Motion-X Drive is an iOS based app to replace your in car GPS. This little app is a full featured replacement for any in car GPS. [Read the rest of this entry...]
So the next generation iPhone called the iPhone 4S was formally announced today. In my opinion the most important new feature is the integration of Siri voice recognition throughout the system.
My favorite cloud based backup service Crashplan, now has an iPhone app (who doesn’t?). Now all your backed up files can be accessed on your iOS device.
Access files on the go with new CrashPlan apps | Utilities | Macworld.
I like to geotag photos for public viewing. Geotagging is the process of embedding GPS information about the location that the photo was taken into the photo file. Sounds complicated, but most camera phones can do this automatically. Why is this helpful? Well it provides others with meaningful information on the location that the photograph was shot. Plus years later it helps me remember more about the shot. Most of the photos on my Flickr page have geolocation (geotag) information in them.
But there are times where I want to not reveal the location of the photo on a public level. This new but probably long over due feature now added to Flickr gives much needed control over that. With it you can designate a private geolocation region called a geofence . Photos that are within the geofence will have their location information suppressed to the public and revealed to only those friends and family that are on the list. No more need to change location privacy settings on a photo by photo basis. I can now geotag with confidence.
Good job Flickr!
For more information see “Introducing geofences on Flickr! « Flickr Blog“.
I have been tinkering with network audio. So far I had been just streaming The audio around the home but now I want to actually move it for higher bitrate conversion. The goal is to play high bit rate files on a laptop for local DAC. Thereby preserving the highest quality of music till the last step in the chain (more on this in a future post). To achieve this I needed to “see” my main iTunes library that is on my basement desktop on the MacBook Pro upstairs. At first this seems like a no brainer iTunes-> Advanced-> Home Sharing should solve the problem. In reality this proved to be harder than I initially though..
Over the years I have had more than my share of hard drive failures. As more and more of our lives are in the form of digital photos and videos, a dead drive without backups creates a lot of frustration and lost memories.
Fortunately I have not had any significant data loss in over ten years. Though early on I remember spending whole weekends trying to recover files and those were the days when I just had 1–2 GB of data. Over the years I have learnt a lot about backup and recovery. Here are some of my notes:
Later today Apple will host its annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) where Apple is expected to showcase their big products for the year and set a direction for the future. So far they have had more hits than misses.
Since the last WWDC, Apple has grown to become the second largest market cap company in the world with a highly profitable mobile division to complement their ever popular computers (I cannot imagine going to work without one).
Yes, I finally got all my movies, music, photos and documents backed up to a remote server. It took 9 months of slow continuous background backup to get all 2.1TB (terrabytes) or 2,100 gigabytes of data uploaded. But now that it is all there the changes will be quicker to upload.
The need for remote storage cannot be overemphasized. This is really evident when you look at natural disasters that are currently occurring in southern states of the US.
I have two local copies off all my data and every night everything gets backed up to the cloud. The first cloud backup will take the longest then only the new or changed files need attention.
I chose crashplan because of the unlimited storage that they offer. Please see my previous post on other cloud storage solutions and why I felt crashplan was for me.
Crashplan does offer a peer-to-peer backup solution where if you have a friend that has a lot of storage you can backup your data in an encrypted format to his/her computer. Let me know if you are interested. I might have some space 
for a few people.
Also remember if you use dropbox with my link I get 250MB of additional space for your free account.
Stopped by the apple store today and noticed that the product information that was on a printed white card has been replaced by iPads. There about 75 of them at this store. They have interactive demos and information on the products. You can even call a store representative to come and assist you in the store.
Ironically the iPads have iPads to demo them.
Now the only problem will be to keep the fingerprints off the screens.
Here are some photographs that I took earlier this year at Brookfield zoo. I ended up taking about 400 pictures. Here are some of my favorites. If you like them please leave a comment on the Flickr site.
I took these pictures with my Canon 5D Using a 70-200mm lens For most of them. They were later processed in Adobe Photoshop CS5.
