Apolitically Incorrect » Raves

Reclaiming Free Space from a Time Machine Backup

Rob Oakes — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:24:09 +0000

As much as I love Apple’s Time Machine, it’s a hard drive pig. If not carefully watched, the little porker will use every spare byte of free space it can. What is particularly obnoxious, however, is that you might not realize you have a problem until it is too late and you’re backup drive is filled to capacity.

Take my situation as an example. I have a single MacBook Pro notebook with a 250 GB hard drive. Most of my files are text based and on the smallish side. In comparison, my networked backup is a hefty 1.5 terabytes. The combination of small hard drive and large backup drive had me thoroughly convinced that I wouldn’t have to worry about free up space for years.

I was wrong.

Because of the size of the backup drive, I like to keep other files on it – mostly music and video files – so that I have a duplicate copy. But earlier this week, I got a nasty surprise while trying to add an album I had just downloaded from Amazon Mp3. The Mac informed me the backup drive was full.

As you might guess, I found this to be very confusing. How could the drive be full? Sure … I had three or four hundred gigabytes of music and video files on it, but there was no way that the Time Machine backup could be over a terabyte in size … Could it?

This situation didn’t smell right, so I decided to investigate. I mounted the backup drive and tracked down the Time Machine sparsebundle and confirmed the impossible. My Time Machine Backup was a whopping 1.15 terabytes worth of disk space. “How in the world could the backup be so large?”, I asked myself. “Time Machine is supposed to be an incremental system. 1.15 terabytes is big enough to hold every bit and byte on my computer four and a half times over!”

First, I got annoyed; then, I got angry. What really tipped the scale toward seething fury, however, was failing to find any straightforward way of getting the space back. Yet another spectacular example of Apple’s “simple over useful” approach to computer design!

After the first bout of obscenities, I came to a simple conclusion: I could publicly express my dissatisfaction with Apple’s product line or I could go about trying to find a solution. Publicly spouting off was unlikely to help much, so I opted for the latter option. What follows is a brief summary of what I learned.

The Technical Details

The good news is that you can reclaim your drive space. It’s not even very hard. Here’s what you need to do:

Delete any and all unnecessary backups from the sparse bundle image. Time Machine is tremendously aggressive in making sure that you’re protected and while this might make sense for the near past, do you really need that backup from 9 months ago?
Mount your AirDisk, Samba share or Time Capsule as a local drive.
Use the hdiutil to compact the sparse bundle.

Step 1: Delete Backups from the Sparse Bundle

Start by loading Time Machine from the root of your main hard drive. (In my case, the hard drive is named “RobOakes-Mac”.) Next, select the snapshot that you are interested in deleting from the timeline at right. Finally, press the gear button and select the “Delete Backup” option.

Time Machine will ask if you want to proceed. Confirm that you do, indeed, want to permanently remove the selected backup by pressing the “Ok” button.

At this point – if you’re using Snow Leopard – you may run into a rather obnoxious bug. For reasons that make little sense, the confirmation dialog box doesn’t always appear. Instead, the user interface might freeze and you’ll be treated to the spinning beach ball of death. If this happens, be patient. It might take a minute or two for Time Machine to go about it’s business. (Since this problem doesn’t exist on regular Leopard, go ahead and curse Apple’s grandiose, false, and self-serving rhetoric about parallelism. It might even make you feel better, I know it helps me.)

When the damn beach ball finally goes away, just hit enter. Apparently, the dialog box really is there, you just can’t see it. So, use your imagination and pretend.

Finally, you will be prompted to enter an administrator password.

When you’re all finished deleting snapshots, click on the main “Cancel” button. This will take you back to your desktop.

If everything worked as planned, you should see something similar to the screenshot below. There will be a “Delete One Backup” indicator for each of the backups you removed. Important: Wait for the indicators to finish before proceeding to the next step.

Step 2: Mount the Disk Using Finder

Since we will be using a command line utility to compact the sparsebundle, you will need to mount your backup disk before proceeding. While this can be done a variety of ways, the easiest is to open up the finder and select the backup drive from the list under “Shared”. (When it is mounted, you will see a little eject symbol next to the computer name.)

Now open up a command line terminal and go to the /Volumes/ folder.

cd /Volumes/

Spend a bit of time looking in the various subdirectories until you find the correct .sparsebundle file. The sparsebundle file will have the general form of Computername_MACaddress.sparsebundle. Note the name of this file, it will be important in Step 3.

Step 3: Use the Command Line to Shrink the Sparsebundle Image

Once you’ve found your sparsebundle, use the following command to reclaim your free space (be sure to replace SparsebundleName with the name of your sparsebundle):

hdiutil compact SparsebundleName

Depending on just how your fat your Time Machine backup has gotten, this might take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Regardless, the good news is that it works! After aggressively cutting away old backups, I was able to get my 1.15 terabyte porker down to a much more reasonable 500 gigabytes.

“An Ounce of Prevention”

While the procedure described above will let you fix the problem, it is far from an ideal solution. For starters, it’s only a temporary fix. Time Machine still has a gluttonous appetite for space and you’ll need to repeat the above steps whenever you want some of it back. For me, that works out to every six months. Further, the procedure is time consuming. The obnoxious ui freezes, spinning beach balls, backup deletions, and sparse bundle shrinking requires more time than anyone should have to spend on this problem.

This is a clear case of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound a cure.” Rather than resorting to digital liposuction, it’s much better to simply limit how big the sparse bundle can become. This is no more complicated than using the “-size” flag when you create it. But if you (like me) overlooked that small step, then welcome to the club. Let’s just hope that Apple implements a more intelligent way to managing Time Machine backup size in the relatively near future!

Time Drive 0.1.5: Incremental Changes

Rob Oakes — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:19:10 +0000

It’s been an interesting couple of days. I was rather honored to see that Lifehacker did a short highlight of Time Drive, which I thought was pretty cool. It’s always been one of my goals to have something featured in Lifehacker or Gizmodo, and now I’m going to have to scratch that off the list of goals. But that’s okay, I’ve got other things to fill the void. Like … how exactly does one get invited to present at TED?

On another note … while I knew that I would see some kind of traffic bump due to the article in Lifehacker, I wasn’t necessarily prepared for the magnitude. In mathematics, there is this thing called a step function. It’s where you move from one value to another more or less instantaneously. It looks like a step, hence the name. Sure, It may not actually exist, since even very dramatic shifts still have a non vertical slope; but even so, the change in my traffic might as well be a step-function. Between yesterday and today, I’ve had more visits to this site than I’ve had in much of the rest of the year combined. I think that’s kind of cool, though it probably won’t last.

(This might be a good time to say that I am actually rather proud of my “lackluster” web traffic. Though it might not necessarily be that impressive, it is, nevertheless, mine. I’ve worked hard for it, and I revel in the fact that some 40 to 50 people each day find the unorganized garbage of my mind intoxicating. Some of them even come back!)

But as interesting as that might be, traffic stats is probably not why you're here. Good thing, since I’ve got announcements.

Time Drive Update

As of this moment, Time Drive has been updated to version 0.1.5 and is available on the project page.

Let me start by saying what this release isn’t. I really wanted to write a blog post and say, “Time Drive is available, and now it’s really easy to install!” In the past few days, this has been by far the most requested “feature” and I’ve tried hard to deliver. (Honest!) Unfortunately, creating a binary installer for Windows and a self contained package for Mac has proven … illusive. I’m not really a programmer and the inner workings of py2app and py2exe are tremendously frustrating. I have made some serious headway, but stand-alone installers are still “forthcoming.”

But a lot of things are new, and some of them are even shiny! Moreover, the relatively huge interest has gotten me excited about the program, and I’ve spent some time refining things that didn’t quite work right. “So …” you ask, “What’s different?”

New Stuff

For starters, the Snapshot History on the main window actually works now. If you want to restore a previous version of a file, you can select it from the list and click the add button (+) to open the archive browser. It will automatically load the snapshot as it looked on the selected day and time.

If you can’t find your file there, don’t despair, from within the archive browser, you can easily navigate forward and backward between snapshots by using the arrow buttons or by dragging the slider to the appropriate place. Once you have it sitting on the snapshot of interest, hit the refresh button to reload the file list. This is starting to get closer to the overall vision of the program that I originally stole. Now, you can actually use Time Drive to keep tabs on how your files change.

I’ve also been trying to get things cleaned up so that the program runs better. I went back and modified the code so that all long running processes use their own threads. This should help the UI from freezing and lets you do several things at once.

I also cleaned up the way that Time Drive interfaces with cron. Now it works on Mac without requiring tweaks. In the relatively near future, I’ll write a proper backend for Windows so that is uses the Windows Vista task scheduler. Installing cron on Cygwin is just too much of a pain.

Looking into the future, I foresee support for Amazon S3, pruning and naming snapshots, and advanced folder options. There may be other changes as inspiration strikes. Expect additional announcement soon.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it. Why this may be a bit of a minor addition, there’s still some nice stuff. (I know, I’m biased.) Head over the download page and check it out.

Why Bother With a Personal Website?

Rob Oakes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:45:09 +0000

Seven or eight years ago, I remember seeing a print advertisement for Apple’s latest computer: the MacBook. Like most Apple ads, it hyped the benefits of a connected digital lifestyle promising things like “Web design for the rest of us,” and “Access to the ‘Podcast Revolution.’” At the time, I remember thinking, “Why would I ever want to have a connected digital lifestyle? I like my anonymity. That just seems like a privacy violation ready to happen!”

And while I still hold many of those same opinions, I probably should mention that I have thoroughly changed my ideas on the necessity of the digital lifestyle. And, ironically, it wasn’t the promises of convenience, understanding or creativity which resulted in my change of heart. Not at all. Rather, I came to realize that I should embrace digital existence for one simple reason: necessity.

Why A Personal Website Is Necessary

Your privacy is completely dead. Just come to grips with it now. With cameras included on every device, cell-phones everywhere, always connected “social media” and a general attitude of “Privacy? Who needs that?” your hope of quietly avoiding the scrutiny of others might as well be a chemical induced fantasy.

Don’t believe me? Take a moment to scroll through your Facebook friends list. As you do, you’ll learn a host of details about what many people are doing. You’ll probably see pictures of their recent outings and learn a tremendous deal about the people in their lives. Now ask yourself, “How many people in that list am I actually friends with?”

If you are like me, the answer to that question is probably “about half.” And the other half will be comprised of a bunch of acquaintances and relative strangers. And yet, I either know (or can find out) all sorts of details about their most intimate lives. This includes where they are, what they’re doing, who they’re dating, and even where they rank on the “irresistible meter.”

But while Facebook, MySpace and other social media might have delivered the fatal blow, they were merely the culmination of a trend that was already well underway. Ultimately, the seeds of privacy’s demise were planted twenty or thirty years ago when internet chat, message boards, and email arrived on the scene. These technologies demonstrated one thing very clearly: the freedom and convenience of mass communication outweighs the loss of anonymity or the perceived security of privacy.

And even the death of privacy didn’t necessarily require that I embrace the “digital lifestyle.” That particular honor goes to another implement of convenience: the search engine. Whereas Facebook, MySpace, and other communications tools make it possible for us to give up our privacy, search enginesmakes it really easy for others to violate it.

I remember the first time that someone told me they had “Googled” me. A friend and I had been talking about applications and graduate programs, and he asked me how I had become involved with a small humanitarian operation called CHOICE.

After I answered the question, I asked, “How did you know that I was involved with CHOICE?” I was pretty certain that it hadn’t ever come up in casual conversation.

“Oh, I Googled you and saw a newspaper article on your project.”

Since I generally had gone out of my way to avoid having my life archived by the Google, this was somewhat of a wake-up call. (I wasn’t even aware of the newspaper article on the project.) And, as you might guess, I politely excused myself from the conversation to head straight for my computer.

After typing in “Rob Oakes, Utah” into the little search box, I found out all kinds of interesting things. I learned that a 1999 horsemanship clinic in Scotland had generally been a success and that I had been instrumental in bringing Patch Adams to the University of Utah. I also learned that a group of mostly crazy philosophy students took issue with a letter I had written to my student newspaper. Luckily, I didn’t find anything negative or terribly embarrassing.

Define Yourself Before Someone Else Does

In an age when Google can easily aggregate and filter the content of your private existence, the only real defense is to proactively define yourself. Yell it to the world! Tell them who you are! Exhibit yourself and the things that describe you. This might take the form of your thoughts, ideas, interests, hobbies, family, friends, feelings, or something you are passionate about. Online diaries, self-written books, poems, pets, or ramblings on your favorite TV show. What is important is that you are the author of your own persona. And it is for this reason that every adult or professional should have a personal website.

A website is a tremendously efficient way to share with the world. It is accessible to anyone with a browser and a bit of curiosity and can easily be the one single place where others can access all your writings, thoughts and curriculum vitae. And while you're at it, you should also include information about how people can get in touch with you.

A well crafted and maintained website is a sign of an organized and thoughtful professional. If they are an academic, you can ask, “Does this person consistently publish?” “What material do they exhibit from their work?” “Are they proud of the things that they have accomplished?” A highly visible person is often someone who who wants to collaborate and network with others, which is an invitation for future opportunities.

And given all of the above, what does it say if that information isn’t there?

Proactively defining yourself is so important that a mentor once told me me it is the very first thing any serious person should do. “Everyone needs a ‘web presence’,” I remember him saying at the time. He used his website for publications, helpful hints, pictures and other things that he was passionate about. And, ironically, despite his status as a world famous researcher, the single most popular article on his site was about how to have a good time on a bike. It had been viewed tens of thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of times.

But a good-website goes beyond establishing your online persona. It can be a tremendously valuable repository of knowledge. After all, where should you leave notes on how to set-up and configure your home server, the instructions for installing PyQt on Mac OS X for the first time, or the essential (though obscure) Subversion commands that you infrequently need.

Others have successfully used their web sites to create a diary of life, adventures, and miscellaneous travels. Or to share pictures, videos or memories. Or even to release stress by spouting off at no-one in particular. You can too.

A Website Is More Than Social Media

Okay, so Facebook and MySpace can provide you with some of the same benefits as a good website. But they aren’t really the same. Consider: the very format of Facebook and related services doesn’t really lend itself to cohesive thinking or content. Rather, they encourage the “Twitter” mentality. That is to say, “Explain the state of the world in 120 characters or less.” (In case you haven’t tried, it’s hard to communicate important things in 120 characters.)

And what’s worse is that those 120 characters have a tremendously short half life. I’ve read in places that the lifetime of a “Tweet” or “Facebook Update'” is only about fifteen minutes. In contrast, a good personal website or blog can make your work and thoughts permanent in a way that social media simply cannot.

Conclusion

A website matters because it allows for you to set your own identity. When you type your name into the little search box, what you prefer to see? A link to your website – which showcases your identity, your very best work and thoughts – or that picture where you passed out at the family Christmas party? It’s a pretty good bet that Google will have links both.

Thus, take control of your digital existence and build yourself a website. You’ll be glad that you did.

I Killed Twitter

Rob Oakes — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:59:06 +0000

I just killed Twitter. The whole website is down, it can’t even be pinged. So ... just in case I get asked about it, here’s my story. I was trying to post an update about the brand new, easy to install binaries of LyX-Outline and then … the little twitter widget (twidget, what a sickeningly sweet name) went black and crashed. Now, I can’t contact the website, even when I try to access it from another computer on the neighbor’s wireless. Who’s to say that little people don’t have any power?

Update: Okay, in the face of both reality and facts ... it may be possible that I did not kill Twitter, per se. But my interaction most certainly had a negative consequence. That, at least, you have to give me.

Introducing LyX-Outline 0.1

Rob Oakes — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:16:12 +0000

Writing anything - whether it be a book, or a short story or an angry letter to your boss - is substantially more than starting from the first idea moment of inspiration and continuing to the final draft. Rather, writing involves a fair number of idea fragments, fleeting moments of inspiration, and a tremendous number of dead ends.

It is incredibly unfortunate that most writing software, however, is geared to organizing and structuring the document after most of the hard work has already happened. It simply assumed that most of the planning and layout has already happened and the author is ready to string words together. Unfortunately, this assumption overlooks one important truth: ideas are best defined as they are expressed. Thus, it's usually about the time that the a writer sits down to compose the draft, that the document's true structure becomes apparent. In my own case, this often leads to a flurry of reorganization. And it’s during the restructuring that the real battle begins.

When in full creative passion, I am typically working with three or four different programs all at the same time: OneNote is open so that I can access my ideas, Word is there to start collecting the somewhat finished text, and I'll also probably be using a MindMapper so that I can see a visual representation of the document structure. The tools are separate and don't communicate with one another. Thus, a change made in one place needs to be made everywhere. And all too often, that I end up fighting the word-processor and the notetaker, and the mind mapper. It is tremendously frustrating to battle the tools of your adopted trade. Luckily, I am not alone in my frustration.

In the past everal years, a number of programs have become available that leave the linear model of writing behind. On the Mac platform, one such tool looms above the others: Scrivener. Central to Scrivener's function are two important metaphors: that of the outline and that of the corkboard. And it works really, really well. There are just a few minor problems. First: Scrivener is only available for Mac and Scrivener's lead developer has made it clear that there won't be versions for other platforms. Second: Scrivener was really designed with creative writing in mind. Thus, while it can be used for long and complicated documents, this is a slightly less than straightforward process. Last, to create said fancy documents, Scrivener requires the raw use of a markup language (and all of the associated headaches that come with it).

The document processor, LyX, however, excels in many areas where Scrivener falls short. It is built upon the mature and robust underpinnings of LaTeX, the typesetting language of choice in the science and engineering. And more importantly, it is easy to use (where LaTeX most decidedly is not). But it fails in the same way as Microsoft Word and other word processors, it is a linear writing tool and doesn’t offer a great deal of work-flow flexibility. That is where LyX-Outline comes in.

LyX-Outline is a marriage between Scrivener's organizational tools and LyX's typesetting tools.

Looking for Flexibility

While you can download and play with LyX-Outline, please reember that is still a forthcoming add-on to the LyX. And while you find it useful, this release is an alpha level technical preview. Right now, you can view the structure of your document at a glance in the corkboard, move things around, poke about in the outliner, and even jot your winded thoughts with the very basic plain text editor.

But even though some of the functionality is lacking, you can start to explore. And as you do so, one of the first things you might notice is that LyX-Outline has been designed with flexibility in mind. Nearly all of the tools can be docked, ripped away, or hidden if they are not needed. The work environment should adapt to your work habits, not the other way round. Whenever the writer needs to adapt to the environment, a moment of productivity and a spark of life has been lost.

A Quick Overview

The main interface consists of three main elements. This includes the document map, the editor pane, and the dock tools. As described above, the document map and the dock tools can be relocated, docked or left free floating (depending on your preference). And if you don't find them useful, they can quickly be hidden.

The document map lets you see a hierarchical list of every item in your project. Selecting one of the items displays its content's in the editor pane. The editor pane is the main text processing portion of LyX-Outlineand can be toggled between a text editor (plain text only at the moment) and a corkboard view.

In addition to the main editor and corkboard, there is an additional corkboard and outliner tool available as a dockable widgets. Just as in Scrivener, you can view the pieces of your documents in many way. Every item is a document, and an index card, and an outline point. They are intimately tied together and any change made to the order or content of one will be reflected everywhere. The document map is used to navigate the content of the main window.

The dock tools, however, can be controlled separately. You can view the entire document, or filter to a specific level in the hierarchy via a drop-down menu. In the future, filtering by search term, keyword, document structure, or tag will also be possible.

Item Summary and Organization

The health of any written work can also be greatly improved by connecting a simple synopsis to a larger chunk of text. This makes it much easier to check the flow of your work at a glance . A summary can easily be added to any individual item in the collection by double clicking on it's index card in the corkboard or the synopsis column in the outliner. The summary text is independent from the full text and can include pertinent information that helps you structure the document. For now, the synopsis must be entered by hand; however, future versions will allow for automatic generation of the synopsis from the text.

Of Outlines and Index Cards

Scrivener (and LyX-Outline as it's dedicated clone) utilizes multiple metaphors. The Corkboard may be useful in some instances, but will be less helpful in others. Ditto for the outliner. Either way, it is important to know that both the corkboard and the outliner display sub-items. If you are using the main corkboard, these sub items will be connected to the active item in the document map. If you are using the dock tool, they can be filtered via the drop-down menu. From the corkboard, you can then edit items by double clicking on either their title, or their summary. You can reorder them through drag and drop. From the outliner, you can add new items or sub items, or delete them from the document. You can also change their order (by using the up or down arrow buttons) or change their indentation level (with the left and right arrow buttons).

Minding the Potholes

And that is a very quick tour of the Outline modules for LyX. As noted above, this release of LyX-Outline is a prototype and it is still very far from its intended target. Thus, if it doesn't meet your needs right out of the box, please be patient. The mantra of OpenSource is "release early, release often." In this case, I have erred on the side of early and as you might suspect, there are some dangerously rough edges. These include:

Unfinished interfaces. Most of your manipulation will probably need to happen in the outliner pane. This includes adding or removing new document nodes, as well as indenting or un-indenting the document selection. The final version will include ubiquitous drag and drop.
A crappy editor. The current editor is plain text is a placeholder only. Ultimately, LyX-Outline will be integrated with the LyX editor and have access to all of it's very powerful features. It is important to keep that future in mind.
No export option. While you can save and open past documents, there is currently no way to actually get them out of the program.

In it's current incarnation, this prototype is valuable for pecking out thoughts and playing with the organizational tools. I am releasing it so that people can see how the tools might look in their final form and provide feedback. Please do so. Download the source, use it as you can, and let me know what you think. What things work? What things don’t? What features would you as users like to see?

Update: You can download the source code and find installation instructions on the LyX-Outline project page.

Living with Google Voice

Rob Oakes — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:25:20 +0000

I don’t really like telephones all that much. I understand that they are a necessity of modern existence and can be greatly convenient, but that doesn’t make them pleasant. They ring incessantly and result in virtual slavery to an overly complicated lifestyle. Keeping track of callers on a home phone, a cell phone and a work phone is a nasty piece of business. It usually means running two (or three) separate voicemail inboxes. And there is nothing worse than battling voice mail after a long weekend. Nothing.

Luckily, Google agrees with me. In 2006, Google acquired a California based start-up called GrandCentral. GrandCentral had a pretty simple vision of phones: they should work for people. That means one number that never changes, for life. Here’s the vision: landlines change, cell phones change and work numbers change. It is far more convenient to provide people with a single number that can ring to work, home and cell. One number instead of three.

GrandCentral did all sort of other nifty things too, like send e-mails when a new voice mail arrived, let you transfer calls between phones, screen callers before choosing to answer, and automatically direct individuals based on who they are or what day it is (useful for sending the boss to voice mail after 5:30 pm). Even David Pogue of the New York Times had nice things to say.

But for everything it did well, GrandCentral also had some rough edges. For one, it didn’t support text messages. Thus, when I experimented with GrandCentral a year ago, I also had to give out my cell-phone number. And while I would tell people to call me on the GrandCentral line, said people preferred to call me on the cell phone. After all, they wanted to make sure that I would answer; never mind that GrandCentral would ring to my cell office and home all at the same time.

At some point. Google decided that they would overhaul the service and GrandCentral shuttered its doors to the public. And while the service remained active for people who were already subscribers, I found that GrandCentral became a fancy business number due to its limitations. Today, after nearly 21 months of development, Google announced GrandCentral 2.0: Google Voice. I think it’s fair to say that Google’s developers took off the rough edges.

Familiar Vision, New Features

In addition to the the features of GrandCentral, Google Voice includes:

Text Messaging. Google added full support for SMS messaging. You can send and receive an unlimited number of alphanumeric characters through the web or from a cell phone.
Conference Calls and Call Recording. Have you ever needed to take a message, but don’t have anything to write on? Google Voice makes it very easy to record parts of a conversation. Just hit 4 on the keypad to start and stop recording the conversation.
Voice Mail Transcription. All of your voice mail messages are automatically transcribed by the industrious gnomes of voice recognition.
Directory Assistance (GOOG-411)
Integration with Google Contacts.

Though I’ve only been using the expanded service for a few days, Google Voice has already begun to change how I think about telecommunications. To illustrate why, let’s look at one of the most hated part of any phone system: voicemail. Quite often, I know that there is important information in a message; but to get to that message requires listening to 15 other messages of crap. Sure, I can skip those messages and slog through them later, but that leads to a cluttered inbox. Cluttered inboxes aren’t good and well meaning phone companies have created ways to ensure that you don’t accumulate horrific numbers of old messages. Verizon’s strategy, in particular, is tantamount to torture. Prior to retrieving new messages, you have to manage old ones.

Google Voice changes this. Voicemail messages and text messages are now filed into an inbox that is wonderfully similar to GMail The phone number and contact information of the caller, in addition to a transcribed copy of the message. It’s really easy to delete unsolicited, old or unimportant messages. Important new messages can be retrieved first, before voicemail fatigue sets in. Simply awesome!

Attention to Detail

It gets better. One of GrandCentral’s neatest features was the ability to route calls based on who was calling. Work calls could be sent to a special after-hours message box or calls from family could immediately be routed to ring to the cell-phone. Tremendously convenient! But GrandCentral had no easy way to import existing contact information. As a result, it was a huge amount of work to program this feature for all but the most common callers. In contrast, Google Voice is integrated with GMail and the Google address book. The same address book that can be synced with iPhone! With the contact information already there, it’s easy to create groups and apply rules.

Similar attention to detail has been given to text messaging. While other services would forward text messages, responses had to be sent via a web interface. Google Voice, on the other hand, let’s you respond to forwarded text messages right from your phone (even from my decidedly outdated, non-smart cell). Thanks to Google Voice, I don’t need to give out my cell-phone number to communicate with the modern American teenager.

And thus we arrive to my favorite change to the service. Through Google Voice, all calls placed with the continental United States are free and calls overseas are cheap. For example, calls to the United Kingdom are a mere 2 cents per minute. In comparison, Verizon or Comcast charge nearly $1.49 per minute for the same call. The prospect of free national long distance and text messaging, combined with ridiculously cheap international provides real options to simplify my phone plan. In a tight economy where I need to save every penny, this is a welcome development!

If there is a weakness in the service, it is making out-bound calls. There are two ways to do this: 1) through the web app or 2) by dialing the Google Voice number. Option 2 can be a tremendous pain, though it is a pain I’ll put up with for free national long-distance. Luckily, options 1 is both easy and convenient. Need to make an appointment with a business colleague? Find him in your Google address book and click “Call.” Google Voice will automatically connect the call and ring you on your phone of choice. The Google Voice number appears on the caller ID and all is generally right with the world.

Conclusion

The net result is revolutionary. Voice does for phones what Google’s original algorithm did for search: it completely transforms how you think about telecommunications. If the phone companies aren’t scared yet, they should be. The search giant is saying that it wants to be the world’s communications hub, in addition to its keeper of knowledge. Google Voice will change the status quo in fundamentally wonderful ways. I hope that the telcom giants are paying attention and are willing to adapt. If not, they will probably cease to exist.

Edit - March 17, 2009: Even though GrandDialer worked for the first several days after I converted to the new service, it has since stopped responding. This is a tremendous shame, since GrandDialer nicely integrated my iPod Touch into GrandCentral. It is my hope that either Google or some enterprising developer will create its equivalent. I have edited the entry accordingly.

Some Alternatives to MobileMe

Rob Oakes — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:37:12 +0000

MobileMe (the email, contacts, calendars and file service from Apple) is something that seemingly everyone loves to hate. It’s too expensive, doesn’t work right, and doesn’t really offer anything that you can’t find for free. This winning combination of traits have lead to more than a few articles detailing how to sync, share and publish without handing even more money over to Apple.

Even with the plethora of articles explaining how to save time and money, however, it is possible to find happy users of Apple products. Users which will "vigorously" share their "carefully considered" opinions. One user from MacWorld raises the following (somewhat legitimate) points:

Are you the pot or the kettle? First you say don’t expect the rest of us to have the same needs/wants, and then you make a blanket statement … [which] is full of assumptions that are not necessarily correct ...

“It’s way to expansive.” If you only use web hosting, then maybe. MobileMe is $8.25/month. how much is hosting? Does hosting give you automatic sync of photo galleries, contacts, ect. How much is Flickr pro on top of regular web hosting.

Alternatives are not that hard to find, set up or use. Really? It seems that not everyone knows of alternatives. And then why did the commenter have to make suggestions and corrections? It seems to me [that] it’s not as easy as you say.

This happy MobileMe user has essentially laid down a challenge. He implicitly (and others explicitly) state that they are willing to pay good money for their time. And in the same bravado common to members of the Cult of Cupertino, he almost dares someone to disagree with him. Since this topic has become a bandwagon and I’ve decided to generally hop in its direction, I accept this challenge. You might even say that figuring out ways to avoid using Apple’s signature web service has become a bit of a hobby.

The Challenge

As with any good competition, first let’s size up Apple’s offerings. From there, we can begin to analyze the competition and see how they stack up in comparison. Here’s what MobileMe delivers: integrated email, calendar, contacts, picture sharing, online file storage/synchronization, and web publishing (also quaintly known as blogging). Advertised as “Exchange for the rest of us,” the service is supposed to deliver the same ease of access that most major companies enjoy. Put another way, MobileMe makes it convenient to keep everything up to date on all of life’s different computing devices.

The lifestyle that MobileMe promises is extremely compelling. When it works correctly, it’s the future of computing. Knowing that schedules, contacts, and files are where I need them to be when I want them is priceless. Even better, any changes made to one are instantly sent to all other devices at the same time. That’s cool! But that’s not all, MobileMe offers a few additional strengths as well:

Works with iPhone/iPod Touch and Mac. There is something tremendously cool about true, cross-platform and mobile sync. While I’ve long had something similar available to my Windows machine and handheld through Exchange, MobileMe hits both the Mac as well.
Integration. Apple has made sync goodness available through a single log-on. Convenience makes it more likely that all of the services will actually be used. It gets better if you use a Mac (nearly 8% of Americans do!) since the MobileMe services are deeply integrated into the operating system and iLife.
Websites and Blogs. Though it is not advertised, MobileMe is tightly integrated with iWeb. In many ways, iWeb exists exclusively as an offline client (and unofficial advertisement) for MobileMe blogs and websites.
Special Benefits for Mac Users. The purpose of this article is challenge MobileMe on its home turf: Mac OS X. For the Mac Faithful, MobileMe provides instant messaging (via iChat) and easy remote desktop connections (via Back to My Mac). Unfortunately, Windows users are not able to use these parts of the service.

MobileMe’s strongest advantages are its simplicity, platform availability and integration. Apple bills it as the service for people who want things to just work and any serious competition should both offer the same services and a similar degree of simplicity.

Strategy 1: Windows Live

When comparing alternatives to Apple, perhaps the first place to look is Microsoft. While Microsoft’s online services have been known under a variety of names (the current flavor of the month is Windows Live) they offer a huge number of services:

Hotmail: Email, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. Hot is available from the browser, through POP3, a downloadable program called Windows Live Mail, or it can integrate with Outlook through a special connector. And with 500 million users, most people have used it at some point in their lifetime; thus, it’s familiar.
Photos. Windows Live Photogallery, available through Windows Live Essentials, is the Windows equivalent of MobileMe and iPhoto. It includes a place to both share your photos with friends and family (similar to Flickr) as well as a program that lets you organize them (Photogallery). Luckily, Photogallery gives iPhoto ‘09 a serious run for its money in some ways and utterly devastates it in others. My favorite feature is the ability to sync your entire photo library to every computer you use.
Spaces. Everyone wants to be at the center of social networking, including Microsoft. Spaces is their current best effort. It brings together simple social networking tools, a place for blogging, file sharing, photos, comments, emoticons, and all the many other stimulating activities which brought FaceBook to prominence. But while many of the features appear to be aimed at social networkers, it is actually possible to build a fully-developed personal website.
SkyDrive. Online file storage is important. SkyDrive offers 25 GB at a fantastic price: free!
Mesh. What is an online platform without file sync, backup and collaborative sharing? And it works quite well; I would even hazard that it is the most compelling sync framework available. (Did I mention that it also does the simplest implementation of remote desktop I’ve ever seen?)
Messenger. Every online platform offers an instant messenger application, so does Microsoft.
Writer. Back in Digital Dark Ages (circa 2003), Apple came out with iWeb and made a serious push to sale people on the “Blogging Lifestyle.” In its day, iWeb was pretty neat with a real click and drag experience. A few years ago, though, Microsoft released their answer to iWeb and the “blogging lifestyle:” Windows Live Writer. Live Writer is iWeb done right. It interfaces with essentially every blog/content management system in existence and makes updating a website simple and elegant. But that only scratches the surface, using Live Writer you can also publish pod-casts, video feeds, and leverage social networking to its fullest. I run VMWare Fusion on my Mac just so that I can use Writer.
Office Live. Ever needed access to files and documents while on the road? Or maybe you collaborate as part of a research group or project group and need to share documents. While you might use a solution like Subversion, you might consider Office Live as a really good alternative. 5 GB of online storage, discussions, task lists, and more make it a great way to work with others on complex school projects, research proposals, books, or presentations. There is even a plug-in which lets you access your workspace right from Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The Windows Live offerings simply dwarf anything that Apple offers through MobileMe. All of the essential services are covered (email, calendar, contacts) in addition to the not-so essential (simple remote desktop, file sync, blogging, photos). Everything is available from a single log-on and password and there is plenty of online storage. Windows Live Hotmail, Office Live and Live Mesh all offer 5 GB of storage. SkyDrive offers 25 GB. In total, Microsoft offers a whopping 40 GB of free hard-drive space with no strings attached. That’s nearly double the storage offered by Apple’s MobileMe.

If the web side is strong, the software is even better; Microsoft is primarily a software company after all. For the first time this decade, Microsoft has even entered the arena of “lifestyle applications,” long dominated by Apple and its iLife suite. Think about this: some of the coolest features in iPhoto ‘09 first made their debut in Windows Live Photogallery. Face recognition? Check. Geo-tagging? Check. Integration with maps? Check.

Through the use of add-ins, Windows Live lets you extend your existing desktop software into the cloud. Outlook Connector gives you access to Hotmail, Live Calendars and contacts inside of Outlook. Office Live drops seamlessly into Microsoft Office.

But despite it’s overall strength and attraction, there is a major problem: Windows Live exists to “Light Up Windows.” Put another way: Microsoft’s services don’t play nicely with other platforms. While there are some exceptions (Live Mesh), only web versions are available for users of alternative operating systems and support for the iPhone/iPod Touch is non-existent. In fact, only users of Windows Mobile will find anything remotely resembling platform integration. Which is too bad.

Advantages: Windows Live offers everything available in MobileMe and even goes deeper. The online services are strong, especially if you use Windows as your primary OS. And the software applications are awesome. Most important, though: it’s 100% free.

Drawbacks: Doesn’t really play nicely with Mac, Linux or iPhone.

Strategy 2: Google

If Windows Live won’t work for your email, calendar, file sync and other needs; do not despair. There are a number of other strategies which can help you get the job done. Google (another online giant) offers many of the same services as MobileMe and Windows Live. Here’s the rundown:

GMail, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk. These cover mail, calendar, contacts and tasks with the additional benefit that they work everywhere. GMail is standards compliant and offers both POP3 and IMAP access. This means you can access it from the mail application of your choice. Google Calendar works in Outlook, iCal and just about anything with CalDav. And you can connect to Remember the Milk in too ways to count.
Google Sync. Whereas Windows Live lacks any meaningful way to sync information to mobile devices, Google makes this extremely easy. It works with Apple’s iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile; that is, just about every smart-phone in existence. Ironically, the technology that makes this possible was licensed from Microsoft.
Picasa. Google has their own photo software and service, and it’s a heavy weight. While iPhoto and Windows Live Gallery work for consumer use and light professional use, Picasa is pretty close to a professional application like Adobe’s Light Room or Apple’s Aperture. I’ve used it to organize, edit and annotate tens of thousands of medical images and to organize albums of 5000+ pictures. Even better, there are versions available for Windows, Linux and Mac (the only major photo application which loves all operating systems equally). But you don’t have to use Picasa on the desktop. For Mac OS X or Windows Live Photogallery users who would rather use those programs, both plug into Picasa albums for easy photo sharing. As do most of the aforementioned Light Room and Aperture.
Blogger. A look at Google’s services would be incomplete without considering the Google personal publishing platform. While not as tightly integrated as Windows Live Spaces, that can be an extremely good thing. Blogger can be used for both personal and professional sites (complete with custom domains and sub domains), whereas Live Spaces is best suited for a personal web presence.

Google’s strategy is very interesting. Rather than developing both the online services and corresponding desktop software (as Microsoft or Apple does), they instead focus exclusively on the online component. This results in some of the best online experiences available anywhere that comply fully with existing standards. This makes it easy for other companies to come along and integrate the Google into their own products. For example, iChat will let you use a Google Talk account, Mail.app plugs into GMail, and iCal can connect to Google Calendar.

Unlike Windows Live, you can get the full iPhone experience by using Google’s Sync. Configure iPhone Mail for Google IMAP and point your calendar and address book at Google Mobile. The rest happens automatically. When I tested it using my iPod Touch, updates were nearly instantaneous (maybe not push, but really close) and hassle free.

Advantages: Like Windows Live, you can get nearly everything that MobileMe has through Google with one username and password. Even better, Google probably works with your existing software (whether that be for IM, chat, calendar, photo sharing, or email).

Drawbacks: Even though Google’s offerings Come close to a MobileMe replacement, there are still a few missing pieces; most noticeably: no online storage.

Strategy 3: A Smorgasbord of Free Services

While Microsoft may offer a complete package and Google is nearly there, why relegate yourself to a single offering. Both are free and there’s nothing to lose. Thus, let’s look at my favorite MobileMe replacement strategy: Mix and Match.

Use Google for email, Calendar, and tasks; then leverage Google Sync for the iPhone experience. Live Mesh provides for cross-platform file sync and backup while SkyDrive handles online needs. Add a pinch of Flickr for photo sharing (don’t worry, iPhoto and Windows Live Gallery have support built in); and Live Spaces, WordPress or Blogger for your website (conveniently accessed from Live Writer of course). And these aren’t the only options, you might also consider the following:

File Sync/Storage: Oosah (1 Terabyte of free online storage), DropBox (easy sync for Mac, Linux and Windows), and ADrive (50 GB online for free).
Photos: Flickr, Photobucket, DropShots, Zenfolio and SmugMug.

Advantages: Pick and choose amongst the best services on the web. Use the same services as friends and family.

Drawbacks: Multiple usernames and passwords. Integration with specific software may not be as seamless.

Strategy 4: A Custom Web Platform

Okay, so you can get all of the same services through the various online giants (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo) or dwarves (SmugMug, DropBox, Oosah, etc.), but there are actually a few reasons you might want to opt for a paid service. Support is one reason, but let me posit a completely different one: total and complete personal control. While “Mix and Match” might be my favorite, Strategy 4 is the one I actually use.

For my online presence, I pay for a Professional Web Hosting account with Brinkster for $10 per month. In return, I get email, calendar, contacts, to-do, web space and technical support. I use the online space for this site, collaboration projects and encrypted file backup (through use of a Linux tool called Duplicity). While online space can be found everywhere, I deliberately chose Brinkster for its email support.

You see, Brinkster’s servers run Zimbra (an OpenSource competitor to Microsoft’s Exchange). Zimbra works with Outlook and Mac OS X via plugins and it uses ActiveSync, which means instant and perfect sync with iPhone (no futzing required). It gets even better, $10/month doesn’t get me one account, it gets me 500. (If that seems a bit much, there’s also a “Rookie” option, which comes with 200 GB of storage and 50 email accounts for a meager $4/month.)

Sure, hosting your own website can be like riding a tricycle on the the freeway, but it is also extremely liberating. I control my domain name, I control my personal information. I’m not worried about terms of service or what my employer thinks. Even better, I’m outside of the Google, Microsoft, and Apple wars. Should any one of the big three decide to change their terms of service, storage limits, or prices; I simply don’t care. I can still use all of the fantastic web services for free, but at the end of the day, I control my data: not a major corporation. That feeling of freedom is priceless.

Summary

Sure … Apple’s MobileMe offers a pretty compelling vision: seamless email, contact, calendar, and data sync between everything. And while it may be a polished service, there is really no reason to pay for it. Microsoft, Google and many others offer similar services without for free. So, while many of the Apple Faithful might be willing to “pay for their time;” that isn’t a very compelling argument for MobileMe’s price. Just about everyone has a Hotmail or Google account, which means that you are already set up to live “La Vida Nublada.” Finding alternatives is easy and can even be fun.

Big Things, Little Things and Unassociated Thoughts

Rob Oakes — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:39:59 +0000

At this moment, I’m lying in bed sandwiched between a yellow dog and a little brown and white dog and a much chewed upon stuffed witch. And it is good. It’s been a somewhat hectic day and the irritable sleepy dog on my leg is quite pleasant.

Actually, that’s not quite right (well the bit about the hectic day at least, the little sleepy dog is still quite irritable). It’s been a somewhat hectic couple of years. In that time, big momentous things have happened and my life has changed from backwards to forwards and the world spent a substantial amount of time feeling decidedly insane. Then 2009 arrived and things are … better. And while busy, life has been somewhat happy. With all that, though, I’ve spent the past several days working on a big project stuff involving the University and miscellaneous messes … and after it’s done … things will be different. My big thing will hopefully change things, and then, I’m going to finally move on and go do … whatever comes after completing big world changing stuff. Or at least big changing stuff that will completely alter my place in the world. If that makes any sense.

In the meantime, I read an interesting article at Zen Habits. While I tend to not reside within the demographic for self-help type things (I fall more more naturally into the self-beyond-help group), sometimes it is simply good to read things that sound like collections from the bottom of mashed Chinese fortune cookie bags. It thus stays in my RSS reader. Anyway … the guy who writes it asks an interesting question, “What would you do if you only had a short time to live?” Well, other than the obvious things, I think the answer to that is this: not much different.

A couple of years ago, I watched my aunt pass away from a brain tumor. She went the way I hope to go, loved and surrounded by family and friends. While she could have done just about anything, she was happy to keep doing the little things. Get up, pack lunches, help with homework, gossip with neighbors, argue with children, etc. After all, while we might despise them, it’s often the little things which make life bearable. (You know, things like lickly little dogs who steal socks.) Even when you’ve got big world changing stuff to do.

So … I think I’m just going to lie here sandwiched between a yellow dog and a little brown and white dog for a while. Because it is good.

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