It happened to me every time but did not happen to others all of the time.

What finally appears to be be the problem is easily avoided, if you don’t use the AppleTV preset.

Large File Size

All of my files were created with the AppleTV preset in HandBrake. Most of the shows that I will be watching will be either on my iMac (which can play AppleTV files) or my AppleTV, so it made sense.

However, the AppleTV preset in HandBrake 0.9.3 adds a new feature called “Large File Size”. What is “Large File Size”? This is what the command-line version of HandBrake (HandBrakeCLI) says:

-4, --large-file        Use 64-bit mp4 files that can hold more than
                        4 GB. Note: Breaks iPod, PS3 compatibility.

There isn’t a whole lot of information about this option in the HandBrake documentation, but if you hover over the option in HandBrake you will see a tooltip:

The take-away point here is whenever you see “Large File Size” think “64-bit” not necessarily “4GB”.

The nomenclature here is confusing. If you use this option, you will not necessarily get a 4GB or large file (an average episode of the West Wing (about 42-44 minutes without commercials) is 400-650MB. However, these are still “64-bit” files, and that seems to cause the problem with AtomicParsley.

This option “may be going away” according to some discussion on the HandBrake support forums.

My recommendation is that you do not use this option unless you know that you need it (i.e. you are ripping a very long movie). I do not know what happens if you try to make an AppleTV compatible file of a movie and it needs to grow larger than 4GB, but it seems unlikely to be something that we run into often.

Make Your Own Preset

One of the nice things about the GUI version of HandBrake is how easy it is to customize a preset.

Step 1: Choose the AppleTV preset in HandBrake (click “Toggle Presets” if it isn’t visible already)

This will get you most of the way there.

Step 2: UNcheck the “Large File Size” box

1. All three ought to be unchecked:

1. Then go back to the Sidebar and click the +

1. Give it a name, something clear and obvious:

1. After saving, make it the default (if you wish)

Using those settings should help you avoid the AtomicParsley bug I have been struggling with.

Will there be a new iPhone? We don’t know.

When is iPhone 3.0 available? We don’t know.

Here’s what I hope will be in there.

1) Copy and Paste - Yeah, we keep saying it, but if it isn’t there by now, this is going to be a serious shortcoming. It’s been almost 2 years now. This is well beyond “Duh”. I only hope it isn’t a big part of the announcement because there are more important/bigger things to talk about.

2) Unified INBOX - I’ve got 5 email accounts on there, and having to tap tap tap tap tap tap tap to get from one to the other is absurd.

3) Auto-Brightness That Works. If you go to Preferences > Settings > Brightness there’s an On/Off switch for auto-brightness.

Right now it does…something. But it doesn’t do what I want it to do, which is:

a) Detect when I am somewhere bright and crank up to 100%.

b) Detect when I am in a dark room and crank down to about 10%

This doesn’t seem like brain rockets, but as someone who uses his iPhone at the dark, it would be really nice if this worked

4) “Live” Turn By Turn GPS - I tried to use my iPhone as a GPS one day when I didn’t have my regular GPS. By which I mean I went the wrong way. I came to an intersection and had to turn left or right and wasn’t sure which way to go and couldn’t reach over to manually update my iPhone Google Maps “fake GPS”.

Sure it will be a battery suck, which is why I have a car adapter for my iPhone. Give me real GPS!

5) Email Full Size Pictures - whether it is to my family, Flickr, or MobileMe, I want to be able to get pictures off my iPhone without them being downsized.

6) Let Me Remove Built-in Apps - There’s never been a better time to remove the “Stocks” app from your iPhone. And I prefer Wunderground’s iPhone Interface to the built-in weather app because it doesn’t suck. They don’t actually have to be “Deleted” as long as they “Do Not Appear”

7) Stop asking me for my iTunes password to download free apps and/or updates to apps I have already paid for - Make passwords meaningful by only asking for them when I really need them. What is the purpose of asking me for my password for free apps/updates? Are you afraid someone has gotten ahold of my iPhone and is improving it without my consent?

8) Drag and drop files to/from the iPhone - I know there are scads of apps that will do this for me. I’ve bought several of them. But what I want is something built-in. Bonus points if I can do it over WiFi/Bluetooth (HA HA HA…No, seriously, that will never happen, but it would be cool.)

9) Bluetooth keyboard - I’ve got a MacBook, and I’ve got an eeePC running OS X, but there would still be times I would use an iPhone plus keyboard. By basic rule of thumb is this: if my Treo 650 could do it, my iPhone should be able to do it.

10) Background apps and/or notifications manager - I want music players besides iTunes to be able to keep playing after I push the “Home” button. I want IM apps to be able to poll in the background. A sub-set of this wish is for PUSH/IDLE IMAP support for any server, not just Yahoo. Because a) does that actually work for anyone? It never has for me; and b) Yahoo? Really? You gave Yahoo an exclusive feature on the iPhone? Why?

We were told that background apps are a bad idea, but Apple was willing to give us a notifications manager which would be released back in September.

Except it wasn’t.

And that was 6 months ago.

I fully expect that we will hear something about this tomorrow. I hope it is fixed and I hope it is deployed soon.

So there are my 10 things. I didn’t set out to make them 10, but 10 came to me, and then I stopped. Most of these aren’t new features, they are improvements to existing features.

I have no idea if any of these will happen (I expect #1 to happen and #10 to be “addressed”) the rest of them are wishes more than predictions.

Unless I’m right, obviously.

But how do you get that if you want to convert them into an AppleTV compatible format?

The answer is easy. And complicated.

In it’s simplest form, the answer is this:

1. Open HandBrake, select the “Source” you want to use. (In this case I’m using one of the DVDs from the West Wing series.)

2. Click on the “Audio & Subtitles” tab (shown in blue below).

3. Click “Track 1” and look at the drop-down options:

1. The West Wing DVDs are marked as having “Director’s Commentary” but other DVDs I’ve seen have no such clear indicator. You might simply have to look for a second track marked ‘English’

2. [Optional] I recommend setting the “Subtitles” to “English” (and leave “Forced Subtitles Only” unchecked) in case you want to be able to follow along with the movie/show. Most often the commentary track will drown out the regular audio. If it is a movie/show that you know well enough to not need the original script, well then I suppose you can leave it off.

Note: Subtitles are an all-or-nothing proposition. Neither QuickTime nor VLC has any way to turn them on/off. You either embed them into the video file when you rip from DVD, or you don’t.

There is supposed to be support for turning subtitles/captioning on/off, but so far there is no way to do it, at least as far as I am aware.

“Well that sounds easy enough…”

Like most other things, there is a catch.

Did you notice that there are dropdown boxes for more than one track?

Did you wonder what those other tracks are used for?

If you use the instructions I gave you above, you will be left with an output file which will default to giving you the director’s commentary and an alternate audio track which has the original audio in it.

So what’s the problem?

Well, for Mac users, the problem is that Apple doesn’t do a great job supporting alternate tracks.

For example, in my testing, VLC let me switch between the commentary track and regular track.

Go to the “Audio” menu then go to the “Audio Track” sub-menu and choose there.

Works great.

Quicktime

Quicktime, on the other hand… Well…. not so much.

There’s a similar menu option.

Confusingly, you’ll need to choose the “View” menu option, then “Languages” (“View Languages”? and you’ll see something like this:

Unfortunately for me, it has never once worked for me.

Neither will it work in FrontRow. There is nowhere to change the audio.

Supposedly AppleTV 2.2 supports alternate audio but HandBrake users report some problems with it and I have not tested it myself.

iTunes does support alternate audio, and rather well, either from the menu Controls : Audio & Subtitles as shown here:

It’s not actually showing it as “Director’s Commentary” but you get the idea.

You can also do it from the pop-up menu which appears when you move the mouse over a playing video. Simple click on the little “Talk Bubble” (it looks like a Q with a very small “foot”) and a pop-up menu will appear to choose the audio:

As far as I know there are no options for controlling audio from the iPhone.

“So what should I do?”

My opinion? Rip it twice.

Rip it once “normally” and a second time do as I have shown above.

You tell HandBrake to add the same item to its queue twice with different settings (just be sure to rename the output file).

When you add the metadata, put the word “Commentary” in it somewhere where it will be easily identified (i.e. in the Episode Title. For example, this episode of the West Wing is called “Twenty Five”. When I apply metadata to it, I will call it “Twenty Five [with commentary and subtitles]” which will make it easy to spot later on.

Given that subtitles are an on-or-off encoding option and not something you can switch on/off from a menu item, it seems like another good reason to make a second copy.

Yes, this means that it will take twice as long, but if you leave it running overnight, both of them ought to be finished by morning (assuming you have a fairly recent computer).

N.B. Sometimes Commentary Tracks Are On Different ‘Titles’

I have heard that there are some DVDs where the commentary track is a completely separate “Title” in HandBrake.

By “Title” I mean where HandBrake shows “2 - 00h42m13s” here:

For example, if you were ripping a movie which was 02h21m15s long, you might see two Titles which were about that same length.

If that is the case, one of those might be the commentary track, or it might be a “dummy” Title put in when the DVD was mastered to try to confuse those who try to convert DVDs to other formats.

Sadly, given the Movie Studios ongoing attempts to prevent you from doing things like make iPhone/AppleTV compatible versions of the DVDs that you own, it can be very difficult to know what you are getting on some DVDs.

If you are not sure what to do, I highly recommend ripping only one “Chapter”.

Again, look at the image above. See the dropdowns for Chapters 1 through 7? If you want to test what is happening, tell HandBrake to rip Chapter 1 through Chapter 1 and open the resultant file to check the results. It will take a lot less time and might save you a bit of frustration.

I hope that helps.

AtomicParsley is a very cool little program that will allow you to apply metadata to video files on the commandline.

However, it appears that you only get one shot at applying metadata with it, or else the file will be left without video.

Here is what I mean and how to re-create this (apparent) bug:

How To Recreate

1. Create an .m4v using HandBrake. Let’s call it “File1.m4v” for clarity.

2. Apply some tags to File1.m4v using AtomicParsley which will create a new file, let’s call that File2.m4v.

3. Apply some different tags to File2.m4v using AtomicParsley which will create a new file, let’s call that File3.m4v

Warning

AtomicParsley is used in several other GUI programs such as Lostify. If you use AtomicParsley as on File1.m4v and then use Lostify on File2.m4vm the resulting file will lose its video as well.

The same thing will happen if you use Lostify on File1.m4v and then on File2.m4v.

Note

a. This has been how the bug has bitten me. It may affect other formats created in other ways, but I am trying to be as specific as I can in the hopes of getting others to confirm this bug (or not confirm it).

b. This has happened to me on both my iMac and my MacBook, both of which are running 10.5.6.

I do not know if this bug shows up in the GUI programs, but it seems likely that it would, so be careful using those as well.

Result

For me, the result is that File3.m4v always loses its video.

QuickTime and iTunes show the video with a black screen.

VLC doesn’t show any video at all.

How to Work-Around

The key to avoiding this bug? Don’t apply tags with AtomicParsley (or programs that use it) more than once. Which is to say, you’d better keep your “File1.m4v” around until you are absolutely sure that you have all the tags that you want to apply.

Q: “What Do I Do If I Did Not Keep my File1.m4v?”

You can still edit the tags using iTunes. At least that worked for me in (limited) testing.

Final Notes

1. There may be something that I am doing (or not doing) which is causing this, meaning that it is not a bug in AtomicParsley. But I am skeptical.

2. I posted on the SourceForge forum for AtomicParsley and it was suggested that I try the “-4” flag to AtomicParsley. That flag had no noticeable effect. It appears that someone else may be running into the same problem.

3. I also posted about being unable to compile from source on the same forum.

4. It appears that the existence of AtomicParsley has meant that no other commandline programs for tagging video files has been created.

Sadly, AtomicParsley has not been updated since 2006-09-16 and will not even compile on my Mac OS X 10.5.6 machine:

$ ./build 
Compiling AP_commons.cpp ...
Compiling AtomicParsley_genres.cpp ...
Compiling AP_iconv.cpp ...
Compiling AP_NSFile_utils.mm ...
Compiling AP_NSImage.mm ...
AP_NSImage.mm: In function ‘bool ResizeGivenImage(const char*, PicPrefs, char*)’:
AP_NSImage.mm:204: error: ‘_NSBitmapImageFileType’ was not declared in this scope
AP_NSImage.mm:204: error: expected `;' before ‘filetype’
AP_NSImage.mm:208: error: ‘filetype’ was not declared in this scope
AP_NSImage.mm:212: error: ‘filetype’ was not declared in this scope
AP_NSImage.mm:216: error: ‘filetype’ was not declared in this scope
Compiling AtomicParsley.cpp ...
Compiling AP_AtomExtracts.cpp ...
Compiling APar_sha1.cpp ...
Compiling APar_uuid.cpp ...
Compiling main.cpp ...
Linking AtomicParsley...
i686-apple-darwin9-g++-4.0.1: obj_files/AP_NSImage.o: No such file or directory
strip: can't open file: AtomicParsley (No such file or directory)
[1]    38645 exit 1     ./build

However it is not clear to me that it would even matter if I could compile my own version.

All I am saying is that if you were in the market to develop a program for tagging video files on the commandline, don’t assume that the existence of AtomicParsley means that the market is full. Obviously, if you could build on the code which already exists, that would be excellent. AtomicParsley was released under a GNU license. Sadly, I am no programmer, so I can’t do much by the way of improving it.

Update: 2009-03-15

@schuetzdj suggested that the “Large File” flag may have something to do with it. That would make sense as all my files were done with the AppleTV preset which turns on Large File support, even though these files are less than 4GB in size.

To test this theory, I converted a file (MPEG sequence, v2, program multiplex) using HandBrake and the “AppleTV” preset twice: the first time I did it as the default, with “Large File Size” enabled; the second time I did used the AppleTV preset but turned off the “Large File Size” (LFS).

Then I used a shell script which I wrote which converts a file twice using AtomicParsley.

The results? The LFS file does not show video at all after processing with AtomicParsley. The Non-LFS file shows video even after two conversions with AtomicParsley.

Tentative conclusion: **AtomicParsley cannot handle the “Large File Size” flag that HandBrake sets, even if the file is less than 4GB **

If you would like to attempt to duplicate this bug, here is what I ask you to do:

1) Take a file from any source, and convert it twice: a) for AppleTV + LFS and b) for AppleTV without LFS.

2) Run the script above on both files.

3) Let me know which of the files show video, and which do not (either QuickTime Player or VLC)

The script was written for Mac OS X but ought to work on any Unix system where ‘AtomicParsley’ is installed.

Please leave comments below if you have results you would like to share.

It’s faster and easier than loading several different Labels which only have a few unread messages in them.

Naturally, I wished for an easier way to do this than to have to keep typing “is:unread” all those times.

The first thing I did was make a TextExpander shortcut so that when I type “/un” I get “is:unread”, so I don’t have to worry about making typo when I go to the search field.

Which is good… but what would be even easier is if I could make a Filter that would automatically put all my unread messages in it.

That would have the bonus of being something I could use over IMAP.

So I thought I would try something, and I created a new filter with just one criteria:

Would it work? I had no idea, but “nothing ventured, nothing gained” my mother always says.

Danger! Danger!

Well, Gmail did not like my idea, and responded “Hey, buster, just what do you think you’re doing, using our search booleans as a filter? Knock that off right now, or you’ll go to bed without dinner.”

Ok, they were a little more formal:

“Don’t do that! It won’t work!”

I assumed this meant that it would catch all the current messages which were unread, but would not automatically be updated in the future.

I was wrong.

It showed me all of the current unread messages, and it keeps showing me all of the unread messages.

So it works.

Sorta (read on)

The only downside is that once a label is applied to a message, Gmail doesn’t automatically remove it, so even after the message is read, it will still have the whatever label you use for unread messages, which isn’t a big deal, I’ll just select all and “Remove Label” occasionally.

And, of course, it could break at any time, but I would assume that Google would move in the direction of giving us more functionality, not less so if it breaks, I hope it is because they came up with a better way.

Then I noticed something odd.

Well, This is Odd…

While I was testing this, I discovered something curious.

I tried to call my custom label “Unread” because, well, it’s the most logical/obvious choice.

Except that Gmail wouldn’t let me use “Unread”:

Well, that’s strange. “Unread” is a “system specific name” eh? So it already exists? But I don’t see it in my list of labels.

You don’t suppose that it’s there just hidden, do you?

Well, thanks to the practice of Using Sane URLs (a miracle more people should get into) I just went ahead and tested it:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#label/Unread

and…. it works it works it works!

But it doesn’t show up in my regular list of labels!

Enter The Labs

At this point I thought I was sunk, having a cool-but-useless discovery on my hands.

Then I remembered Google Labs, specifically something called “Quick Links” which is described thusly:

Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.

“Any bookmarkable URL” includes the “System Specific But For Some Reason Hidden” Unread box.

So go to Google Labs, enable “Quick Links” (it’s currently the 2nd one from the top), and then go to the hidden Google ‘Unread’ label and click “Add Quick Link”.

You can call it whatever you want (may I suggest something creative like “All Unread”?) and enjoy.

Oh, and it is automatically updated when you read messages, so there’s nothing cluttering up that Label once you’ve read the messages in it.

This is Not A Fix, It’s a Workaround

Sadly, this still won’t show up when you are using IMAP. For that you’ll need to create a hacky-label like I created.

Ironically, it also doesn’t show an unread message count. (I assume that’s a limitation of Quick Links.)

The only real solution for this is for Google to make the “Unread” label appear as a regular label.

Since it is already there just hidden, I have no idea why it isn’t more readily accessible, preferably up there right underneath “Inbox” or somewhere up there with the “Special” built-in labels.

Must be because Gmail is still in beta.

1. Take the hard drive out of your old computer.
2. Buy an external hard drive case.
3. Put the drive from your old drive into the case.
4. Buy a new computer.
5. Attach drive to new computer.

Boom. You’re done.

Repeat every 3-4 years.

Any Questions? If so, see below.## “Wait, is that the same as what Migration Assistant does on the Mac?” ##

Of course not, don’t be absurd.

Migration Assistant on the Mac moves over old programs, old user files and accounts, your preferences, and just about everything else you’d ever imagine or want.

But you don’t want that on Windows.

If you’re like 99% of the Windows-using population (and I am sure that most of the other 1% will post comments here telling me how to avoid this), after a year or so of running Windows you’ve accumulated a bunch of crap you don’t need or want.

(More realistically: some of it was probably on there from day one, because most PCs are sold with a bunch of bundled crap no one wants.)

Your Windows computer has started slowing down, you’re probably getting some weird errors every now and again, if you’re really unlucky, you’re getting popups even when your browser isn’t running.

Do you want to move that all over to a new computer?

Hell no.

And there is no computer program smart enough to do it all for you without carrying over some of the crap.

So wipe the slate clean.

“But what do I do with that hard drive in the case?

Simple: once you attach it to your new computer, it will appear as another drive (probably E: or F:) under “My Computer”

find your “My Documents” folder. It’s probably somewhere like

x:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents\

or some such.

Copy (not move) all the files in that folder to your new “My Documents” folder (which I believe is called “Documents” in Vista! Whee! Innovation!)

Tip: make sure your anti-virus software is up to date on your new computer before trying to move files from your old computer

You should abandon everything else in there.

“But what about my email?”

1. If you’ve been using IMAP, then it’s all on the server. Setup your new mail client and it will start syncing your email.

2. If you haven’t been using IMAP, what is wrong with you? Get a GMail account, forward your existing email to it, set it up to send mail as your existing email address, and voilà! You’re done.

3. “I haven’t been using IMAP, how do I get my old email off my old computer?”

   • Let it go. Seriously, do you really need any of it? Sentimental reasons? Are you using email as a task management system?
   • If so, good luck. I’d check Google for an answer. I’ve been using IMAP for a decade now.

4. Did I mention IMAP?

“What about my bookmarks?!?!”

Oh face it, you haven’t looked at those since you bookmarked them in the first place, unless it is somewhere you go frequently (in which case you can probably find it again using Google and bookmark it again).

Move on, already.

(If you really think your bookmarks are that important, try something like Delicious so they aren’t stored on your computer.)

What about my software?

Yeah, that’s a big bag of hurt. You could try to move it over, but most likely you’ve got some outdated versions of software and a bunch of programs you never use.

First of all, checkout Evernote as a place to store your registration codes, etc online so you don’t have to go looking for them.

I never reinstall software until I realize that I want to use it. Saves me a lot of headaches.

One Last Tip

Sign up for a free Dropbox account, and put your most important files on it. You get 2gb of space for free, which is most likely far more than you’ll ever need for your word processing, PDFs, etc. (I’m not talking about your MP3 collection, pictures, or movies, I’m just talking about regular files.)

If you’ve got a lot of other media files, bite the bullet and checkout Drobo. The initial investment is expensive, but not having to worry about lost files is worth a whole lot (ask anyone who has been through it. Drobo is a lot cheaper than data recovery off a dead hard drive).

More?

Learn more about Migration Assistant at O’Reilly Mac Dev Center.

Oh, and if you buy a Mac instead of a new PC, Apple will migrate your data for you. They will probably be a lot more sympathetic about your bookmarks and email too, and will probably know how to move them over.

I started by purchasing four 500GB drives, which I am already replacing with 750GB drives. Due to the way that Drobo works, you get redundant storage but less than you’d get if you added the drives up. For example, if you have 4x500GB drives you get about 3x500GB worth of storage, and Drobo protects your data so that if any one of those drives dies, you can replace it without losing your data.

I had heard about Drobo on Twitter and on Mac Break Weekly and had watched the demo, so I knew basically how it worked before it arrived.

Imagine my surprise when I saw this

I dutifully checked the Help file before contacting support, and saw that the only way to change it was to reformat the entire {bleepity-bleep} thing.

I sent this email to Drobo tech support:

So I replaced my 500GB drives with 750GB drives, and now Drobo is telling me that I have to have another Volume (see attached image), and that the only way to get around this is to reformat the entire thing?!?! If I chose HFS+ why would you limit me to 2GB by default?! I really don’t want 2 volumes, but I don’t have enough space elsewhere to move all the data off the Drobo and then reformat and move it back on. This is pretty disappointing. Had I known about this earlier I would have set it up differently, but EVERYTHING I saw said “Hey, just add more hard drives later, it’s just that simple!” not “Just add more hard drives and eventually end up with multiple volumes” :-/ I know it’s my fault for trusting marketing-speak, but you could throw in a line there about the 2TB limit, if not in the “commercial”, then at least when I start putting drives in for the first time. Had a dialog come up and explained this limit to me (similar to the Help file), I would have chosen 4TB without hesitation. Anyway, that’s my feedback, for what it’s worth. TjL

And received this reply.

Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:05:02 +0000 (GMT) From: Drobo Technical Support To: “luomat@gmail.com” Subject: Drobo Case # 10909 [ ref:00D56kRy.500556Q8D:ref ] Good Morning, Timothy, I apologize that when you were given the option to size your volume to 2 TB, 4 TB, 8 TB or 16 TB, in the Drobo Dashboard, you chose to size it to 2 TB. Next time you run into something you do not understand in our software, please do not hesitate to give us a call and we will walk you through it. Have a wonderful day, Wanda ref:00D56kRy.500556Q8D:ref

to which I wrote back

{Expletive deleted} you and your snotty passive aggressive attitude. You’re marketing something that you claim is so simple you don’t need to worry about a thing. Oh, except for this one setting that you’ll probably run into pretty soon if you’re dealing with such large quantities of data. I’ve already had people ask me what I think about my Drobo. I’ll be sure to tell them what I think about the support they offer. I’ve got 4 extra hard drives that I was thinking “Hrm, return them or buy another Drobo.” Guess I’ll return them. TjL

I gather from Wanda’s snide comment that I chose a 2TB setting. I have no recollection of that being asked, but of course with 4x500gb worth of data, I would have thought “Oh, well, it’s less than 2TB, so I’ll choose that.”

There’s an old saying that goes something like “try to make something fool-proof and they’ll start making better fools.”

I wish I could see the initial start sequence again, perhaps I didn’t read it carefully enough, but I would hope that it says something like “Confirm 2TB partitions? If you add larger drives that exceed a total of 2TB, Drobo will automatically make a second partition.”

And I would have said “Oh, well, in that case, I’ll go for the larger size.”

(Technical aside: the strangest thing is that the default format is HFS+ which is a Mac format, but the 2TB limit is there for Windows compatibility [if I am remembering the Help file information correctly] which has trouble dealing with discs larger than 2TB. Ok, but then why is HFS+ the default format?)

The minor aggravation of the 2TB partitions is minor. The response from Drobo tech support is not.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve known so many people in tech support, but each line of it reads “You did this yourself, you stupid moron.”

And that’s perfectly understandable to think but it is not acceptable to say when you are being paid to be the public-facing side of a company that I just shelled out $350+ to. I don’t expect you to kiss my ass because I bought your product, all I expect is something like this:

When you initially setup the Drobo, you *were* asked how large you wanted the partitions to be. I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear what this setting meant.

Boom, that’s all you need to say. Simple, clear, precise.

You could even throw me a bone and add “I’ll pass along your comments” even if you don’t do anything but roll your eyes and file my email under “Clueless Morons Who Are Unfortunately Our Customers.”

Do I allow that “Wanda” might have been having a bad day? Sure. Tech support is often a godawful job. But when you’re being paid a salary to respond to people’s tech support emails, you scream in the breakroom, and smile in the email.

Should I have used profanity in my response? No, that was a dickish move on my part, but I did it, and I admit to it. But if you want to know how to turn a minor irritation with your company’s product into full-blown anger at your company, here’s a good recipe.

(BTW I was quite serious that I was considering purchasing a 2nd Drobo, because I’ve got 4x500GB drives already. But after this I will not. No, I don’t mean `not ever’, I mean anytime soon.)

The article talks about Mark Cuban who wrote a letter saying that ISPs should block P2P users because they are making everyone else’s connection slower:

“If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of: BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC, PLEASE. As a consumer, I want my Internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my Internet service down are P2P freeloaders,” says Cuban. “Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime… When consumers provide their bandwidth to assist commercial applications, they are subsidizing those commercial applications which if it isn’t already, should be against an ISPs terms of service.”

Let’s set aside the “who” here for just a moment. Let’s assume it wasn’t Mark Cuban saying this. Let’s say that it was, for example, your techie relative over the Thanksgiving meal. He’s explaining to your parents why their Cable/DSL connection isn’t as fast as it used to be. They’ve had all the hardware checked and everything is wired OK, but it still seems slow.

“Well what you have to remember is that there are a small group of people who use a lot of bandwidth all the time, even when they aren’t using their computers. They are sharing files — most of it music but now also a lot of the time it’s also movies or TV shows — and that is making your connection slower, because you are sharing the available bandwidth with them.”

Your parents are going to think that sucks.

They want to surf the web, look at some pictures, maybe occasionally download s 3 minute video of the grandkids doing something cute.

Here’s what Ars thinks:

[W]hat, exactly, is wrong with users saturating their connections? They are, after all, paying for that connectivity, and most ISPs are keen to market their higher-cost, higher-speed services. Dictating how bandwidth can be used will not make bandwidth any faster or cheaper, nor will attempting to play favorites with what kind of Internet traffic is legit or not.

What’s wrong with them saturating their connections is precisely the fact that it will slow things down for everyone else.

Yes, they are paying for the connectivity. So is everyone else. There is not an infinite amount of bandwidth available, and if everyone saturated their connections 24/7, the system would break down. Yeah yeah yeah, the ISPs ought to be upgrading it so that everyone has fiber to their front door. But here in the real world, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Instead, there are a few people using up what is meant to be shared by everyone. Imagine going into the local fast food restaurant and finding out that they are out of napkins. Annoying, right? Then you see them bring out another boxful, and someone jumps up and takes 90% of them for himself. When questioned about it, he says “What?! I paid for my meal just like you did, and the napkins come with that, so I’m completely in my rights.”

The worst part is the claim that “Dictating how bandwidth can be used will not make bandwidth any faster or cheaper.” I’ll grant you cheaper. But would a drop in P2P traffic make bandwidth faster? I bet it would, especially those using shared cable connections. Turning off P2P would be like running a batch of Draino through old pipes. You’re going to be able to get a lot more through there without the extra cruft.

…nor will attempting to play favorites with what kind of Internet traffic is legit or not.

Earlier in the article the author refers to downloading Linux ISOs, which is the old standby for talking about the legit side of P2P. And it’s true. I wonder, however, how statistically relevant it is. That is, of all the P2P traffic in the world, how much of it really is being used by people with legit downloads such as Linux ISOs versus people downloading music and movies. And I don’t mean for the purposes of criticism or parody, or to make it easier to use on their iPhones than converting movies they own.

I mean people who don’t own any of it and are just downloading a movie because they want to watch it and don’t want to pay $5 to rent it. I mean people will download a song off P2P who won’t pay $1 to download a song off iTunes because “Information wants to be free, man.” These are people who want you to believe they can tell the difference between the bitrate that iTunes uses and what they are downloading, when really they just don’t want to pay for anything and they’ve found a way to avoid it for now.

Is everyone using P2P like that? No, certainly not. Are the vast majority? I’d bet yes.

And the idea that P2P users aren’t slowing down the Internet for everyone else is just plain dumb.

But it will die at some point in the future.

That’s what they do. That’s what happens.

(Note: although I talk about several Apple products and Mac software, this post really isn’t about Apple or Mac OS X. It’s about being prepared for the when not if of your hard drive dying.)

If you are a Mac user and are not using either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, you’re an idiot.

I know, because I stand among you as one of you.

Oh I have SuperDuper. I had even used it, as recently as a week before my hard drive died. Which places me in a pretty small group of people with actual working backups.

However, in the intervening week I downloaded about 100 pictures and several short videos from my wife’s digital camera after she and our son spent a week with a friend in Virginia Beach.

Say it with me: IDIOT.

Not that SuperDuper didn’t try to tell me. I have it scheduled to backup every night. Every night it would pop up and say “Hey, I tried to make the backup like you asked, but you didn’t hook up the backup drive!” (I’m using a laptop.)

I just ignored it.

After all, the drive isn’t that old (a year in August) and it’s a good brand (Seagate Momentus, same brand that Apple uses in their laptops).

Then one day it just started making a terrible, terrible noise.

Then the laptop froze up.

And that was it.

Dead.

I tried various tricks to get it to work long enough to get just a few files off of it.

Nope.

Fortunately I had the pictures on my iPhone, and was able to download them, but they were in ithmb format. Since Apple has decided not to let you use the iPhone as a hard drive (despite every other iPod being usable as one), you can’t store full resolution pictures on your iPhone. If you could have, I would have had the missing pictures (but not the videos) on my iPhone.

The next problem is that the only program I could find the read ithmb files was File Juicer, a $15 utility which helps Mac users get at all sorts of files. I had actually looked at it before but had never needed it.

I was able to download a demo, but it didn’t seem to work. Desperate, I emailed the developer.

(Given that the programmer lives in Denmark, where there are no iPhones as of yet, this limitation is completely understandable.)

He emailed me back and asked me to send him one of the ithmb files, which I did.

The next day he emailed me back an updated version of the app which could extract the iPhone ithmb files.

Now these are much lower resolution pictures than the originals, but they are much higher resolution than my backups — which you will remember consisted of zero pixels because I hadn’t made backups.

Compared with hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in hard drive recovery, or losing the pictures forever, $15 seemed like a good deal.

So learn from my mistake:

Step 1) Get backup software.

Step 2) Use it. Daily. At least.

Speaking of good deals, I realize that SuperDuper costs $30 and CarbonCopyCloner is free. To me it was a no-brainer. Backups are worth $30 to make sure that someone is dedicating to offering support, and the folks at Shirt-Pocket.com are great when it comes to support. The CarbonCopyCloner folks may be great folks, but at the end of the day I feel a little more secure with a paid solution. YMMV. The point is you need to be doing this on a daily/nightly basis with an app you can trust.

My new solution? I bought another 2.5 inch 160gb SATA drive (the same size as the one that died) and an external case for 2.5 SATA drives. When I get the Seagate back after its warranty replacement, I will use not just the backup drive that I have already (which I will probably keep at the office and have itself update daily a noon) but I can also keep the other drive in my laptop bag and when (not if) my internal drive dies again, I will be able to simply swap it out and replace it. Downtime should be less than 15 minutes. Total cost?

$100 for the 160GB SATA drive. $30 for the external SATA case. $30 for SuperDuper

$160 (and I had already bought SuperDuper, so really the cost was $130).

Compare that to what I did this time:

1) Drive to Columbus (2 hours) 2) Get replacement drive 3) Drive home (2 hours) 4) Find out original replacement drive was bad (I was having a lot of bad luck that week) 5) Drive to Columbus again 2 days later (2 hours) 6) Get replacement drive 7) Drive home (2 hours)

Note that had I ordered the drive and case online I probably would have waited at least 2-3 days for shipping, so this was about as fast as I could get it done unless I lived in a big enough city to be able to pop into a computer store and find an SATA laptop drive at a competitive price (which isn’t every big city. This isn’t something you will find at Best Buy).

Would avoiding all of that hassle be worth $130?

Probably more. Factor in the cost of your time and gas, and I probably would have saved more even if I had bought a second drive when prices were higher.

So that’s my backup strategy.

What’s yours? It is more than “Gee I hope my hard drive lives forever!” or “I’m sure I’ll have plenty of warning before my drive dies!”

Some hard drives may slowly slip into that great beyond, but some have a sudden massive heart attack and are gone in the blink of an eye.

So I decided to do the same thing with GMail.

As everyone knows, GMail was designed so that you’d never need to delete anything. Well I’d managed to get up to 80% of my total and it seemed like I was gaining a percentage point faster than they are adding capacity.

I thought about signing up for the for-pay version of GMail which gives you 6GB of email but then I wondered:

“Do I really need all this crap?”

See, when I got GMail, I immediately signed up for a bunch of mailing lists. When I switched to Mac, I joined just about every Mac-related mailing list I could find.

If I had a SSH issue, I’d join the SSH list. I was on the Zsh list, the procmail list, the subversion list (despite the fact that I never quite got around to setting up subversion anywhere), AppleScript (despite not having any clue how to write it), and so on and so on.

So last night I went through and deleted all those mailing lists that I don’t really ever read. They aren’t bad lists, I just don’t need to be on them and don’t have time to read them, so why should I be asking them to send me mail I won’t read?

In the purge I found several email lists which have apparently dried up, yet I still had a Label for them with unread messages. Deleted. Special label for a conference I went to in January? Deleted. Special label for someone I was emailing frequently but haven’t for 6 months? Kept the messages, deleted the label.

Did it make a difference?

Compare the start, middle, and end results below:

641MB doesn’t sound like a lot, but the mental difference between 90% and 58% is significant.