This past week, I received a call from my next-door neighbor and friend, Kendall, who is a food rep.  He was traveling to Charleston to present a new line of meats to a restaurant but the other food rep who would be working with him would need to drive over 8 hours from Florida in order to join the meeting.  Instead, he asked what would be involved in having him video chat for the meeting.  Kendall is not a Mac or iPhone owner, but I told him about Skype and that we’d need to buy a web cam for his laptop.  Then it dawned on me, tell him about FaceTime.

Our family has had a lot of experience, this year, with FaceTime.  Either my wife or I both have been traveling for work almost every month this year.  Many times, due to my wife’s job change in February, we have not been able to afford the time off to travel together, and so one of us would be home with our daughter while the other traveled.  FaceTime has enabled us to talk while we’re in hotels and traveling and see each other.  It has performed as well as all the Apple ads have portrayed it and really, it is a feature I would really, really miss if I lost it today.  It has let me and my wife talk with our girl about her day, let her tell us her stories and let us tuck her in at night before bed.  My wife was able to read the nightly bedtime story, just like she were at home (especially since my daughter has a few favorite books and my wife has memorized those).

As I relayed this story to Kendall, I could hear his enthusiasm grow.  “Philip, you might be on to something there,” he said.  And surely, we were. So, I offered to lend him our family iPad and work with him to get everything setup.  We added a set of external speakers to make the audio louder, because were concerned that the restaurant might be noisy during the meeting.  The only other step was to add a contact for his associate, and we were all set. (As a failback, we also setup Skype, just in case, but it was not needed).

Kendall’s business associate had an iPad and one quick phone conversation had him we were testing FaceTime from home.  Kendall traveled to Charleston as planned and tested everything from the restaurant the night before and it performed great.

On the day of the meeting, the restaurant staff gathered around for the presentation.  Kendall setup the iPad and started the FaceTime call with his his iOS enabled business associate.  And the presentation began.  There were few thoughts about the underlying technology that enabled it because it just worked.  The only issue of the day was that some of the staff could not see the remote associate well on the iPad screen depending on their angle, but they could hear him and he could see everything going on there.  And the ability to see what was going on in the room made the presentation go off fantastic.  Kendall was the arms and legs for the presentation, able to talk to and cater to the staff while his associate spoke and watched remotely.  All of this enabled by two 1lb. gadgets that are easily transportable and WiFi in the hotel and restaurant.

Certainly, this isn’t an Apple only ability.  Skype and other video chat applications could do the same and pre-date FaceTime, but with so many iOS devices and Macs in the world, the ability to have a platform like FaceTime that just works is a huge advantage for customers.  Skype will run on PC’s and other tablets and lots of devices, so it has its advantages, too, certainly.  But, one of the biggest for FaceTime is that it is dead simple to use and that goes a long way with less technically inclined folks.

Up next for FaceTime – a birthday party…  I just sent off an email to my in-laws who will not be able to make it to my daughter’s birthday party this year, but I hope that they will attend using FaceTime.  They have recently made the Apple transition with iPhones and Macs, so we will try to let them join us virtually, wish their grand-daughter a happy birthday, and even watch live as she opens her present from them…  Those miles between us just shrank to nothing, and that is a huge accomplishment.

Early on, I got a taste of success (particularly for a blogger with NO following) by blogging during VMworld 2008 about the announcements being made from VMware.  It was the first time I had content picked up and linked to from others, and I’ll admit, it felt good.  To this day, my blog still gets some traffic from web searches about VMware’s Fault Tolerence feature.

Those early results did not turn into overnight success.  After VMworld 2008 and 2009, the blog has received relatively low numbers of visits, participation and readership. I allowed it to languish with only a few updates here and there.  The growth has been relatively slow, but recently doors are opening up.  Opportunities, like attending HP Discover and the Blogger Reality Contest, are allowing me to attend great networking and technical events,  to report on great new technology being introduced, and to refine my skills as a blogger.  The future for this blog is looking as bright as ever and I just wanted to to take time to thank those involved for the opportunities, support and encouragement.

First, SafeCopy looks a lot like Mozy on the surface.  I immediately see that they are cross platform with both Windows and Mac compatibility, but they also list iPhone.  Digging a bit deeper, I have found that SafeCopy also has a search engine feature for finding and retrieving your data online and thus all your files are from the iPhone or other mobile phone.  I have to say, the Google-style search for my backup is cool.  The online demo shows that you can see versioning of the individual files, also.   Like Mozy, the backups are encrypted.  SafeCopy uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption according to their website.  

Second, their data caps for the yearly rates are really competitive and more realistic in my opinion.  They show two plans on their website a 200GB and a 300GB a year plan available for $50 and $70 a year, respectively.  I’m currently paying about $100 per year for two computers at Mozy, although both computers have unlimited storage (but only for now).  All of my data currently backed up would fit within the 300GB limit, even with versioning (a lot of my data does not change — music and photo libraries, etc.).

Third, its one account for all our home computers – meaning, while I’ve only ever run Mozy on two computers, I could potentially protect more of our home computers.  This is fundamentally different than how Mozy used to work — where Mozy used to charge by the number of computers, SafeCopy charges by data limit and you’re free to use as many computers as you want.  Mozy will limit its users in both number of computers and the amount of storage moving forward.

Beyond these three points, however, SafeCopy has some very appealing features to differentiate it from other providers that I have seen.  The first of these features is something they call “TurboCopy”.  Essentially, “TurboCopy” is deduplication, and this is one area I found Mozy to be lacking.  For instance, I have two iTunes libraries with the same music, but I backed up both on Mozy (yes, blame me for killing unlimited storage plans by wasting space like this).  With SafeCopy, it should only store a single copy of these files and then allow me pointers for both computers to access them.  That is also the best use for your storage capacity.  By only storing the single copy, you’re not consuming your storage allotment with all the same data.

The other major differentiator is real-time backup.  The SafeCopy software is constantly watching for changes on the file system and when it finds one, it moves that to the backup cloud.    There are no schedules to manage making it even simpler to setup and maintain a backup.  But, this feature also worries me.  I am concerned about saturating my internet connection — a problem I experienced with Mozy even though it had trottling.  Fortunately, SafeCopy offers throttling, also.  Saturating my connection has become a problem since I added a Microcell at home.  When saturated, this obviously affects my ability to make and receive phone calls.

So, I will be beginning my SafeCopy trial this weekend and I’ll be posting my additional thoughts and impressions after I begin the process of backing up to their service.  And that brings me to the best part…  SafeCopy offers a free account with 3GB capacity.  I’ll be starting with this initially to test and setup my computers.  Stay tuned.

And, you can sign up for Safecopy below:

That was last year.  My photo preservation project has been pretty idle for the past year, but it hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it from time to time.  I’m thankful to have those photos, to be able to show them with my daughter and future generations and to have digital files to make prints from.

After tackling some of our family’s historical photos, I looked at my file of snapshots from my younger years and even early in my marriage – a time before we had digital cameras.  Two things are evident – we take lots more photos with the digital cameras than back in the film days and, secondly, prints are easy to get very disorganized.

What I am also struggling with is the best way to store and share these scans.  As of today, the most sharing that has happened with the scans is loading them to Facebook or Geni.com.  Unfortunately, neither site stores the photos in high-resolution (as far as I can tell) for sharing with others, so they aren’t print quality.   I don’t have my solution yet for this, but I suspect I’ll use something similar to Gallery, which I have used before for personal photo galleries prior to moving everything to PicasaWeb.

My project so far has left me with a few lessons learned and a few tips to share for you if you’re looking to preserve your family’s historical photos as well as your current snapshots.

Tip One – Organize your photos
The first tip is to start with organized files of photos.  This will greatly aid you once the photos are digitized and I’ll leave it at that.  If you have photos grouped before scanning, you’ll have a much easier time with the digital files once they are scanned.  One thing I’ve also been trying to do is get dates of events with groups of photos (if possible).  This additional information (metadata) will help a lot once you move from scanning to cataloging your photos (in Picasa or iPhoto or whatever photo management software you prefer).

Tip Two – Choose the best scanner for the job…
Before you say “no duh”, there are a few interesting tid-bits.  Scanners come in lots of shapes and sizes.  I picked up a $100 CanoScan a few years ago which is a great portable scanner.  For documents, I use the document feeder and scanner on my HP Officejet.

What I have been missing is a great portable scanner which you can use without a computer and I found a very good deal on one in December.  Radio Shack has previous generation Pandigital Photolink 4″x6″ photo scanners on clearance for only $15 at its company stores (company stores and not franchise stores — I found out in my own experience that franchisees do not honor the clearance price).  The Pandigital scanners are great because they scan directly to an SD card and do not require a computer and they only take a few second per print to scan them, as opposed to putting photos on a flat bed, previewing them, scanning in the images individually and naming them on a computer.  These Pandigital scanners are ultra-portable and come in a variety of sizes from 4″x6″ up to 8.5″x11″ (larger scanners are capable of scanning smaller prints, by the way).

My coworker, Jamie, purchased one of the larger 8.5″x11″ earlier in the year and raved about how good it worked for his snapshots.  On his advice, I began looking at these.  The 8.5″x11″ model is available from Amazon for $99.   I have found Kodak also makes a simliar scanner.

Tip Three – Catalog the scans
When I say catalog the scans, I don’t just mean to import them into iPhoto or Picasa and forget about them.  Cataloging, as any librarian will tell you, is a lot more than just collecting things.  It involves a process of categorizing, organizing and sorting through your items and assembling them in a way that you can search an easily find a particular subject.

Lifehacker recommends that you also spend the time to delete and purge any unwanted digital photos.  As I mentioned earlier, this is a big issue because most of us snap far more photos now with our digital cameras than taking the time to get good photos from back in the film days.  We don’t need ten out of focus photos of weird rock formations.

Tip Four – Archive your photos
Once you have assembled a good catalog of your photos, archiving becomes a big deal.  You have a lot invested in your library now and so you want to protect both the images and their metadata.  There are a lot of ways to go here, so what works for me may not work best for you.

Online backup is my first recommendation here.  If its not your first time on my site, you’ve probably heard me talk about Mozy and other online backup solutions.  These are my preferred backup method for anything you want to survive a fire.  #1 – Online backup moves your data offsite, which is a hallmark of backup strategy.  #2 – Online backup generally provides online download or offline download as part of its service.  #3 – Most services are generally cheap – Mozy, for instance, is $59 per year per computer.  I keep my library on one computer, so it costs me less than $5 per month — less than one Starbucks drink.

External hard drives would be my second recommendation.  These provide quick and easy recovery from a hard drive crash or accidental deletion.  Most external hard drives come with some sort of backup software — and if not — Windows has Windows Backup and the Mac has Time Machine.  I would recommend making it something automatically schedule and not something you must remember to do — because we are all human and forget.

Archival disks would be my third recommendation.  I don’t think that any one backup method is sufficient.  For instance, I use Mozy and Time Machine to backup my Macs at home.  The two protect differently and from different threats.  Mozy is for the most important — cannot part with this if my house burns down — data.  Time Machine is for the oh crap, my hard drive crashed situations (the external hard drive method).  In the same way, I think investing in Archival CD or DVD media is smart.  Once you create collections in your library, move these files onto archival media and then store them with your other valuables – offsite — in a safety deposit box or other form of offsite storage.  Ritz Camera has a nice description of Archival disks and why they are better than regular CD or DVD media.  (They also have a good set of tips for preserving photo prints). I recommend this because these have a greater chance of surviving for future generations.  And of course, keeping your archival media current is crucial.  Whatever replaces DVD’s as a format — you should move your data to that format in the future.  Same with file formats (but that’s a bigger discussion).  And most importantly – label these archival disks!

More Tips:

By no means am I an expert.  These sites have some great advice on the subject and so I want to share these links and articles with you:

• Lifehacker:  Future-Proof Your Digital Photos with Better Archiving Techniques – Jan 5, 2011
• Ritz Camera:  Tips for Photo Archiving & Storage – April, 2010
• Digital Photo Archive – Backup – Help and Tips

A week after our conversation, I began playing with WordPress on my own webserver and started putting together a website mock up with a template from WooThemes and content from their existing site.  It was fairly easy and I like playing around with websites like that.  Wordpress worked pretty well for the basic site.

WordPress also provided them with an easy way to keep the website up-to-date from the road or from their iPhones as they traveled and snapped photos.  Wordpress is supported and updated as security problems were found and should help them stay secure in the future.

Useful Plugins for Musicians
After putting their existing information into the site, I started looking at what else would be good on the site.  I located the fantastic website of developer Dan Coulter, http://blogsforbands.com/.  He had developed several WordPress plug-ins for bands, including a gig calendar and discography.  I added the discography plug-in to a new install of WordPress and began adding songs from the past album that I had.  It worked wondefully — allowing me to post each album, the songs, words to the songs and links to buy the songs from iTunes, Napster or Amazon’s MP3 store. It also allowed a link to buy a physical copy…  but from where?

Enter another plug-in – Tips & Tricks HQ – developers of the WordPress eStore.  I had used WP E-Commerce in the past, but it didn’t want to install on my musician’s web host and it didn’t easily offer digital downloads, but WordPress eStore did…   We added the plugin and began populating it items, like T-Shirts and CD’s.

Our musician friends utilize ReverbNation heavily and so I was able to find their widgets (which our friends were already using on their original site) and place those into text widgets on the sidebar.  The cool thing about this approach is that it allows them to update their music players, gig calendar and mailing list all within ReverbNation and have it feed their website.  Likewise, their website is feeding ReverbNation new mailing list addresses for future mailings and it is collecting stats of who is listening to their music.   ReverbNation is a free service, but offers enhanced and additional pay-for services.

As we were going live and testing everything, I found a couple things – like emails being sent from the eStore were sending from “WordPress”, but Tips & Tricks HQ had another plugin to allow us to customize the friendly name of the sender.

If any other bands or musicians are looking for a solution, I’ll be the first to recommend WordPress!

I had been contemplating getting a Mac Mini to replace my aging Apple TV at home and to offer us the capability of watching NetFlix or Hulu directly on our TV.   I had found dongle cables to offer video and audio to HDMI on the last revision of Mac Mini and was just waiting primarily on our house build to get going to see how our money looked as we were finishing the project.  I have been trying to be very good about my technology purchases – since I felt like we had higher priorities.

And today, I am glad we waited.  I hope to add a new Mac Mini to our collection at home soon as our media Mac – our home base for iTunes content and photos.  I still feel like I need to wait, but my wishlist of Apple products keeps growing…  An iPad, a new iPhone 4 and now add a Mac Mini.  I also want to replace my aging iMac with a new version for video editing…

The biggest issue with the Mac Mini media “server” I see going forward is software, given today’s hardware revision.  I had blogged before (here and here) about wanting some of the iTunes capabilities brought over to iPhoto – to be able to setup a library and have all my photos automatically push up to it and to be able to pull down photos easily in iPhoto from a central library.

I’ve mentioned my friend before with the agency, and good photo management is a problem that they have in their all Mac environment.  They currently have their photos on a file share, but iPhoto is much better solution since you could add keywords and ratings and all the other metadata that iPhoto allows.  But this same need applies to the multi-Mac home.

On a personal note, my wife and I are in the final stages of planning our new home, which we hope to begin building in the coming months.  Any free time that I would have had to blog about my experiences has been consumed with house plans, builder meetings and other items to prepare for this major undertaking.  My wife is attempting to chronicle our build on her blog, My Green Glasses.  The house will be a certified green home, Energy Star certified and *possibly* LEED certified.  We know that we will be close to meeting requirements for a LEED certification and we are looking at what additional things need to be done to make it happen and whether it is worth it or not.

For those in the beta test program, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.  Quicken Financial Life shows a lot of promise, but many of the features are yet to be implemented.   The release was supposed to come during the summer months of 2009, but any reference to that release have since been hidden on the Intuit website.  Pages of information previewing the release have been removed and the Quicken Blog post is the only source for any current information.

My personal frustration over this release is apparently shared by many users, judging by the comments left on the blog post.  I wonder why it taking so much time to show any real progress in the product.  QIF import, for instance, isn’t implemented making transferring your historical data next to impossible.  The only way to import historical data is upgrading from Quicken for Mac 2007 – which I don’t own.  Capturing what’s left of the switchers, like myself,  is a big way that Intuit could capitalize and profit with this release, but it seems to be ignored.  Oh, well, time will tell.

As I’ve chronicled, I think the initial backup is the biggest challenge for all online backup solutions, Mozy included.  My experience taking one month really isn’t that bad given a relatively slow upstream connection and 60GB plus of data to backup.  The process was relatively easy, though I needed to throttle the bandwidth to keep my Internet connection usable while I was at home.  Thanks to a comment on an earlier post, I was able to find that very hidden setting in the Mozy client.

Throttling the bandwidth solved one problem, but presented a new one – it took longer to completely my initial.  Even with bandwidth throttled, it seemed to affect my normal activites online were degraded.  So many nights, I’d stop the backup when I arrive home and start it back (when I didn’t forget) before going to bed.

All in all, I’m impressed.  Its a nice product and the price is right.  Even though I had the paid account for a year, its taken me to month 11 to actually let it back something up, so I get to renew my newly backed up account at the end of this month.

The feature that I liked most about this product is its smart filters.  Out of the box, the configuration screen comes with a set of handy filters to easily pick and choose what to backup.  For instance, if I’m a writer and I want to protect all my Word documents, just check the box for Word docs and whalla, its going to find those on the entire hard drive and back them up.  And in my Mac version, it includes filters for iCal, Mail, Pages, Numbers, etc. out of the box.  Its a very intuitive package and would be easy for any in-experienced user to use.

HTC has been looking into reselling the Mozy service to our residental customers, and after my experience, I can say that I fully endorse that option.  I think this is a service that all users should have, even if not for all their data, for their critical data.  As a matter of fact, I have several that are coming to mind right now that I should sign up for a free 2GB account.  I guess I have a few emails to write and a few phone calls to make…

My wife and I went into Circuit City yesterday to purchase a new printer.  We found and purchased an Officejet with an attached document feeder for the scanner.  So, yesterday afternoon, I got it all setup and running at home.  I started scanning some of my mortgage documents and trying to store them.  Some quick Google searches later, I’d found how to create searchable PDF’s in Adobe Acrobat Pro, and I was very happy with my results.  I finally had a pretty good solution.   Between Spotlight and my folder structure, things looked pretty good.  Documents were fairly easy to find.  But it wasn’t perfect.  

A few Google searches later, I was demoing DevonThink, which is a great product.  Unfortunately, the Pro version is very pricey and the scan features are currently disabled in this current release, although the very kind error message said they’re working to get that back quickly.  I really liked the software and its very full features, maybe a little too much so for what I was looking for, so the search continued.  

A MacRumors forum post then pointed me to a little app called Yep.  I downloaded and I’ve been demoing it overnight.  Color me impressed.  

This little app is wonderful at what it does – it finds and categories your PDF files.  You can limit it to your home directory, the whole computer, or just your documents folder.  I opted for the latter, since that’s where all my relevant PDF files are at.  

Yep lets you add tags to your PDF files to for quick search.  Much like a blog, you have a tag cloud that shows you which tags are most used in your PDF collection.  You can organize the PDF’s into logical collections of PDF files, too.  The PDF’s all stay in their original file system location (no duplication here) and renaming or updating them has no effect to their record in Yep.  

Yep lets you do a full preview (even full screen view) of your PDF document.  You can open it with your preferred “normal” PDF viewer/editor if you would like to perform touch-ups.  You are able to view documents in your Finder filesystem locations in one view and by collection with just a simple click.  

The downside to all this is its PDF only…  So it won’t be tracking your original documents in Word, iWork or OpenOffice.  But that was kinda my point.  I wasn’t looking for something to track everything (that’s call the filesystem).  I was looking for a nice program to help archive my documents and keep it all straight.  

If something catastrophic were to happen, I need help finding my key documents and getting that information to put things back on the road, and I think this app can do that.  There are some things left to do for me – like finding and backing up its database of tags (or does it attach them to the PDF file??).  All in all, I think I’ve found the perfect solution to my document archiving.