Dave Hamilton / Dave The Nerd » geeky tidbits

SXSW Debrief 2011

Dave — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:52:43 +0000

As I have in years past, last week I attended SXSW down in Austin, Texas, catching the last portion of the film festival, as well as all of Interactive and Music. I wrote some of this up for us over at The Mac Observer and iObserver, and also included mentions in our Mac Geek Gab podcast (with more material coming in future MGG episodes). Currently, that content is as follows:

18 SXSW Live recordings Now on iTunes
Mac Geek Gab 320, which includes my initial SXSW 2011 Debrief
My ever-popular Geeks Survival Guide to SXSW Music 2011
A few articles (from others with help from me on the ground there) about the new pop-up Apple Store that was put in place temporarily for the iPad 2 release during SXSW.
Why SXSW Interactive Attendees Should Stay for Music

And for those of you who like to know (and I know you’re out there), here’s the list of bands I saw during the Music festival:

Foo Fighters
Guadalupe Plata
Luger
The Baseball Project
Duran Duran
Emmylou Harriss
North Mississippi Allstars (w/ G. Love)
Bob Geldof
The New Mastersounds
Preservation Hall Jazz Band
Widespread Panic
Ozomatli
Luke Rathborne
The Belle Brigade
Darlingside
The Givers
Miracle 3
Summer Erikson
Eli “Paperboy” Reed and the True Loves
Bowling for Soup
Los Lonely Boys
Tony Scalzo

The iPad is The Future Of Laptops

Dave — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:51:46 +0000

You can read it over at TMO (where there are some *great* comments) and/or watch it in my interview with TheDigitalLifestyle.tv. Or, you know, right here below.

iPhone OS Multitasking Idea

Dave — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:06:28 +0000

I had what I consider to be quite a fantastic idea for solving a lot of the complaints about the iPhone OS’s lack of multitasking support for third-party apps. I wrote about it over at TMO, so you can see it there. Enjoy!

My Lightning Lessons

Dave — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:39:41 +0000

Just posted an article about my lightning experiences and lessons learned over at TMO that *should* have gone live a year ago, but got lost in the system. Thankfully a conversation sparked up this weekend on the Macworld Forums about Chris Breen’s related power experiences, and it sent me to seek out this old article that for whatever reason was never published at TMO.

In any event, it’s published now, and you can head over to TMO to read it.

[The previous post here still stands: follow me on Twitter if you want to see more frequent/current updates from me.]

Skype for iPhone thoughts

Dave — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:44:53 +0000

Skype for the iPhone came out last night, and I spent a little time with it, and wrote a lot about it. Don’t worry, I’ve been using Skype regularly for years, so most of what I wrote is actually real stuff I didn’t make up!

The article’s posted over at iPodObserver today, and even includes some tips on making your experience with the iPhone app even better.

First trip with the iPhone

Dave — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:32:54 +0000

My recent trip to New Media Expo was my first travel experience since I moved from the Treo 650 to the new iPhone 3G. Overall, I think it the move was positive.

Web browsing was, as expected, far and beyond a better experience than I’ve had previously. No surprise here.

Those of you who followed my SXSW experience know I find Twitter to be an invaluable tool while traveling. On the Treo I was relegated to accessing Twitter with the Treo’s wimpy web interface. On the iPhone I was able to use the Twitterific application and it was, again, a much smoother experience.

Email on the iPhone is a mixed blessing. It sure looks nice, but the UI is quite a bit slower than I had with ChatterEmail on re Treo. This is largely due to the lack of physical keyboard meaning I didn’t have shortcut buttons for filing messages and such. That said, the virtual keyboard on the iPhone allows for MUCH faster typing than I had on the Treo. In fact, this blog post comes from the iPhone while on board a plane from Las Vegas to Dallas (thanks to the WordPress application).

Battery life was also a difficult bit to manage. I found I could make the battery last for a full day only by disabling Bluetooth, WiFi, Location Services, and auto-brightness. I could leave 3G on and make it through the day, though I found the speed benefits were outweighed by the battery savings gained by disabling 3G for all but the heaviest web-surfing needs.

SMS works very well on the iPhone, though I realized that I got very used to using copy and paste on the Treo. In situations where I had to alert multiple team members or colleagues to the same bit of info, I would simply type the message once and use the clipboard to facilitate sending to the rest. On the iPhone I had to retype the message over and over again.

So while the iPhone has a long way to go on its path to maturity, it is clearly a superior platform, especially with the growing App store. I look forward to more software updates and applications that will make use of the iPhone on future trips even smoother!

My Backup Strategy

Dave — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:41:53 +0000

On a few recent Mac Geek Gab episodes I’ve mentioned my current backup strategy and more than a few listeners have asked me to document this somewhere. I figured this blog was as good a place as any.

Starting in 1995 and up until February when Apple’s Time Capsule came out, I was a died-in-the-wool Retrospect user. But I got sick. and. tired. of. waiting. for. an. update. Even still there’s no Intel native version of Retrospect (due Real Soon Now… in October, or maybe later), and to me that means it’s not currently a viable option anymore. Combine that with Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine and Time Capsule and, well, life can be better than Retrospect.

And it is.

Time Capsule/Time Machine

I have 5 Macs to back-up. 4 of them are on Leopard, and one is on Tiger (too old to run Leopard). All 4 Leopard machines back up to a 1TB Time Capsule. The TC sits over at the house, and is connected via Gigabit Ethernet buried underground. This means if the office burns down the Time Capsule likely won’t go with it, and vice versa regarding the house. Semi-off-site I like to call it. So that’s one line of defense.

SuperDuper

I also use SuperDuper daily to clone my MacBook Pro’s hard drive to an external FireWire drive sitting here in my office. This provides both a second backup as well as an “instant boot” method if my main drive were to go down at any point.

Additionally, I use SuperDuper on the Tiger machine to back up critical files daily to the Time Capsule. Yes, though Tiger can’t run Time Machine, it can very much see the Time Capsule as a shared drive, and this works perfectly.

IMAP

Because I use IMAP for my mail, my “current” email is stored on the three Macs I use regularly (MacBook Pro in office, iMac in studio, Dual G4 over at house), so that’s backed up. Because of this, I exclude the mail directories from Time Machine backups on all but my MacBook Pro (those being [home]/Library/Mail/IMAP-[name of mailbox]). No need to back that data up again onto the same Time Capsule drive.

iDisk

Earlier this year, I decided to fully adopt the “cloud computing” concept and moved all of my documents up to my iDisk. This doesn’t include pictures or music, but pretty much everything else is there. It takes up about 3 GB. The beauty is that the iDisk can be synced for offline usage to any (or all) of my Macs. So again I have it synced to the 3 Macs I use most, and again I exclude it from Time Machine on all but one of them (this is done by excluding [home]/Library/FileSync, for those playing along at home).

MobileMe Sync

Since I use multiple computers as well as an iPhone, I take full advantage of MobileMe’s ability to sync Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks. And while I don’t fully consider this a backup necessarily, it certainly acts as one since the data exists on all 3 computer plus the MobileMe cloud.

So I have all of my data in at least two places, and some of it in as many as 6. Yes it seems a little obsessive when you break it down, but it really all flows very smoothly together with the sole exception of MobileMe Sync, which is not entirely reliable and requires massaging and resetting about once every six weeks. The rest of it has worked like a charm since I started down this path in February, and I have no intention of changing any time soon.

If you have any questions, please just feel free to comment and ask.

Mobile blogging

Dave — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:52:38 +0000

For years I’ve complained that the only time I think to blog something is when I’m away from my computer and, hence, nothing gets blogged. My blog frequency certainly supports that. Now that WordPress for the iPhone is out, perhaps that will change and you’ll hear more from me here, as well. Time will tell.

Lean, Clean, and Mean Session Online

Dave — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:00:09 +0000

The audio and slide-video from the “Running Your Mac Lean, Clean, and Mean” session I did at Macworld Expo 2008 is now freely available online.

SXSW Debrief

Dave — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:34:37 +0000

As most readers know, last week I attended the South by Southwest conference for the first time. I caught the last bits of the film festival, and then was there for both Interactive and Music. I reported on this over at The Mac Observer and iPodObserver.com throughout the week, as follows:

The music festival really blew me away, and in basically 4 days I saw more than 24 acts, including:

American Bang
Béla Fleck
Ben Harper
Billy Bragg
Blue Cheer
Bowling for Soup
Brendan James
Dead Confederate
Foreign Born
Jonathan Rice
Kate Nash
Kevin Gordon
Papercranes
R.E.M.
RX Bandits
Serj Tankian
The Presidents of the United States of America
The Redwalls
The Supersuckers
The Vines
Tom Morello
Vampire Weekend
Van Morrison
Wheatus

Was a great week, and is also great to be back home!