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Unplayed

January 2, 2012 at 19.23

Santa brought me The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Christmas (thanks Mom!). I’ve enjoyed playing it, just as I’ve enjoyed playing video games for nearly my entire life.

In recent years, however, I’ve abandoned or not fully played all of my video games. I attempted to maintain a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of my unplayed games, but it quickly became more neglected than the games themselves.

I recently found out about Shaun Inman’s Unplayed, and it seemed perfect. It’s like a much simpler, lightweight Shelfari for video games. You can now see which games I’m playing (or not playing) at my Unplayed page. For now, I’m going back to Skyloft!

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Gaming, Webapps | No comments

Christopher Nolan’s “Other” Movies

January 1, 2012 at 21.33

The first Christopher Nolan movie I saw was the incredible Memento. I’ve watched it many times since, and I always manage to catch something new. It’s a great movie the first and tenth time you watch it. It’s well-written – with some help from his brother Jonathan, who has helped out on other films since – and the attention to detail is incredible.

I think Nolan caught the attention of most of the movie-going public for his reboot of the Batman franchise. Batman Begins is one of the best comic book translations, outdone only by its sequel, The Dark Knight. Nolan wisely decided to take breaks between Batman films to make other films that he was interested in. He managed to pull this off because of his own production company, Syncopy Films, and his success as a director. As a result we’ve got two great films so far: The Prestige and Inception.

I love that Nolan has focused on other projects that he’s passionate about to avoid creating anything “stale” or boring. I think there’s a larger lesson there that most people can take away. Sometimes you can make something better by not giving it attention.

If Nolan’s “interstitial” movies keep improving at the same rate, we’re in for a treat in 2014.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Films | No comments

Writing

December 25, 2011 at 23.19

I recently started using Byword on OS X and Elements on iOS for my writing in general. Both apps are Markdown editors that, in conjunction with Dropbox, let me write from nearly anywhere.

I write my blog posts in Markdown, but the format is useful for almost any kind of writing. Any application that can read plain text can read Markdown for those times that you need to keep it simple, or you can convert to HTML for when you want or need to make it a bit more presentable.

I love using Byword in its fullscreen and paragraph focus view. It’s a great way to minimize distractions with enough context to let you properly proofread your writing. The Markdown to HTML preview is a keyboard shortcut away, and saving to a folder in Dropbox means that I can access my files anywhere.

Elements requires a Dropbox account to work, so I specified the same folder that I save documents from Byword into. Et voilà, I can edit or add to a blog post or any other writing on my iPhone or iPad. Elements has a great Markdown preview, too, and it’s distraction-free (from other apps) by nature of being an iOS app.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Articles, Writing | No comments

Local Backups are Great

December 23, 2011 at 21.48

I use SuperDuper! to make daily backups to my local hard drive. Remote backup is important, but it’s always nice to have an easily-accessible way to recover from a hard drive disaster, especially when you need to fix the situation quickly.

Your Backup Device

Choosing the right hard drive to use for your local backup isn’t a difficult choice, but it is an important one. Sometimes you can find great deals on good brands (Western Digital or Seagate, to name a couple brands that I have used and liked) on Newegg. The requirements for a hard drive really depend on how you want to use it.

If you want a hard drive dedicated to backup, any drive with a relatively quick speed (I would go with 7200 RPM or higher) and a size that’s at least a bit bigger than the drive you’re backing up will be a great option.

If you want to use a hard drive for other things – to store your media or back up another drive – you’ll obviously need something bigger. I have a 1 TB drive that I have split into two volumes. One volume is a bit bigger than my MacBook Pro’s hard drive (128 GB) and I use it to hold my backups; the other takes up the rest of the space and is used to store all of my music, movies, and photos.

Solid state drives are another option, but I’ve found that the extra cost isn’t worth the speed benefits. I would absolutely recommend a solid state drive to use in your main computer on a daily basis – I have a 128 GB solid state drive in my MacBook Pro and it’s noticeably faster than the mechanical hard drives I’ve used in MacBooks past. However, when it comes to something like backups, where you’re mostly writing to it in a situation that isn’t time-sensitive (e.g. at night), I think mechanical drives are the best option because you can get much more storage space for much less money.

Software That Helps You

I mentioned earlier that I use SuperDuper!, but there are many other backup applications out there. Some of them may fit your specific needs better. The key feature is to have an automated and bootable copy of your hard drive ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I admittedly have not given Time Machine a fair shot, but that’s because I don’t have a use case for its main draw. “Going back in time” to an earlier version of a file is not something I need to do on a regular basis. And now with Lion’s Versions feature, I don’t need a whole backup just to keep recent versions of my files around.

Another option is Carbon Copy Cloner. It makes bootable backups and can be scheduled to back up on a daily basis. It’s free to try; donations are requested if you continue to use the product.

I love SuperDuper! because it’s so simple. The interface tells you in plain English what is going to happen. I set up my nightly backups one time a couple years ago and the only time I ever see the app again is when I am traveling without my hard drive. When a backup fails, the application stays open to tell you what went wrong. That rarely happens though: usually an incremental backup occurs at 3am that takes less than ten minutes to complete. When it’s done, my data is safe and sound in two places.

The successful backups are bootable, meaning that you can just choose the backup volume as the boot volume when you hold Option after you turn your computer on and restore from there. If you just want to restore certain files instead of everything, the drive is right there in Finder for you to navigate as usual.

Backup Is Not a Daunting Task

Almost none of my “non-technical” friends (i.e. friends who do other things in their lives besides fiddle with computers) back up their computers. And yet I know that each one of those friends would be devastated if their hard drive crashed and they lost their music or photos. Local backups are the simplest way to avoid this, and it’s so simple to set up:

That’s it. Back up your data. It’s so simple and so useful.

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Howto | 1 comment

Move Your Domains Away From GoDaddy

December 23, 2011 at 09.06

The Stop Online Piracy Act (explanation via Kottke on what’s wrong with SOPA) is bad for the internet in general. GoDaddy supports SOPA, and this has alarmed many of its customers, including this Redditor with fifty one domains and myself.

Again via Kottke, I came across this guide to moving from GoDaddy to NameCheap (Google cache). NameCheap has officially come out against SOPA, and their site and experience has been nothing but top notch since I started the transfer process.

I’ve also heard good things about Hover; by all means shop around for a registrar that fits your needs and doesn’t blatantly support SOPA.

My transfer process to NameCheap is nearly complete, and I couldn’t be happier to leave GoDaddy. Don’t forget that December 29th is Move Your Domain Day!

By Thomas Upton | Posted in Links | No comments