Red Yeti's Blog

To me, the best thing about Blogs is that you find some amazingly useful stuff written by some fascinating people.

The worst thing about Blogs is that you have to keep going back to each web site to see if they’ve changed.

But there are tools out there, very simple ones, that can make that a no-brainer.

I’ve started using “google reader“.

It’s free although it needs you to follow a very simple sign up – how else would it know who you are next time? Note that’s “sign up” for a google account, not a gmail account (but if you have a gmail account, you already have a google account).

It shows you all the Blogs you’ve added in a nice clean easy to see screen. Most importantly it shows which ones have new, unread articles on them. That’s the single feature that makes it invaluable to me.

It even lets you read the Blogs from the google reader page itself in a plain text view or with pictures.

On a side note, it also recently saved my “HR Kit: Cold Weather” posting from being lost when I left my home machine logged in to the site and carried on an edit from work (if you use WordPress to produce a Blog – always log out of one machine before logging in on another!). Google had cached a copy and I retrieved it from there. Phew!

There’s another tool that looks very nice as well but I’ve not used it very much: Net Vibes

It’s a bit more richly featured (it has the weather and allows you to add other things like your ebay watch list) but I find myself preferring the simple google reader interface.

Oh, and if you’re looking for an outdoor related posting – the picture is from a walk we did in the Low Arctic (sounds exciting that eh?). It’s from near the Abisko Hut in the far North of Sweden, at the start of the Kungsleden. I must put up a post about it later in the year.

Well we came back from Iceland. And then LB’s folks were over for a few days for her graduation from her Master’s Degree (Distinction – well done LB!) in Scandinavian Translation from UCL.

Then we were off again for a very few days on part of the TMB that LB hadn’t done. Where I did the whole one-knee-with-a-ring thing on a snowy balcony of my favourite Alpine hut – the Refuge de la Croix du Bonhomme. It came as no surprise to her, we’ve been planning the party for months (and the honeymoon for longer – the GR5). And she didn’t even want a ring. But I thought what the heck…

And then we were back again to more work (it does rather get in the way doesn’t it?) and trying to get all the gear packed away at last – before going off for a weekend in my old friend and ex-business partner’s huge house and swimming pool. Which always has me grinning because we met as a couple of sixteen year-olds on the Royal Park’s Apprenticeship scheme. Who then would have guessed where we’d end up?

Well – we did guess to be honest but only he was completely right. It didn’t just “happen” though. It took a lot of work to get there. We started out in business together but after a few years I chose the more standard university/career route whilst he continued the running-a-firm route. We both have our regrets but at the same time are also both happy.

And then – there was still no time for blog entries as I had thousands (literally) of images to sort through and develop. And that really does take time!

But I will write up the Iceland trip (and in fact have started) – I promise!

But with all the time I’ve spent developing the RAW files, I’ve created a nice “workflow” (as the pro’s call it). So I thought I’d write it down. And then I found myself wishing that someone else had written it down as they would have saved me hours of working it out. Sure, there’s a manual that describes all the tools in Capture One but I wanted a quick recipe.

UPDATE: I no longer use Capture One – Adobe Lightroom 2 has completely out-classed it. There’s no contest between them for me!

So, for anyone who’s using Capture One 4 this might be helpful (and I’d very much welcome comments from anyone that is). But for anyone else, I’m quite sure this will be of no interest – sorry!

Note that if I wasn’t taking RAW, I’d only be using Picasa. In fact I do use Picasa as my “photo library” tool for all the results of my developing and all the images LB takes. She doesn’t take RAW. She has better things to do with her time.

So RAW development in Capture One 4: This is the way I work. There may be better ways, I may yet find them, but as of today this is it.

Although the following looks very long winded when written out, it’s far faster in reality!
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Did you know that hard drives are rather like light bulbs? They have a finite life and are simply not expected to last forever. At some point, the hard drive inside your computer will fail.

If you are reading this blog, you probably have pictures from your walks and climbs in beautiful mountains. If they are only stored on your computer’s hard drive, you would lose the lot.

By not backing-up you’re simply gambling that the hard drive will fail after you’ve moved on to a newer machine, whether it’s MS Windows, a Mac or Linux.

Losing my pictures would be awful but there’s plenty of other data I’d rather not lose; emails, letters, source code, old academic work. Horror stories of losses abound on the web and I personally know people that it has happened to.

If you backup already, to DVDs or an external hard disk perhaps, but keep that backup in the same building as the computer, you have no protection against the worst case scenarios of fire/theft. I’ve heard it said that people who lose their house in a fire or other disaster come to terms with the loss of everything, except for their pictures.

Backing up on to DVDs or even better, on to external hard drives is a great idea. Nothing is faster for restoring a backup from than a disk in your hand. But you still risk finding that the backup disk has simply died. They all do, eventually.

As long as you have broadband, online backup is a no-brainer. It’s easy to set up, cheap, and once it’s done, it’s done. No need to remember to start the backup, or swap the disk. Nothing more to do – ever.

It can take quite some time to back up initially; days or even weeks if you have a lot of data. But so what? As long as it doesn’t need looking after, it doesn’t matter. And once it’s been done once, only the changes are uploaded.

Its not expensive – especially once you consider how much you’d pay to get your photos back if you were to lose them.

There are many online services and I’ve tried several of those that get better reviews.

Overall I’d recommend Jungle Disk (see below) but I must admit to having been impressed by both CrashPlan Central and BackBlaze.

Edit: 23 May 2010: It struck me that whatever online backup solution you use, the passwords MUST be kept off-site somewhere so that you can access the backup from scratch on a new machine (say, in case your place burns down!). The best way to do that is probably to print them off and keep them somewhere with a friend or relative you trust.

I’ve been using Jungle Disk backed by Amazon S3 (not Rackspace Cloud Files) for several years and can’t find anything that ticks all the same boxes.

But my criteria are perhaps more demanding than some. Apart from checking for data-corruption, encryption and the high bandwidth that any good backup provider will have, I also want data stored in more than one geographic location looked after by a company that’s large enough to be unlikely to go bankrupt.

Amazon S3 writes every file to multiple different geographic locations (and then immediately checks each one to ensure the write was correct).

Most people would probably be happy with BackBlaze or CrashPlan (not Mozy – see below, or Carbonite – which I won’t waste anyone’s time even mentioning further).

The only thing that puts them in front of Jungle Disk is that they require slightly less set-up and they offer a fixed price per month option. Whereas Jungle Disk varies in cost depending on how much data you store. Though for storing less than 10gb of data, Jungle Disk is comparable per month – they just don’t do yearly billing unfortunately. Meaning a forex charge on your card every month if you’re outside the USA.

So, assuming you’re not quite as paranoid as I am, and can live with the small risk of the datacenter being wiped out in a far-fetched disaster (and so aren’t going for Jungle Disk+S3); which one would I recommend?

Probably BackBlaze. Although I prefer CrashPlan’s interface, I prefer BackBlaze’s use of a large, trusted datacenter.
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