See that? That’s the stack of dead hard drives I found when cleaning out my office closet. They’re all from within the last 7 years.

You hear this all the time, but it still seems to never sink in: back up your data. Most people are, in some fashion, very dependent on the data in their computers, yet less than 10% regularly back it up. Not backing up your data is like not wearing a seat belt — sure, you probably won’t get in an accident, but do you really want to take that chance when prevention is so easy?

My stack of dead drives looks extreme to most people, but I have always had a lot of data, so I’ve owned a lot of hard drives. As such, this has given me more than enough opportunities to be exposed to the pain of data loss. Fortunately, I only actually lost important files one time. How can you protect yourself?

Most people don’t back up regularly because it’s too inconvenient or time consuming. I’m going to offer some recommendations that aim to cut down those barriers so that backing up can be easy for everyone. We’ll start with the cheapest and work our way up.
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Toward the end of last March, I wrote about how I had ditched my iMac for a self-built Hackintosh. Given the huge cost savings and flexibility you get from a Hackintosh, I field a lot of questions about how well it works and if I’m still glad I did it. I thought after six months, it was time for a follow-up.

Am I glad I did it? Mostly yes, but a few niggles remain. On the whole, the machine runs brilliantly. It’s never kernel panicked or crashed, and with the Core 2 Duo at 2.8 GHz and 4GB of RAM, I can keep all the apps I regularly use open all the time with very little slowdown. I can pack a whole bunch of hard drives into the case, and have the connections necessary for up to two 30″ monitors should I want to connect them — all things that you can normally only do on the $2500+ Mac Pro. For $600, I can’t complain too much.

But I can complain a little. For one thing, the card reader in my Dell monitor has never worked right. This is solved with a separate USB card reader, but it’s another thing to have to hook up. The Line In/Microphone don’t work…which would be a significant problem if I didn’t also have a MacBook Pro for the times I need to Skype or something. And finally, system updates can be a pain. The small updates aren’t a problem, but the big ones (10.5.4, 10.5.5, next up is 10.5.6, etc) will hose your Hackintosh if you just run them straight from Software Update. They require varying degrees of handholding and third-party packages provided by the Hackintosh community, along with some dedication and patience.

So I am glad I tried this project, and it’s working out great for the most part. Will I do it again? Probably not. Ultimately, I’d like to buy a Mac Pro. Another option I’m considering is seeing if I can consolidate my life down to one machine — a MacBook Pro — for simplicity’s sake, which I would just dock at my desk when I needed a larger monitor. The home-based massive file store (2.5+ TB) would return to either a basic Linux server or a Drobo. I could use the home theater Mac Mini to run any secondary tasks (like long downloads) that I can’t leave my MacBook Pro behind for.

That’s very pie-in-the-sky stuff at the moment though, because I’ve never been without a desktop computer to fall back on. And while the simplicity of a single computer appeals to me, insofar as I would no longer have to be constantly moving files around and maintaining two primary machines, the lack of redundancy scares me a bit. So for now, the Hackintosh stays and continues to chug along. I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth, and if you’re a bit of a computer tinkerer a Hackintosh might work well for you too.

Now that I’ve gotten into photography a little bit, I tend to pay more attention to how other people use their cameras. There’s two things that I repeatedly see which drive me up the wall: pointless use of flash, and that dang beeping noise.

Let’s start with the beeping. On most cameras, this will occur either when the camera focuses or when you release the shutter — or both. In my opinion, this feature is pretty unnecessary for most people, because there are visual confirmations for both of these actions (and I do hope you’re looking at your camera when you use it!). The cacophony of beeps is just plain annoying when you’ve got several people all trying to focus and snap pictures all at the same time. It’s downright rude when you’re in a quiet setting — like some sort of performance, gallery, etc. People seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that their camera is making loud, rude noises while someone is performing a solo or whatever. There is a simple on-off setting for this…please, consider turning it off.

The second item of photography etiquette on today’s agenda is the use of flash. Most people buy their point-and-shoot cameras and then never take it off the Auto Flash function. This works fine for many situations, but cameras are still kind of stupid about when to use flash. I remember watching diving at the Beijing Olympics a couple months ago, for example, and the Water Cube announcers repeatedly asked spectators not to use flash. Yet, every single time someone went off the diving board, hundreds of flash bulbs popped from the stands.
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One marketing ploy that most consumers have almost universally bought into is that the more megapixels a digital camera has, the better it is. This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the entire consumer electronics industry, possibly second only to the belief that a $140 Monster cable will make your audio signal sound better than a $12 cable (or a coat hanger). The first thing out of someone’s mouth when you show them a new camera is often “How many megapixels is it?” More megapixels not only don’t make for a better camera than one with less MP, but it may actually make it worse. Before anyone starts shopping for cameras this holiday season, I want to make sure everyone’s aware of the Megapixel Myth.

A huge factor in the quality of digital photos is the quality and size of the digital sensor inside the camera and how much light it is able to absorb. You’ve all seen grainy, noisy digital photos, especially in darker shots — that’s the sign of a sensor struggling to take in enough light to expose the photo. The sensor is a rectangular device that is divided into a pixel grid — if you have a 4 MP camera, then you’ve got about 4 million individual photo-sensitive cells on that sensor. If you then cram 8 MP onto that same sensor, with the same physical dimensions, then more of the surface is divisions, or “walls”, than light-gathering pixels. Think of it like an ice cube tray. If you have a tray that normally has 20 cubes, and then subdivide it so it can handle 40 smaller cubes, your total volume of water drops because of the extra space that the divider walls take up.

Sensors in the typical compact consumer camera can only get so big and still fit in the case. So all other things being equal — same physical sensor size, same sensitivity, etc — a lower megapixel camera will perform better in low-light situations where every possible photon of light must be absorbed. DSLR cameras have much larger sensor sizes, and so have much larger photo-sensitive cells. This is one reason why a DSLR will always outperform a point-and-shoot that has the same MP rating — the photo cells are bigger, they can absorb more light, which means less noise in low-light situations and faster shutter speeds across the board.

Now of course as technology improves, sensors get better and better at absorbing light from small photo cells, so a lower MP camera is not automatically better or more sensitive to light. But the important point here is that higher MP does not mean you’re going to get a better image.

During a London event pimping the upcoming military/monster/undead bloodbath game Gears of War 2, developer Rod Fergusson from Epic made a remark about the Xbox 360 having reached its graphical limit. Some thought he meant that nothing else could be done with the platform, but what he was really referring to (as clarified later by Epic colleague Cliff Bleszinski) was that developers had to find creative new ways of taking advantage of what the 360 provides, because they’re not going to get any more processing power or memory. Bleszinski cited the Super Nintendo’s life cycle, during which game graphics continually improved despite a series of apparent plateaus.

The point is that a fixed platform, like the Super Nintendo, Xbox 360, and every other console, forces developers to work within their hardware restrictions with no expectation of any flexibility or improvement. While this may be obvious, the contrast between development for game platforms and PCs makes for some interesting observations.
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