Paul Mayne blogs here since 2003.

It’s been another great year of new music. I was disappointed by a couple albums I was looking forward to, but have been pleasantly surprised by others that turned out to be unexpected gold.

1. Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz

   It’s not the Sufjan Stevens you are used to. You won’t hear much banjo plucking on this album. Sufjan has never been one to follow a formula or continue with what works, he’s a creative interested in exploring new and interesting ways to express himself through music. (Amazon | iTunes | Music video “Too Much”)

2. LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening

   I purchased this album only a couple weeks ago, but it’s been on heavy rotation since. As only a partial fan of LCD before now, this new album made me a full-on fan. (Amazon | iTunes)

3. Dr. Dog – Shame Shame

   Was lucky enough to catch Dr Dog perform live last month. Solid performance and album throughout. Favorite track: ‘Jackie Wants a Black Eye‘. Note: the iTunes Deluxe Edition contains some great additional tracks. (Amazon | iTunes)

4. Spoon – Transference

   Spoon keeps it raw, new and exciting. Awesome band. (Amazon | iTunes)

5. Vampire Weekend – Contra

   A departure from their debut album, but it quickly grew on me as another solid album. I actually prefer the non-official album Weemix, a collections of Vampire Weekend remixes. (Amazon | iTunes)

6. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

   Aside from only a couple tracks, it’s avery solid album all the way through. Good stuff. (Amazon | iTunes)

7. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – The Social Network – Soundtrack

   A perfect soundtrack to an interesting and well made film. It reminds me of a modern day Weird Science soundtrack with all the techy blips and sound effects. Favorite track: ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ a remix of a song that’s been used as video game music. (Amazon | iTunes)

8. Norah Jones – …Featuring Norah Jones

   A collection of collaborations with great notable artists, most previously unreleased. Some favorites with Sean Bones, Q-tip, Outcast, Ryan Adams, M. Ward and Dolly Parton. (Amazon)

9. Ray LaMontagne & The Pariah Dogs – God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise

   Recorded in two weeks at LaMontagne’s home in the woods of western Massachusetts. Solid. (Amazon | iTunes)

10. Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record

    Never been a fan of BSS before this, but something about this album sticks. (Amazon | iTunes)

Honorable Mentions:
The Apples In Stereo – Travellers In Space and Time
Roots – How I Got Over
Black Keys – Brothers
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Mojo
Gorillaz – Plastic Beach
OK Go – Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky
Eminem – Recovery
Band of Horses – Infinite Arms
Belle & Sebastian – Belle & Sebastian Write About Love
Jack Johnson – To The Sea
Girl Talk – All Day

Update: (new additions)
Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Beach House – Teen Dream

— December 5th, 2010

If you’re neighborhood was on fire and you had a short time to grab your valuables and bolt, what would you grab first? I got to consider the situation first hand about a month ago when the hills behind my home were engulfed in flames (we weren’t forced to evacuate on our street, but chose to leave due to the air quality). The first item I would snag is my external drive containing all photos and videos taken since 2000. It’s a journal of my life, my family, my kids, countless memories. Priceless to me.

Local Storage

Overall, I’ve had pretty good luck with hard drives (knock on wood), but in the past year I’ve had 2 external WD MyBook’s die. Thankfully in both cases I was able to pull the data from the drives before they were fully gone. I’ve always had duplicate copies of my valuable data stored in a fire-proof safe, but it’s only updated every 3-4 months.

After the latest drive failure, I did the math on buying a new drive or multiple drives and other options for NAS and RAID storage arrays. I came to the conclusion that in the long run, a RAID-like multi-drive would be the smartest, most convenient and in the end least expensive solution.

I did some research and comparisons on storage arrays and went with the base Drobo 4-Bay Storage Array for $344 on Amazon.

Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology allows mixed drive sizes and brands, they are all hot swappable and easy to upgrade as your storage needs increase. I currently have it plugged into my MacBook Pro via FireWire 800, but I have the option to connect it to my Apple Airport Extreme via USB and let it function as a Network Storage device. I don’t currently have a need for that, but I love that the option is there.

I currently have 2.71 TB of space available. I have no idea how the magic mojo of RAID technology works, but if any single drive dies, the data is safe, redundantly spanned over the other drives.

Cloud Storage

There have been great, affordable cloud-based backup solutions for many years now and I had been putting it off the investment for far too long. For $50 a year, you can upload everything you have and be rest assured it’s safe and available if anything happens to your drive, home, or computer.

After some research of reviews and comparisons between Mozy, Backblaze and even self managed Amazon storage I felt Mozy was my best option. I signed up for month-to-month and started my uploads. All seemed well until I realized I wanted to pause the uploads during times that I was on Skype calls or doing other tasks that required my full internet speeds. With Mozy you would have to completely stop the upload task and it didn’t even stop immedietly. I actually spoke with a Mozy developer friend and got a beta build that offered “Pause” functionality, it worked ok. The next issue I experienced was slow upload times. After a month of uploading solid, I only had 120 GB uploaded.

So I gave Backblaze a shot. Immediately I was impressed with the user interface. Much simpler, and includes the obvious “pause” functionality. And easy task bar item that lets you see remaining items to be upload. Backblaze takes the approach of back up everything and you select the items you want to exclude, where Mozy takes the approach of, you select only the items you want to back up. Within 2 weeks I had uploaded over 300 GB of data. It’s fast.

Backblaze is really great and I highly recommend it.

System Backups

I have a 1 TB external USB drive that syncs with OS X’s Time Machine for my system backups. It’s possible to create a partition on the Drobo drive as it supports Time Machine, but I haven’t done that yet.

I know a lot of people that don’t have any type of backup solution, they don’t realize the value of their digital data until it’s lost. At the very least you should backup to DVD or any secondary drive a couple times a year.

— November 4th, 2010

I’ve launched my first iPad application, a game I designed for my kids who love to play memory card games. My sons (not including baby Dylan) are 4 and 6 years old. It was a lot of fun using them for ideas on the graphics, features and sounds. Seeing their eyes light up was priceless when I showed then the initial designs and especially when we had a working game on the iPad.

The game was designed to play with 1-4 players and is a perfect family activity. Even young kids understand the concept right away. The game is live and available for download on the iTunes Store for $.99. If you like it, a star rating and review would be much appreciated.

Designing for the iPad is a lot of fun. I can imagine it will be fun to design for the iPhone 4 high-res screen as well, something I plan to do soon.

Application page | iTunes Store Page

— July 2nd, 2010

I’ve been using at iMac 27-inch as an external display for my new Macbook Pro for over a month. I’m here to report that as beautiful as the high-resolution LED screen is, this machine is not made to use as an external display.

Why?

More pixels, that’s why. If you’re a designer and you’ve had the luxury of working on a 30″ display, it’s very hard to go back to anything smaller (in terms of pixels). Despite not being updated in six years, Apple’s 30-inch Cinema Display (2560 pixels wide) is the only (Apple) display option if you want more that 1920 pixels wide. And they are still charging $1800 for that beast. For $1700, you can purchase the base model 27-inch iMac, which has an amazingly brilliant LED backlit display with the same pixel width as the 30-inch display, 2560, just at a higher pixel density (108 dpi on the iMac 27-inch vs 100 dpi on the 30-inch Cinema). The 30-inch Cinema has more pixels in height, 1600, while the iMac 27-inch has 1440.

Even with less total pixels, I prefer the iMac screen to the old Cinema LCD screens. They are so much brighter and vibrant.

Apple has been very slow to update the LED Cinema Display line to any size other than the 24-inch. MacRumors reports on why. Sounds like we’re due for the 27-incher next month.

What’s the Deal?

Here’s a list of the issues you will find when using an iMac as an external display for a Macbook:

• The iMac must be awake and fully booted into OSX in order to function as an external display. This mean lots of wasted power and fan noise.
• When waking the Macbook, if you don’t first wake the iMac, the only way for the Macbook to recognize the display is to unplug and re-plug in the mini display cord.
• The above issues make having a dedicated mouse and keyboard for the iMac a requirement. Thus, I have 2 mice and 2 keyboards on my desk. This sucks.
• Can’t make use of the built-in iSight camera, mic or speakers on the iMac (like you can with the 24-inch LED Cinema Display).
• Can’t control the brightness on the iMac display, either from display controls or from the keyboard. Must switch the display back to the iMac’s OS and adjust there. Command+F2 on the iMac’s keyboard.
• Can’t make use of the USB ports. This mean more cord management with using your Macbook on the desk.

Overall, you don’t get any of the plug-and-play features that make using an LED Cinema Display so nice. But you do get that amazing screen.

— May 21st, 2010

I’ve been a happy iPad owner since day one. Even as the first version of the device, it’s well refined, useful, fast, a beautiful screen and has a battery life that doesn’t quit. It’s not without some issues, most notably the is the wifi connection bug. It seems about once every other day I’ll lose my wifi connection (mid-use) and have to open the settings and re-connect. It also get’s poor wifi reception compared to my Macbook and iPhone.

Overall, it’s made reading and consuming information much more pleasurable than holding a laptop or staring at a tiny phone screen when lounging around the house or riding in a car.

Here’s a review of the apps that I’ve been enjoying on the iPad for that past couple weeks:

GoodReader – $.99 – Want to read your PDF’s on the iPad? I have a fair amount of books in PDF format that I wanted to read on my iPad. This utility is great at getting your PDFs onto the iPad by either the file transfer via iTunes, or my favorite, via network using your Dropbox account. The actual reader interface needs some improvement, better page turning, and the overall interface is a little buggy.

Instapaper Pro – $4.99 – This is my go-to app when laying in bed. Instapaper is simple way to mark an item you want to read later (via a browser bookmarklet) on your desktop machine. You then sync your “read later” items into Instapaper on the iPhone or iPad for easy to read text versions of the page, available for offline viewing. I’ve used this app a ton on my iPhone, but with the larger screen on the iPad, this app makes reading articles a pleasure. Bonus that the iPad app is free for iPhone Pro users as they made the same app dual-compatible. I also like that many twitter clients and rss readers integrate with a “sent to Instapaper” option.

AirVideo – $2.99 – This beauty let’s me stream those 100′s of .mkv movies I have on our Media center PC over my local network. You need to install an app on the server machine, then you can see your video folder. There’s the option to “Play with live conversion” or you can set a queue to convert your videos to iPad compatible format, which will stream via this app, or you can copy into iTunes to transfer onto the iPad. The live conversion works good if your server machine is a decent and you’re getting good wifi reception. Otherwise you get buffering, but have the option to set the quality to lower if you have problems. Awesome app!

NetNewsWire – $9.99 – The best RSS feed reader on the mac that syncs with your Google Reader account. The iphone app wasn’t great, but this iPad app is quite good. Simple, easy to use, fast. Definitely missing a “Mark item as unread” option.

Things – $19.99 – My tool for managing my tasks. Fantastic desktop app, great iPhone app and now the best of all, the iPad app. Beautiful design to a concept and interface that makes creating logging and managing your to-dos a pleasure. As much as I love this app there are two major downsides: no cloud-based syncing and the price. The wifi direct sync to the desktop app requires all devices to be open to sync, it’s hokey. The desktop app is $50 and iPad app $20, but I suppose you pay for quality. I just hope they don’t charge for the update that adds cloud sync.

1Password – $6.99 – An invaluable app on the desktop to manage and save passwords. With as much use I get from the iPad browser, having all my passwords right there is fantastic. I just wish I could populate my passwords in the native Safari browser (rather than the in-app browser), as the in-app browser is quite limited, like you can’t bookmark sites or save images.

Plants vs. Zombies HD – $9.99 – I got sucked into this game. Don’t buy unless you want to spend countless hours shooting zombies with peas. Awesome graphics, sound and really fun gameplay with some strategy.

Twitterific – free – A decent twitter app but I expect better options to be available soon from Echofon or Tweetie (which is now Twitter for iPhone/iPad, purchased by Twitter).

Safari – native – Very impressive. With the exception of missing the Flash player, this browser is a pleasure to use and easy to read and interact with almost any website I’ve visited.

— April 19th, 2010