it gets full, I suggest replacing it with a new drive and store the old one after labeling it with the dates archived on it... just in case.

Another type of backup that can be a good idea is a network backup. The easiest way is through Backup and your .Mac account. Due to space and network limitations, I only back up things like invoices and other must-have files that I would be really sunk without, but if my office burned down, I would have the data available to start rebuilding things.

But please, please, please back up your Mac. Stop reading and do it now! Well, you can finish this post, first, I suppose. There is only one paragraph left.

A good external hard drive can be bought for around $100 and Backup is free if you have a .Mac account. Time Machine is free if you have 10.5 installed on your computer. There is really no good reason to not back up, but there are plenty of reasons for regret if you don't.