1) I like working with Scott.

2)…

I’m sure I had a second one in mind but it’s escaped me. Well, it’s unimportant. I like working with Scott. “And I’m sure I’ll be able to think of two or three things about…Storage, was it? I’m sure I’ll be able to think about two or three things about Storage to write about every week.”

“…Somehow.”

As usual, the key to writing regularly about a topic is to get past the simple logline and find the abstract idea behind it. With “Storage,” it only took me a few weeks to understand that though of course cloud storage and teeny USB flash drives and huge internal SSDs would play a prominent role in the topic rotation, Storage has a dimension in the 21st century that it has never had at any point since.

One of my very most treasured belongings is a simple and battered pair of purse-sized notebooks. My grandmother was an ardent record-keeper and every time she and my grandfather traveled, she’d keep notes of where they went, what they ate, how much they spent, everything.

They weren’t diaries, mind you. Just notes; things she wanted to remember for later. At the time these pages were trivia. Today, forty years later, they’re absolute gold.

This, from a flight to Italy on May 21, 1967:

11 PM - Drinks were served. Highballs and champagne.

11:15 PM - Dinner was served. Antipasto, potatoes, Steak, Tarts, Asparagus, Tea and Wine.

We were traveling at 628 Miles Per Hour.

This isn’t a woman who’s creating Leaves Of Wisdom from her Tree Of Life. This was a woman in her late fifties taking a trip and wanting to stick to her budget and make sure that she remembered to buy gifts for each of her kids and friends.

These journals survive largely through chance. And it’s probably rare that someone would even bother writing all of that stuff down to begin with.

But things are different today. You don’t have to be a smooth president of an ad agency to manage your calendar and your contacts with sophisticated software. And you don’t exactly have to be Boswell to be a dedicated diarist. Many of us blog. If we can’t blog, we Twitter. Even if we want to keep our private lives completely private, our smartphones are vacuum cleaners of minute daily detail.

The photo roll of my iPhone is a pretty fine-grained document of everywhere I went and everything I thought was interesting since the summer of 2007 when I bought my first one. The notepad app contains thoughts I wanted to keep track of; other apps record all of my big projects and the basic data mechanisms of daily life.

Will future generations ever look at my standard 2009 shopping list and wonder? Who knows. I’ll be long gone. But the idea is that what was once jotted down on a scrap of paper and then wadded up and thrown away during laundry day is now meticulously preserved simply as a matter of course.

And if your grandkids are ever curious about what you were up to in the summer of 2009, they won’t need to go rooting through boxes, hoping to find a treasure like my grandmother’s travel journals. When you finally popped your clogs and joined the choir invisible, your kids probably made copies of your hard drive. It’s all indexed by the operating system. An idle curiosity results in a simple query “Show me all photos shot more than 50 miles from Grampa’s address.”

Then “Show me all emails, notes, and appointments created within one week of this photo of Grampa in Beijing.”

And there they’ll have a pretty damned full picture of my trip to Asia. The countries I visited, the photos I took, the appointments I kept, the planning; the worries I needed to address about getting a visa, the concern I had that my Dad’s health might take a nasty turn and I’d be stuck on the other side of the planet at exactly the wrong time. My blog posts, my Tweets…

And that’s just my own media. They can then extend the search to the Internet and find the photos of people I hung out with, and what they might have said about meeting me for lunch.

What I would give to have those buttons available to me right now. Grampa left his passport at the house, or so Gramma tersely noted. If only he had a Posterous; I could get his side of that story.

Solid gold.

And its integrity is relying on a hard drive that you paid $89 for. An iron tether stretches from today into the infinite future. But today, it’s sitting on a cobweb.

I blog and Tweet and Flickr for immediate and practical reasons. I back my data up because when I lose data, I lose money.

But I like the idea of leaving some footprints behind when I depart. Every day is a new page in your story and you should set fire to as few of them as possible. Sometimes the person rewinding your trail isn’t a descendant, but you yourself at a later date.

When I look through the photo roll on my iPhone, it’s like rewinding a tape of my life. And this version of my timeline has gaps in it…places where photography wasn’t allowed, or not socially-acceptable.

It’s okay to lose these moments for such simple and sensible reasons. It’s not so good to lose them because you had one copy and the hard drive crashed. Or, you ran out of flash storage and didn’t have another card. Or, you never started keeping notes on things because you never discovered a really good, simple phone app or blogging service.

Recently I was reliving a glorious day that would have passed in, through, and then completely out of my timeline, if not for the fact that I impulsively stuck a tiny Flip Mino video camera in my pocket before I left the house that morning.

“One day, all we’ll have are our memories,” I say, usually when sheepishly explaining why I’d like to get a cheesy group picture of all of my friends at dinner. I say it with that sort of inflection that implies “I’m being sarcastic. I’m not really a sentimental old sop.”

Well, maybe one day you won’t. That’s why you back things up. That’s why you choose your tools carefully and remain aware of what’s possible.

And that’s also, incidentally, why you ask your friends to pose for a goofy group photo.

Well, then. Last post.

My thanks to my good pal Scott. See what I mean? If Scott wants to work with me on a project, then the answer’s always yes and the experience is always terrific.

I invite y’all to check out Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste Of Bandwidth. CWOB.com will take you to my old and new blogs and thence to my Flickr, my Twitter, and all of the other stuff I’ve been honking on about for the past seven or eight months. I just might start up a new blog to take up the creative space in my head that MYDL once occupied.

Until next time: seriously dudes…back up your data.

Editor’s Note: From Scott Bourne
My deep thanks and appreciation to Andy for helping with this project. Simply put, he’s one of the most well-read, articulate and entertaining people I know. Besides all that, he’s a guy who I learn from every week. And I’m not talking about just what I learn from him when he writes about an operating system or a backup strategy or a cell phone. I am talking about learning the true meaning of friendship and happiness and all the good stuff that makes life truly grand. Andy gets more out of your average run of the mill New York Minute than most people get out of a year. He lives life to the fullest. He enjoys and consumes and revels in each experience. I learn from that and appreciate it.

Those of you who have been lucky enough to find this blog already have a sense of what I mean. If you don’t yet, visit Andy’s blog and learn what I mean. I hope that soon Andy and I can work together again. In the mean time - this is the very last official post on MYDL.ME. The podcasts will go offline next Monday as will the blog. Please be sure to archive (for personal use) this content before then. It won’t be available after that.

As for a sign off? Well my pal Andy said it already. And to add impact I will too….

Seriously dudes…back up your data.

And of course, shortly after writing about the Exotic And Exciting little flash drives I bought in Asia, Verbatim releases a new line of teeeeeeeeny little flash drives.

(Okay, technically, they were released last week. But we can argue all night about whether or not this produce was released before or after my blog post.)

An 8 gig stick arrived in the mail today and well I’ll be damned: it’s an 8 gig flash drive. Two complaints: it’s a plain little chip of purple plastic and as such, there’s just no room for any kind of a slide or a shroud to protect the USB connector. And instinctively, you’ll stick it in your computer’s USB port with the pretty logo-side facing up instead of with the metal contacts up.

But those are petty complaints. If you want a conventional USB flash drive, stop by my house at Halloween. I have so many of them that I’ll probably be giving them out alongside the fun-sized Three Musketeers bars. This Verbatim drive is different. It’ll fit nicely in any wallet and disappear until you need it. And unlike the drives I wrote about a couple of days ago, they’re common items with national US distribution, and not souvenirs that are only easy to get after a 12 hour flight to Beijing.

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Tee shirts? Bumper stickers? A hula girl with a clock in her belly? Naw. I’m a geek. When I travel to Asia, I want very special kinds of souvenirs.

Which is why I bought all kinds of USB devices during my time in Asia. Almost everything that twigged my “Why haven’t I seen something like that before?” response got bought.

Witness the above specimens. Flat, postage-stamp-sized, walletable flash drives never really took off in the US but there are plenty to choose from in Asia’s electronics markets. On the left you see an offering from PQI. The Intelligent Drive i810 is available in a range of capacities from 2 to 8 gigs. It’s about the size of a Chiclet and slides closed into a (relatively) dustproof case when not in use. And don’t worry: when deployed, a click-stop locks the USB connector in the extended position. It’s available in the US from SuperMediaStore, an outfit untested and unendorsed by me.

On the right we have Kingmax’s Superstick. 2 gigabytes of Trident Sugarless fury. The only online store where I could find it was ChiTek, which also happens to sell some memory sticks from Transcend that have the same shape and form factor and are avialable in capacities up to 8 gigabytes.

So what’s the point of these teensy drives? In truth, they’re so small that they’re hard to use and they’re easy to lose. “It’s laundry-proof!” the folks selling the Kingmax stick assure us.

…

Oh! Wait, I’ve got one. They’re wallet-sized. I might leave the house without a bag, but I don’t leave without a wallet. So I’m guaranteed to always have high-capacity storage with me wherever I go.

But you got me. Chiefly I bought ‘em because I thought they were cool. You remember when computers were supposed to be cool, right? Or is “cool” just the word that tech companies use to imply that Macs and iPhones and iPods are all style and no substance?

Regard the poor AppleTV. It’s a major disappointment to the Industry that wants a real White Knight of an IPTV solution, and a consumer base that counts on Apple to deliver the slickest, simplest, and sexiest stuff for enjoying video and audio.

Oh, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it. It plays media through your TV and stereo just fine. It’s just that it has the stink of Abandonment about it. It hasn’t been updated in a year and a half, and the gears and cams of the Great Rumor Machine are still and rusting. It’s like those shrinkwrapped four-packs of VHS tapes at Best Buy. They’re new, and they stock them, and they’ll sell them to you if you look for them or specifically ask for them. But it’s clear that the company presently couldn’t care less.

No wonder so many people are eagerly applying the software upgrades that Apple has lost interest in. Inside the AppleTV is a credible little Mac running a flavor of OS X and in theory…this little hotplate can do anything a Mac can do.

This isn’t a post about how to make it do that.

This is instead a post about the difference between the enthusiasm between open-source projects and the practicality of commercial products.

The conventional way to upgrade your AppleTV for free is a project hosted at Google Code. ATVUSB Creator is an app that will download the AppleTV OS from Apple, patch it with new software, and then transmogrify a memory stick into a “patchstick”: the radioactive spider that can turn a scrawny AppleTV into a superhero.

In theory.

In reality, I coudn’t get it to work. First it couldn’t find the OS. I looked through the list of known issues and learned that the feature was broken and that I needed to download it manually and then point the installer app at the .DMG file.

Okay. One problem solved, which allowed me to discover the second problem: the installer keeps hanging with its progress bar at the halfway point. A check for console errors revealed the problem:

8/13/09 2:58:25 AM [0x0-0x29e29e].com.atvusb.creator[9572] IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/Users/andyi/Downloads/atvusb-creator-1.0.b10/staging/boot.efi’

Ah. Well, that’s made things clear.

Seriously though, I thought I’d pop that error into a Google search and find an easy answer. There were plenty. None of them actually resulted in a successful patchstick.

Eventually I gave up and downloaded the Windows edition. It finished its task successfully (hooray!) but the patchstick wouldn’t boot the AppleTV (doubleplus boo).

Compare and contrast the operation of the AppleTV:

1) Take it out of the box.
2) Hook it up.
3) Plug it in.

And it works. It doesn’t do nearly as much as I’d like, of course…but what it was designed to do, it actually does.

If it ever stopped working, I wouldn’t have to resort to a Google search to get it going again (and if I did, I don’t suppose that most of the replies to a support question would be a snotty “This has been covered REPEATEDLY in the FAQ” without even a link to said FAQ). I’d take it to an Apple Store and they’d fix it, or walk me through what I was doing wrong.

I’ll get this running sooner or later. I’m descended from hearty pioneer stock. An hour of reading forum traffic on various boards leaves me convinced that it’s either the software, the image, the memory stick, or my AppleTV, so I’m clearly getting close to a solution. None of these boards have suggested that I’ll need to do anything to my fridge to get this AppleTV upgraded.

The point of this missive isn’t to slam open-source projects or even community-run software that does things to commercial hardware that the company which created it wouldn’t approve of. Far from it. I could no more hate open-source than I could hate the Mac OS itself. Remember, huge chunks of it are open-source.

The point is that as a species, there’s a level of pride and craftsmanship and polish in commercial software that exist in the open-source community sorely as mutations. Most open-source projects (even many high-profile ones) are alpha quality at best. They’re developed to the point where a handful of people can get it to function, and then it’s substantially considered to be releasable, usable code.

And that’s not how “real” software should work. It has to work for the majority of the people who attempt to use it. It needs to keep working. And it needs that final layer of polish that upgrades its feature set from a Clever Little Trick to a tool that’s actually useful in daily life.

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There are plenty of features in the Mac OS Finder that you play with for a little while and then permanently purge from your memory. For me, Labels is one of the biggest items on that list.

Attaching a custom label to individual files and folders was a winner idea when I stored those things on 400K floppies and probably could sit down and write out a list from memory that contained the names of at least 65% of the files I’d created on this machine. But now that we’re dealing with thousands of files on dozens of volumes? Nah. Thanks anyway.

Spotlight made Labels relevant for me again. Spotlight as well as this modern conceit of attaching Tags to everything. I stopped thinking of Labels as a way to remind myself that “Sun-Times - ‘MyPhone 3G Review’ (For Web)” was a Chicago Sun-Times review of the T-Mobile MyPhone 3G and that this was the Web edition of that column, and as a way of doing a sort of super-extended-selection across multiple folders, volumes, and even days.

For instance. I truly do want to organize the N number of reference pictures I’ve taken and downloaded for various art projects. Some of them land in the Pictures folder, some go onto a central server, some are downloaded to the Desktop…it’s a mess. I try to stick to a naming convention but there’s always an orphan or three.

So what should I do? Collect them all manually? That seems to be the only answer. But frankly, it isn’t a big enough priority that I’d set aside a few hours to complete this job from start to finish.

Here’s where Labels come in. I’ve got a few minutes, so I start looking through an individual folder. When I spot a file that needs to be added to a certain collection, do I drag it into a separate folder? Not necessarily. This file might be associated with other projects and it might make sense to retain its original location.

Instead, I simply attach a specific Label to the item. You have seven labels available. By default, they’re named after their colors, but if you go into Finder Preferences you can attach custom names.

Over a course of days, weeks, or months, I manage to crawl through everyplace and locate every file. Satisfied that Alexander has reached the sea and there are no worlds left to conquer, I can get the whole list of tagged files back with a simple Spotlight search. Adjust the popup so you’re searching for “File Label” and then choose a label.

Presto: every tagged file on every attached volume. I can now copy them to a new folder, burn them to a DVD, whatever.

I’d like to see a formal tagging system brought to the Finder. You can sort of fudge it by adding keywords to the Spotlight Comments (available in the file or folder’s Get Info box) but that’s not the most visible place to quickly add a tag. Until then, I’ll keep using Labels to fill the gap.

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Managing your Digital Life Episode #14
In this episode Scott and Andy talk about the Novatel MiFi and Eye-Fi.

Hosts: Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko

Show notes prepared by Tom Newman at Fogview Podcast, Fogview Photos and twitter.com/fogview

HOUSEKEEPING
MYDL is a show about storage, backup, and managing your digital life. The show will be produced three times a month: 1st, 10th, and 20th.
Send your thoughts and suggestions about the show to BourneMediaGroup @ gmail.com

DISCUSSION
Scott: What are we going to talk about today?
Andy: We are both fans of the Novatel MiFi wifi base station. This is the credit card size device that connects to the Sprint or Verizon network and with a touch of the button and you are projecting a bubble of wifi. I liked it so much that I actually bought one. When they say it’s a wifi base station, it really is a base station. I can connect a number of devices and they are networked together. I think it was you that mentioned it should work with the Eye-Fi card too. The Eye-Fi is a standard SD memory card that has an embedded processor and a wifi chip. The idea behind the Eye-Fi card is you have to mount it on your desktop and run a piece of software and tell it the wifi base stations you are going to encounter; here are their IDs and passwords; and here’s what I want you to do with the pictures as they are taken. You can tell it that you want your photos to go to your iPhoto library; go to Flickr; or go to Flickr and make them private. You put the card in your camera and take a picture and it goes to whatever destination you asked for. In the past I never had a need to directly post pictures when I was inside my house. But you pointed out that I have wifi in my pocket and now instead of posting cheesy camera phone pictures when I’m out and about, now I can stick the Eye-Fi card in my Nikon D80 and post SLR pictures to Flickr a minute after I take them.
Scott: I really think the MiFi is the savour of the Eye-Fi. Most photographers I know had no use for the Eye-Fi until the MiFi came along.
Scott: What do people need to know to make it work? What are the limitations?
Andy: The limitation is the camera doesn’t think there is anything special about this memory card. The camera will power down after taking a picture and I was wondering why some of my pictures were not making it to Flickr. I ended up having to adjust the power-down time on my camera. Instead of have a simple memory card in your camera you now have a wifi device and it will run down the battery faster. The third thing is the card will do whatever you told it to do. If you told it to upload the picture to Flickr, you need to thing about it before you press the clicker.
Scott: What about security with the Eye-Fi?
Andy: The communication between the Eye-Fi and MiFi is wifi. As far as Eye-Fi security it will only do what you tell it to do. Knowing that I’m backing up my photos as I’m shooting is an awesome thing and great use of technology.
Scott: I do want to talk about some of the limitations on the Eye-Fi. First is the maximum storage of 4 GB.
Andy: I have a 2 GB card but 4 GB is the maximum. This is just a SD card and not the higher speed SDHC.
Scott: You do need a (wifi) router to make it work. It supports both 802.11 B and G. It works on Windows and Mac. It does come with the Eye-Fi manager software. Do you have any experience with that Andy?
Andy: A little bit on the Mac. When you install it, it places a little ICON in the menu bar which allows you to reconfigure the card. The good news is you can use it without the software and it presents itself to a Windows or Mac machine like a standard SD memory card. You would use the software to reconfigure the wifi features of the card.
Scott: They claim a 90 foot range outdoors and a 45 foot range indoors. What does your testing show?
Andy: I find I can count on it working within the room but can’t count on it working within the house through walls. I find that these digital cameras were not designed with a wifi radio in mind. Your camera may be very well shielded. You may find the way you grip your camera acts as a (wifi) barrier. I know it will work when the MiFi is in my pocket but I can’t count on it working when I have a wall between the card and the base station. There really aren’t any cameras designed to work with the Eye-Fi. If you have the MiFi, you may want to look at the few digital cameras that have wifi built in. You will be able to do cooler stuff (with those cameras), like switch between base stations; view signal strength; and have better power management.

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Scott: When we talk about devices like this that can marry devices to wifi, will we see other devices take part in this?
Andy: I think devices like this are the future of wireless broadband. There is no compelling reason to have a device that mounts in your computer when you can have a device like MiFi. When you live in a world where you can have high speed broadband where ever you go, that changes the landscape. The difference for me now is if I have an important document, I will save it to the cloud instead of only having it only on one computer. I don’t think we will find companies making products specifically for the MiFi, but will make their own wifi-based solutions.
Scott: Can you think of some of the things you would like to see take advantage of that?
Andy: What I would like to see is cars, appliances, and things inside the house and office understand that I already have this device. You can already buy printers that have wifi built in. What if you could turn every device into a mobile device. What if any device that had a really big screen could get dynamic content (through wifi) instead of having to run copper throughout your house. The fact of the matter is that any device that has a built-in wifi chip will be that much more powerful and that much more useful.
Scott: We are talking about the MiFi because that’s the only thing we know about that does this right now. I can think of tons of simple applications (to use this). Having your grocery list come up on your grocery cart. You could store your workout program that’s accessible at the gym. We talked about set-top boxes years ago, and now you’re the set-top box.
Andy: There are two things going here. Number one is the assumption that you will have one of three smart phones in your pockets. Two is that we had this ability for years with BlueTooth, so it would be possible for your grocery store or gym to come up with a specification to support this. As usual, it’s humans that is the barrier to technology and the sooner they are wiped out, the better it will be for technology.
Scott: When I was a kid we had Tomorrow Land and the Jetsons, and now we are starting to move into a world where this stuff is real. Of course anyone under 25 can’t relate to this because they grew up with it. For those of us older, remembering Dad bringing home that first color television or the Maxwell Smart sized “shoe phone,” I walk around looking at my iPhone connected to my MiFi card and shake my head at what I’m able to achieve. I get real perspective when I visit with older people in their 70’s or 80’s and show them this stuff and they can’t begin to grasp how far things have come.

WRAP-UP
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Andy can be found at cwob.com and on Twitter at twitter.com/ihnatko

Scott can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/scottbourne

Scowl, grimace, mope.

These were my main reactions as I attempted to back up some important voice mails. Even if you don’t use an iPhone or some other trendy HotPhone, this handset becomes a magnet for some incredibly valuable media. Among them: the voicemail your brother left to tell you he was getting married, the one from George Lucas left to tell you that he thought your YouTube tribute to the GNK power droid from Episode 6 had “absolutely nailed what he was going for in crafting this character”…the only recording you have of a loved one’s voice before you lost them forever.

But it’s all just bits and bytes, right? There must be a way to just copy that digital file to your hard drive, and convert it to a .WAV.

There is.

Or, there are. It depends on what kind of phone you have.

The instructions and utilities you’ll need all vary. One element is constant: these methods all kind of suck.

For example, the best solution on an iPhone involves a jailbreak. Unlock the phone, then access the phone via FTP, navigate to /private/var/mobile/Library/Voicemail/, and copy the files to your hard drive. Your messages are all in some sort of bizarre format that only people with seven toes on one foot can really appreciate, but you can play them with Quicktime Player (and thus convert them to something more manageable).

But I just want to save a WAV, man! And what about other phones that don’t save voice mails on the local device?

I soon realized that I’d been over-thinking the problem. Voice mails are mono recordings at low bitrate. My normal qualms against techniques that ding the sound quality of a file weren’t really applicable.

So! Welcome the Universal Voicemail Extractor: Skype and your favorite audio-capture utility. Skype allows your computer to make calls to any telephone, through your Mac or PC. Audio Hijack for Mac and Replay from Applian will capture any sound coming through your computer to an audio file.

See how simple it can be? Start the audio capture, dial into your voice mail, play the message, and then click Stop. Done and dusted.

Though I think AT&T and the rest are missing an opportunity to serve their users (unsurprising) and charge for an extra service (very surprising): wouldn’t you pay a dollar to have specific voice mails emailed to you as MP3s or WAVs?

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My buddy Scott and I have done a bit of an intellectual property swap regarding the MiFi. What I gave him was about ten minutes’ worth of enthusiastic burbling about how well this ingenious little mobile broadband device works. It’s the size of a thic credit card and has just one button. Give it a squeeze and one of its two LEDs glows green, letting you know that it’s established a broadband connection to the 3G network (it’s sold by both Verizon and Sprint). Go ahead and look for WiFi hotspots…what’s this? “Verizon MiFi”?

Yes. It presents itself as a bog-standard WiFi base station. Through the MiFi, up to five WiFi devices can connect to the Internet and to each other.

Scott bought one on my recommendation. What he did for me was make an observation that had somehow escaped my notice: “This would even work with an Eye-Fi card, wouldn’t it?”

Palm of Andy’s right hand, meet Andy’s forehead. At high velocity.

Of course. The Eye-Fi is (oh, that phrase again) bog-standard SD memory card with an embedded processor. Put it in any digital camera and take pictures as usual. When JPEGs start to appear on the card, the processor grabs them and sends them out through the card’s WiFi radio.

Where, precisely? It’s up to you. When you mount the card on your PC or Mac desktop, you use a configuration app to set up the processor with information about your WiFi base stations (IDs, passwords) and choose a function (dump pictures to your desktop photo library, transmit photos to Flickr or some other photo site as they’re shot, etc.)

I’ve never been a big fan of the Eye-Fi. It’s always struck me as a super-niche product. You need to pre-set the card with known WiFi base stations. Okay, fine, but that means “my house and my office and maybe my friend’s house.” These are all places where there’s a computer, you know? So I’m spending twice the cost of a 16 gig SDHC card for 2 gigs of SD memory that also drains my camera battery much faster. And what I get for that is…fifteen seconds of my life back. IE, the amount of time it takes to eject my memory card and stick it in a card reader.

I can tell you’re already ahead of me, though. Last night, I posted this photo to my Flickr feed:

I was at a stop light (witness the speed indicator: zero). I took my Nikon P6000 from the passenger seat, turned it on, took a photo, and put it back on the passenger seat while I waited for the light to turn green. Thanks to the MiFi in my shirt pocket, the Eye-Fi was able to post the photo — the actual photo — directly to Flickr.

This is a bit of an upgrade over the usual crummy cameraphone photo, wouldn’t you agree?

From a selfish point of view, the Eye-Fi just paid for itself. I’m often at events where I’m actually too busy to blog or even Tweet while the even is happening. With this rig, I can be posting interesting content as I collect it.

From an Industry Sage point of view…this is a glimpse at the future. We’ve often talked about cloud services here on MYDL. And the idea of keeping your files, your media, your contacts, etc. on a remote server that you can access from wherever and whatever is compelling.

But step one has always been “get your butt over to an Internet access point” and that’s the defining limit of cloud computing.

What happens to these services when you have a device like the MiFi, which allows you to carry the cloud around with you? Hmm.

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Managing your Digital Life Episode #13
In this episode Scott and Andy talk about posterous.com, time travel, MiFi and more.

Hosts: Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko

Show notes prepared by Tom Newman at Fogview Podcast, Fogview Photos and twitter.com/fogview

HOUSEKEEPING
MYDL is a show about storage, backup, and managing your digital life. The show will be produced three times a month: 1st, 10th, and 20th.
Send your thoughts and suggestions about the show to BourneMediaGroup @ gmail.com

SPONSOR: Drobo is a premium sponsor at MYDL.ME. Go to Drobostore.com for more information.

DISCUSSION
Scott: We are going to start by mentioning some things that we think are cool and the first one is Posterous. What is Posterous?
Andy: It’s the Goldilocks and the Three Bears solution to blogging. The two extremes have been covered for years. You have the really, really easy blogging by Twitter. You don’t have to format anything but you only have 140 characters. On the other end of the scale you have Wordpress. It tries to be simple and help you out but it really is a publishing media. Posterous is somewhere in between. It’s great because all you do is send an email to post@posterous.com. It figures out who you are (based on your email address) and reformats the email and makes it into a pretty blog post. The real magic comes in the second part where is senses the content and makes the right choices and converts it into a very, very cool and slick looking blog post. If you send just play text, it will reformat that into HTML. But, if that text includes a link to a YouTube video, it will embed a video player in your post. If you send it a link to a Google map, it will embed an interactive Google map.
Scott: Do you have to configure all this or does it automatically know?
Andy: It automatically knows. It’s even cooler when I send attached media. If I send it a photo, it will scale it to the right size. If I send it a group of photos they will all be put into a slide show presentation. If I send it a video, it will be transformed into a streaming video. If I send it an audio file, it will embed an audio player. To sum, up no matter what you send it, it will be formatted correctly for your viewers to your see. If you have an account on Twitter, a Flickr account, and multiple blogs, all you have to do is describe all your different accounts to Posterous and when you send something to Posterous, it not only goes to Posterous, but all your other social sites (blog, Twitter, Flickr, etc.). You can even tell it that you want it to only go to your Flickr account by sending it to flickr@posterous.com. It becomes your way station for all this media that you are distributing.
Scott: It’s like Tumbler but it seems to be more advance and uses simple interaction with email.
Andy. Tumbler started off as a blogging platform but it went off the rails trying to make it like Wordpress. With Posterous, the entire interface is email. If you log in with your web browser, you will get a web-based interface that’s like Wordpress. Any device you have that can send email, can post to Posterous. I set it up about a week ago before I left for China and this is the reason why I was blogging so much. I can go from the impulse that I should be posting this on my blog to having it on my blog in just a couple of minutes.
Scott: Yes, there will be times when you have email access, but not browser access. I’m guessing that’s the real strength of this.
Andy: It directly solves the problem of where to post (Twitter, blog, etc.). I would usually have to post it a number of times. Now I only have to post it once.
Scott: I have been using Tumbler for a while but I recognized that Posterous could be useful when it first came out and signed up as Scott Borne on Posterous but never used it. But, because of you, I’m going to reroute everything to Posterous and give it a try.

Scott: On another subject, I want to talk about something that doesn’t seem like a big deal but does help me to manage my digital life. The Lexar Firewire 800 UDMA CompactFlash reader. UDMA is the fastest speed you can get on a flash device. I have two 16 GB flash cards in my Nikon D3s and I can drop those cards into one of these readers and back them up in about a minute. What is really cool is the Lexar has two Firewire 800 ports on the readers so I can daisy chain two Lexar readers and read from two cards at the same time. The Lexar readers are about the size of a MiFi.

Scott: Speaking of MiFi, we both like that one. I actually I have two of them: one for my office account and one for my personal account. With the MiFi, I’m a router and you can access the Internet through me!
Andy: The simple fact is you can be anywhere you want and still have an Internet connection. This credit card sized device with it’s own battery can fit in my pocket and surround me with WiFi. I had one now for about three months. It support up to five devices and just like any other base station, any device connected to it can connect to other devices on the network. The other day I needed to put a book file on my iPhone from my Macbook. I found the iPhone on the network and was able to move the file from the Macbook to the iPhone.
Andy: I completely forgot about that little devices the size of a memory card that can upload files to the Internet as long as you are near a base station and have it on to Flickr. Now with the MiFi I can spend a couple of hours walking around Boston knowing that the MiFi is in my pocket and sending them up to Flickr as I go.
Scott: You are talking about the EyeOne care (EyeFi?). When they first came out I though it was going to be stupid. However, with the MiFi in my pocket, and a iPhone and a camera you need to give me a five foot buffer zone because of all these rays coming from me.
Andy: This would have been a valuable thing in China. If you take the time to set up the shot and then take the picture and later told you can’t do that, you photo can be uploaded to Flickr before your picture was erased from the memory card.

Scott: Lets talk about one more thing that you wrote about. The new eGo Mac Edition.
Andy: This is a pocket hard drive that I like a lot. I think we are both fans of Iomega hard drive lines and they recently updated their line and it’s slicker and sleeker and it’s still small enough to fit into any pocket you have on your person. It’s rugged: you can drop it from 51 to 52 inches and not lose any data. It can connect through USB 2.0 or Firewire 400/800.
Scott: I didn’t do any tests on this specific drive but when I did my tests of all these drives, this is the brand that survived the longest fall. It’s great to see that they are still around and continue to innovate.
Scott: Do you have anything else to add?
Andy: I did bring back some very cool USB devices from China, but I’ll save that for another show.
Scott: I do want to add that Nikon just announced a couple of new very important cameras. By the time you hear this show the cameras will have been out a few days. They introduced the D3000 at a $600 price point for a DSLR. It has features that surpass the features of cameras introduced just a few years ago. They also came out with the D300s prosumer camera that does 720p video. It also has a mic jack and contrast-base autofocus, plus depth of field control up to F/16. This is a $1,800 still camera that does video and is just below the top of the line D700 and D3. What could they think of next?
Andy: I got the specs on the camera and I can’t figure out what they would use them for. Why would a professional buy a $1,600 camera body that doesn’t have the high-end video capabilities that would be needed.
Scott: This camera addresses the sound issue (with the mic jack). The main reason people want this camera is for the control over depth of field and control over focus. You can buy a $800/$900 camcorder now a days but you can’t get a very good depth of field because of the distance between and lens and sensor. Plus it’s the interchangeable lenses. I have 300-800 mm F/5.6 ($9,000) lens from Sigma for my Nikon D3 and if I hook that up to a Nikon D300s, I can do serious wild life video for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated wild life video camera. This is 24 fps so this is going for the people doing movie style clips. This is serious competition for the Canon 5D MK II.
WRAP-UP

We will be back in 10 days.
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Andy can be found at cwob.com and on Twitter at twitter.com/ihnatko

Scott can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/scottbourne