Stocking stuffers for that gadget guy in your life

Shopping for gadget guys can either be really easy, or really hard.

It's easy when there's a glittering, gleaming jewel of a new gadget that your significant other has talked about non-stop for the past few months. A Wii perhaps, or an iPhone. You know he doesn't have it, mainly because he drops not-so-subtle hints at every opportunity and talks about how his life has been empty and meaningless without one.

But if your budget this year doesn't include the big prize, or if you're shopping for a tech-oriented sibling or friend, or if you're just looking for some good stocking stuffers (gosh I hate that phrase, "stocking stuffers"),  here's a brief list of stuff that almost any gadget guy would want and/or need. Of course some items require a little bit of homework but not much:

• Rechargeable AA batteries w/rapid charger - awesome for many uses
  
• iTunes gift card - you cannot go wrong with this
  
• Digital camera storage cards - a 512 or 1 gig makes a nice addition; you'll have to find out if your spouse's camera takes the SD or compact flash variety
  
• DV tapes for the camcorder
  
• Blank CD's or DVD's
  
• CD/DVD jewel boxes
• Portable hard drive - USB2. Even a smaller one can come in handy
• Some of those very handy mini power cord extenders, or a  PowerSquid
• Lens and camera cleaning wipes
• Velcro or plastic computer cable ties

iTunes bitrates - do they matter?

I didn't used to think bitrates mattered that much for mp3s. But when Apple started offering 256k music on its store in addition to its long-running standard of 128k, it got me thinking. 

Most of my considerable music collection is encoded from CD at the 128kbps bitrate setting, and of course iTunes store downloads are 128k as well.  For kicks, I re-imported some of my all-time favorite stuff at a couple of different rates and downloaded some iTunes plus content, and compared all these new AAC mp3s with older versions. (AAC is a newer type of encoding; AAC files are still MP3s - they just use a different compression that supposedly offers better fidelity at the same bit rates and gets around other limitations of traditional audio encoding).

The result? It does make a difference, at least to me. Note I don't have the greatest physical hearing capabilities in the world (I should probably get my hearing tested at some point). However, I think I'm a bit more practiced than most at really listening critically to music. My main playback devices are an iPod hooked up to my Explorer's speakers, my computer at work through a great set of Logitech speakers, and my computer at home hooked into a decent Monsoon setup. I've got an iPod nano that I use from time to time, and often use headphones with my Macbook and desktop Macs.

Anyway, music encoded at bitrates higher than 128k - and using the AAC version instead of the straight MP3 version - definitely sounds warmer and more dynamic to me. This is subjective of course; I won't go as far as others who've subjected friends and coworkers to "blind" listening tests. But I've decided that it's worth re-encoding, and It's worth the hit I'll take in hard drive space. I can always add storage - but it's a real pain to re-rip a collection. So to those of you just getting started in the world of iTunes, do it right the first time. 

This is my general plan for re-encoding my CD collection, and dealing with new stuff:

• 160kbs AAC - Occasional listening - a non-critical album that I might listen to once or twice a year. Can also encompass audio that's not really all that intricate and would not therefore benefit much from higher settings - an AC/DC album, for example, would be fine to these old ears at 160kbps. If it's cranked in my truck to where the speakers are distoring, the higher setting wouldn't do the higher quality track justice anyway.
  
• 192kbps AAC - Regular listening -  but not quite a desert-island disc. This is a great setting and is noticeably better to my ears. It handles everything from Springsteen to Sevendust. It's my default.
• 256k AAC - Your "can't-live-without" music. In my case, this includes pretty much all Pink Floyd, Stones, Beatles, Zeppelin, and Steely Dan albums.  Sonic treats, 'nuff said.

There are many audiophiles out there who would disagree and dig out all kinds of scientific data proving that only lossless encoding is satisfactory - but they're bigger geeks than me, and probably have nicer stereo systems and speakers. (and bigger hard drives, too - lossless audio files are huge). I'm just providing my opinion, based on my listening standards and derived from my music playing through my sound systems, so take it for what it's worth to you. But if you want to freshen up your listening experience, get out those crates of CDs and let the re-ripping begin.  And get the iTunes plus version of tracks whenever available. For now,  only the EMI catalog is sold at the higher bitrates. I've heard that Universal might be coming onboard with its catalog soon.

Latest Blog Post on Godfrey B2B Insights

Here's a link to my latest post on Godfrey's B2B Insights Blog. Even if you're not in Godfrey's target market for advertising, there is a TON of great content here about branding, Web strategy, media, and integration. I'm not just saying that because I work there - my coworkers are very skilled and knowledgeable, and this company continuously amazes me with its depth of bright, skilled talent.

Add a Mailing List to your site

I don't make any commission from this, so let's get that out of the way. But I've been asked before to recommend a good "email blast" service - a service you can use to send out emails to customers and prospects.

For really heavy-duty applications, my friends over at Listrak are top-notch. For the rest of us, Constant Contact is a great choice. It's super-easy to manage. You can upload an Excel file or even an Outlook Address book to their web site and instantly create a list; add a sign-on form to your Web site; use one of their templates or create your own customized message format; schedule mailings; and then track all your activity. How many people opened your email? How many used the "forward to a friend" feature?  Cost depends on how many subscribers you'll have. It's very reasonable. 

The alternative to using a service such as Constant Contact - adding 20, 50, 100 or more emails to a single email message in Outlook and hitting "send" -  is fraught with peril. There are many reasons you should not do this, including the risk of sending all your clients and prospects a virus; the risk that your email craps out halfway through and now you don't know where it cut off, and the lack of privacy for your readers. Oh, and if one of your email recipients has a virus that inspects his or her inbox for email addresses to harvest, and it finds this nice email from you with 200 recipients...well, it could get ugly.

I use Constant Contact for my Cook Forest Online site.

And they've got a free version that gives you up to 50 members.

Final Cut Studio 2 - First Impressions

It's been quite a busy week. Haven't been any posts this week because blogging is the first thing to be neglected.

Anyway, I received and installed Final Cut Studio 2 at work yesterday and thought I'd provide my initial impressions. I've only spent about 6 hours with it, so there will be more to come later.

First, packaging is about 15-20% smaller, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that they still ship actual manuals in book format.. So that's a nice. 

Next, installation. If you install everything in FCS2 - and that includes Final Cut Pro, LiveType, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, Color, DVD Studio Pro, and all the additional content files such as loops and clips, be prepared to chew threw 20-30 gigs of hard drive space.  It takes a long time for your DVD burner to read and cop that much data, but at least the installer is better than previous versions. It lets you pick and choose which components to install and select their target locations. Note that if you alreay have one of the older versions installed, you cannot deselect its newer replacement in the new installer - you have to replace it. So, be sure to remove any older components for which you do not want new versions. 

Now, on to actual program use. I've only used the Final Cut Pro editor (it's version 6) at this point, not needing the other stuff yet for my current project. After backing up my project, a 10-minute documentary with about four hours of raw footage and hundreds of photos, I opened it in FCP6 not sure what to expect. But it launched with no problem whatsoever, and the entire application is definitely much more responsive. Menus and dialogs are faster, and working with video just seems snappier overall. It didn't have any problems using a few custom plug-ins such as SoundSoap and FCE Counter.

One of the main reasons I wanted FCS2 was its new  SmoothCam feature, which will reduce the effect of camera shake. I tested it on some clips, and it does in fact work as advertised. However, there is one caveat which I wish I'd known before capturing this footage from tape: It has to analyze footage first, which is fine and understandable, but it analyzes an entire piece of media. Not individually selected clips. So if you have a half-hour import file, and from that you select a 30 second clip for SmoothCam filtering, FCP6 will want to look at the entire file. My system reported that it would take 8 hours to analyze one hour. The workaround is to do all your edits and get your content finalized, then export problematic clips as full-quality, self-contained Quicktimes. Then pull those Quicktimes into your timeline, either replacing the original clip or perhaps using it in a layer above the original thereby masking the original clip.  Then you can analyze the Quicktime with SmoothCam and apply your anti-shake effect. This workaround is not ideal, but if your footage is in decent shape overall you can be selective about where to use Smoothcam and it can be a real lifesaver.

Well, off to work. I've got two more hours of raw footage to sift through, and some preview exports to run, and then I'll be messing around with Soundtrack Pro. Hopefully it has good noise reducing filters, because we've got a few scenes that need fixin.'  And I'll probably launch into Color next week to see if I can fix a  color shift that mysteriously infiltrated one particular scene.

Sometimes I wonder if Final Cut has become the Photoshop of video. With digital photos, I'm always hearing "Aw, we can fix that later in Photoshop, right?"  It is to a certain degree - but it takes a whole lot longer and requires a whole lot more patience. We'll see how much more FCS2 helps out this week...

CD longevity?

IT guys like me are always harping about how you should back up more frequently.  I've probably said 100 times, "CDs are cheap, and backing up your files to a permanent CD is so easy it's foolish not to!"

I still advise that, but one side of this issue that doesn't get talked about a lot is: How long will those CDs last? 

I can picture some of you thinking, "Wait, don't they last forever? Isn't that the point?" 

They don't last forever. A few days ago I needed a really old file, from a CD I burned in 1999 - when I first started archiving materials to CD. No dice. The disc fails on every computer I try. That stuff is gone-daddy-gone.

Now, part of it could be that mass-market CDRs were just evolving, and CD burners were slow, cumbersome, and error-prone. This is the era when the phrase "burn a coaster" was coined. But I'm just not sure. How long will CDs I burned a year ago last? What about DVDS? I'll have to look into this a bit further. Maybe 20 years seems like a long time, but my photo library is digital - not print. I'd like my kids to have photos after I'm gone, which means (hopefully) that my photo CDs need to last at least another 40 years. 

I do know that CDs and DVDs need to be stored in reasonable environments - away from sunlight and moisture. And I have audio CDs from 1990 that still work (I suspect home-burned discs are more susceptible to problems).  And there is definitely a difference in quality among brands. One time I got a spindle of some no-label blank DVDs with a DVD burner I purchased, and they were horrible. It has to do with their layer and substrate construction and materials. 

It's also true that some brands are really the same disc just packaged by difference companies (Apple 4x DVD-Rs are very reliable,  but about 1% more expensive than Maxell 4x DVD-Rs - and they're the exact same disc.) 

Anyway, what to do? I guess if you have data you want to hold onto forever, there's no avoiding a mass migrating of all of it from one (older) medium to another (maybe newer) medium. Some big corporate data centers have policies where they routinely copy all of their archives to new tapes, for example, to keep the shelf-life age of their data as low as possible.  Maybe by the time it really becomes an issue, there'll be some sort of fool-proof holographic storage that holds multiple terabytes and never goes bad. 

Disk-based storage might be an answer, but hard drives fail too. I guess the only foolproof way would be to keep a RAID system running with swappable drives, so that as drives die out you can replace them and always have a reliable destination for your backups and archive files.

Don't think about this too hard, though. You can really make yourself nuts over it. "OK, I've copied all my old archive CDs to fresh CDs. But NOW I should make a third copy to store in my safe deposit box..." and on and on and on.... 

Awesome OSX Leopard Tip

Many thanks to the Mac OS X Tips Web site - they posted a list of “Hidden Settings for Leopard,” and I found one that does something I’ve wished I could do for a long time...

“Hidden setting” usually means a setting you can’t make using the System Preferences control panel. Rather, you enter special text commands in the Terminal to change how the operating system works. (Terminal is the way you give old-school Unix commands to your computer; Mac OSX is really Unix under the hood. The Terminal program is located in Applications/Utilities).

Anyway, this particular setting lets you replace the title in a Finder window with its full path. So, instead of “Documents” shown as the title of a window, it would say “/Users/vince/Documents.” Check out the before and after below; we're looking at the title of the window - the centered text at the top of the window.

Before:

After:

This is something Windows has always been able to do, and is very useful for identifying “where you are” on your computer - especially if you’re accessing other computers on a network. I frequently get in trouble when I’m using my Macbook but also browsing the hard drive on my Mac Pro tower downstairs. Am I looking at documents on the Macbook? Or the tower? Previously, each of the two windows would say just “Documents.”

Here’s the command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Just copy that line, launch Terminal, and paste. Log out and log back in, or restart, and you’re set!

Laptop Security On-the-Cheap

Laptops are great - I know I’ll appreciate having one this winter;  my basement office gets drafty and gas for the stove is just too expensive to crank it the way I’d like to. So, I’ll be using my trusty Macbook upstairs at the dining room table quite a bit. Like right now.

If you take your Macbook or Inspiron or Thinkpad on business trips, traveling, or even to your local coffee shop, things get a bit more complicated. Now you have to worry about somebody stealing it. Of course, there’s also network security to consider, but I’ll deal with that later.

Anyway, the estimate for the number of laptops stolen each year ranges from 600,000 to 1 millions. Yikes! 

Now, I’m not as worried about the physical loss of my laptop as I’m worried about the data that’s on it. I don’t know about you, but I’d feel pretty violated knowing somebody else had access to my saved emails, address book, family photos, and so forth. 

Here are a few (mostly Windows) tips that cost nothing but can help protect your data. 

1. Make sure your computer account uses a password. (Settings / Control Panel / User Accounts, choose your account name and click on “Create a password”)

2. Make sure you’ve set Windows to require a login. (Settings / Control Panel / User Accounts, click “Change the ways users log on or off.”  Uncheck “Use the Welcome Screen.”

3. Lock the desktop anytime you’re away from the laptop.  Just press control-alt-delete, then “K” to lock.

4. Make sure your hard drive is formatted as NTFS, not FAT32. NTFS is harder to crack into. Right-click on your C: drive and select properties to see if your drive is NTFS.

5. Set your system’s screen saver to come on in a short time, and require a password to unlock it

6. Set your computer to require a password coming out of Standby mode as well.

(Some of these items apply to Mac users as well - for example, make sure your on your laptop, you have deselected the "automatically log in as..." option, and set the screen saver to ask for a password to unlock. Also see FileVault below.

 

Now, these tips will work fine for the causal attempt at getting into your data. If somebody steals it, takes it home, and opens the lid, they’re not going to get far unless they’re experts. 

Of course, an expert who has physical access to your laptop can always pop out the hard drive and extract the data onto another computer system. That’s where encryption comes into play - if your laptop hard drive is encrypted, even a determined expert hacker is not going to be able to read your data.

You could do all of these things and still become compromised. But at least your personal information and private documents won’t be easy to see for the casual thief. Why make it any easier on scumbags than you have to? 

By the way, there are also a few things you can do to help track your laptop or deal with insurance issues if it is in fact stolen. Some suggest using those hard-to-remove, metal asset tags, which help police identify stolen goods. You should definitely record your laptop’s serial number, in a separate location - not on the laptop itself.

Which now that I think about it, I haven’t done yet either. 

I’ll cover network security for you road warriors next...