So about a week ago my external backup drive for my MacBook Pro died. I was able to get my data off, but I’m needing to find a replacement drive. Prior to the drive failure I was looking at getting another external drive where I could store my media files (photos, audio, etc) so that my MacBook Pro, which is almost at capacity, could run much leaner on a regular basis. My plan was to point to the media drive when I needed access to those files and then have my other drive backup everything from both my MacBook Pro and media drive.

I’ve been researching a lot of different options. I like the idea of a Firewire drive for speed and the fact that you can daisy-chain FW drives together. I also looking into a NAS solution after a friend of mine rigged up his own version of a Time Capsule for at least half the cost. I’m currently at a loss for which way to go.

In an ideal world I’d get something like a Drobo and use that for both backups and media storage and have the benefits of redundancy and expandable storage, but that’s way outside my budget. The NAS solution is nice because of the wireless setup, but I still only have one drive with that and wouldn’t have a backup of the media stored on that drive. The external FW drives look to be an interesting option because of the connection speed and the fact that I can connect two drives together. The downside is that it’s another wire running into my laptop and the FW drives I’ve been looking at are portable drives which I’ve heard can be less reliable.

I’ve also looking into online backup solutions like Backblaze and Carbonite. While the remote storage idea is very appealing, I’m not really interested in getting into another monthly payment situation.

So I’m petitioning you all for help. Do you have a similar setup or know of a solution that I should consider? Are there drives you guys recommend or brands to stay away from? I know a lot of this is subjective, but any additional ideas or direction would be of help to me at this point.

“Sometimes we, at Odopod, are called upon to do something fast, as fast as possible to achieve a burning near-term objective. This is a reality and we’re happy to work within that constraint. However, short-term action isn’t a substitute for 1) thinking about your assets and values and 2) projecting those assets and values into the future.

2 Billion apps was made possible by just this sort of longer-term thinking.”

A fantastic point from a great article on Apple’s recent milestone of “2 Billion App Downloads” on their App Store by the folks at Odopod.

Since I am now the proud owner of an iPhone 3GS I’ve obviously been busy customizing it and of course picking a wallpaper was one of the first things I did. It was hard for me to narrow down which one I wanted to use, so I ended up making several and figured I’d share those with you. I’ve added a new gallery on my Photos page called iPhone Wallpapers. The collection contains some of my photography for now (I’m currently sporting this one), but I hope to add design work to it as I continue to build it out. Feel free to share these and if you have any ideas, comments, or suggestions let me know.

Kunal Anand, who enjoys “…visualizing data, writing music, obsessing over the Superman universe, and creating mixed media pieces.”, is responsible for these beautiful data visuals above titled looks del.icio.us. As the name hints these visualizations tie directly into the social bookmarking service Delicious and graphically display the tagging patterns of individual users. On these you can see the names of the users he targeted, people such as Wilson Miner, Merlin Mann, and John Hicks (my favorites being these last two).

Kunal, while obviously very talented as a programmer (he used to work at NASA), does a wonderful job with the color and post-processing of these images. I’d love to know more about how these are put together. Very nicely done Mr. Anand!

Pictures and videos of the Zune HD, Microsoft’s next iteration of their portable media player, are coming out on the net. While the features are cool (720p HD video output so you can play it back on a HDTV) and the UI animations are quick and responsive, I just can’t get past the fact that the “e” in “marketplace” on the player’s main menu is being cut off. How can you design and develop a device like this, which no doubt had to go through a crazy amount of sign-offs during it’s birthing process, and let something like that slide? It’s incredibly sloppy.

Ben Fry, author of Visualizing Data, produced these fascinating images of all of the streets in the US (lower 48) using Processing. The image shows 26 million road segments in total. What’s interesting is you can see how the roads give way to the natural formations of the country, particularly in the image highlighting the Appalachian Mountains. I also didn’t realize just how divided the US is in road coverage once you hit the midway point.

These visualizations based on the New York Times Article API by digital artist Jer Thorp are fantastic! Thorp compares the frequency of words such as “regulation” and “innovation” (as shown in the first image) in New York Times articles since 1982 and uses Processing to generate these graphs. Some of his visualizations are available as prints at his Etsy store.

I’d love to learn how to use Processing. I downloaded it last year and had a lot of trouble getting it set up. Looks a little over my head, but seeing visuals like this gets me excited to try to figure it out as drawing them out by hand would be an absolute pain. Plus the flexibility to alter the data sets to change the graphs is appealing once you’ve written the program.