PGP Announced this on their beta blog, on this post.

If you want to participate to the beta, here is the link! If you are interested I suggest you subscribe here: I registered on their previous beta page but didn’t get any announcement, using this page I got an immediate reply.

The beta program will end on November 30, and the update should be free if you are covered by the maintenance agreement (i.e. if you purchased less than 12 months ago or if you renewed the maintenance).

My answer to this question is another question: “What kind of data?”.

I have stopped looking for the perfect place where to store everything, and I use multiple applications and services to store my personal and professional data. From each application and service I require different things: security, accessibility, reliability, storage space, searchability, etc.

I have different categories of data that I need to store, and for each category I have chosen an application, or a service. I will go through the multiple application that I use, and explain what data I store where, and why.

I will cover a single application or service per post, to avoid writing a single, extremely long text. The services that I use are: Evernote, Devonthink Pro Office, 1Password, LicenseKeeper, Bento. I am not going to list here storage of music and photos.

Evernote

Evernote is both an application and an online service. It is a freeform database, where you can store pretty much everything. Evernote provides a very well designed web service, and applications for most architectures: Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Blackberry. The basic service is free, but I really recommend to upgrade to the premium version: it costs only $45 per year and allows you to upload 500MB of data, and to attach any kind of files to your notes.

What is very interesting about Evernote is that their server performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on everything you post, making it searchable: photos of documents, whiteboards, receipts, and even handwriting. The service also allows you to tag your notes and to manage tags in a very flexible way. All your content is searchable, everywhere: if you are on your Mac, Evernote supports Spotlight.

It is very easy to post new content, I often do that from the iPhone application, taking pictures of documents, receipts, white boards, etc. Another interesting application on the iPhone is JotNot, which allows you to improve and crop photos of written documents.

Evernote makes it very easy to share information as well. You store your information in Notebooks, which can be set as “Public”. A public notebook has an accessible URL and also an RSS feed, making it suitable even as a blog service! I use my public notebook to post fun and interesting stuff that I find: in this way I am not only sharing the information, but also making sure that it’s safely stored in my “external brain” (as Evernote folks call the service). Each post in my public notebook is also sent to my Facebook newsfeed. In addition to being public, a notebook can be shared with a limited group of people.

Personally, I use Evernote to store many things:

• Business cards: whenever somebody gives me a business card, I take a shoot of it with my iPhone and throw the card away;
• Identification documents: I travel very often, what if my passport is stolen? I can retrieve a scan of the document from Evernote; even if my laptop and iPhone were gone as well, I could retrieve the information from every computer with an Internet connection;
• Snippets of information: Every piece of information that I want to remember: articles, jokes, funny ads, videos, comics, etc.;
• Manuals: I usually download the PDF versions of all manuals, and store them here;
• Travel Reservations: Another piece of information that I might need to access from everywhere;
• Other travel documents: An example of this are some maps of Seoul, provided by colleagues, with notes in Korean to be shown to taxi drivers. My colleagues sent me these maps pasted in an Excel spreadsheet (they don’t use a Mac…), and I simply dropped the spreadsheet itself in the note: very easy to open from my iPhone in case of need;
• Warranty cards: scanned and stored here, at least I know where to find them when needed.

And here is what I don’t use Evernote for: confidential information like credit card numbers, passwords, bank accounts and statements, etc. Evernote does allow you to encrypt text, but there are easier ways to store that kind of information. Stay tuned, this is for one of the next stories…

Personally I use a service called CrashPlan, and I can only recommend it. You can decide to use a different tool, the ideas highlighted here will probably still apply. CrashPlan is composed by a multi-platform application (available for Mac, Windows, and Linux), and a storage service. The storage service isn’t mandatory, a nice thing about CrashPlan is that you can use external hard disks, or other machines as backup destinations. Everything is encrypted, so you don’t need to worry even if you backup to somebody else’s machine. That being said, CrashPlan recently made available an unlimited plan, which is very affordable and makes thing even easier if you decide to use their storage service, called CrashPlan Central.

Last week I was on a business trip, and I had to prepare an urgent document. I wanted to start quickly, so I opened an old document just to re-use the template (I had not saved the template itself); I started writing, and after some time I completely forgot where I started from, so I started saving my work. I finished my document, and delivered it. It was only a couple of days after, when I was looking for the original document (the one I used as a template), that I realized it was gone… I had overwritten it while periodically saving the other one, and I was at 5,000 kilometers from my time-machine. I was almost to the point of restarting it from scratch, when I remembered CrashPlan. I opened the application, typed my password, and was able to choose from different versions of the same document, saved at different times (CrashPlan+ allows you to monitor the filesystem in real-time, and generate a new version of a file when it is changed). It took less than 30 seconds to retrieve the correct file, and this saved me some hours of work. Also very interesting, if you use CrashPlan Central, you can restore your data on a different machine directly from the web.

This is not the only use of having an online backup. This kind of services is also the easiest way to keep an off-site backup of your data, which is always up to date. Obviously, you need to pick a company that you trust with your data: they can claim to encrypt your data, not to be able to access your files, but I don’t see how you can verify these claims. To me the advantages clearly outweigh the security concerns, and I do recommend this service without hesitation.

I have been traveling around Canada for the past two weeks, and I decided to give a shot to Aperture on the road.

Disclaimer: I am a beginner in photography, don’t assume the suggested workflow is the best in any way!

I decided not to bring my main laptop for the trip, I use it for work and I didn’t want to risk damaging it. I brought a first generation Macbook instead, with just Aperture and a couple of plugins installed.

General workflow

After shooting during the day (everything in Raw), I loaded the masters in Aperture, geotagged them, star-rated them, did some HDR rendering with the Photomatix Pro plugin, and backed everithing up on an external HD. The Aperture library being stored in my Dropbox, an offsite backup was happening in the background, whenever I had Internet connectivity.

Having the masters on at least two different disks, I felt comfortable erasing the memory card before a new day of shooting.

I have to say that Aperture performs very well as a traveling photo management tool. The backups are extremely easy using the built-in Vaults, and bringing the work done on the road into the main library is also easy and fast.

The editing, using Aperture and a couple of plugins, is extremely easy and quite fast, even on an old machine. The plugins I installed are: Photomatix Pro (HDR tone mapping), Noise Ninja (noise reduction), and Maperture Pro (geotagging). For heavier duties I also installed Photoshop Elements, but I only used it to stitch panoramas.

Geocoding

While shooting I had my GPS tracker running, so I could easily geotag the photos at the end of the day. I use a Qstarz BT-Q1300, which looks like a simple key-chain, and provides 11 hours of autonomy. For the geo-tagging, I have been using Maperture Pro for some batches of pictures, and HoudahGeo for others: I haven’t made up my mind yet on what method is the best.

Maperture Pro

• Pros: Better interface, integrated in Aperture, easy manual correction of geocoding errors;
• Cons: Doesn’t work at all without an Internet connection, very slow and resource-consuming while processing big GPX files, requires an external application to extract GPS data from the tracker (i.e. HoudahGPS, freeware), GPS tags are not exported by Aperture (to be fair this is an Aperture limitation);

HoudahGeo

• Pros: Doesn’t require an Internet connection (except for the reverse geocoding), fast even with big GPX files, can extract data directly from GPS devices, allows to apply an offset to the photos’ time-stamp, doesn’t require Aperture at all;
• Cons: Not integrated into Aperture, difficult to manually correct the coordinates, interface not very intuitive.

Back Home

Once back home, Aperture makes it extremely easy to export a project, including raw masters, versions, meta-data, and all the work done on the road. The project can then be imported equally easily in the main library. You can see some shots on my Flickr Photostream. To upload the photos on Flickr, I used a plugin called FlickrExport.

I wanted to give a try to Lightroom as well, but I haven’t. The biggest problem with this type of programs is that they lock you in very effectively: the idea of migrating the work done is quite daunting. Probably there is no need to do that, and the best is to keep the shots where they have been processed initially, but for now I’m happy with Aperture.

Apologies and talk to you soon, hopefully my MBP will be repaired when I come back from the cruise (fortunately it is covered by Apple Care)!

• To tag files: Fresh;
• To tag photos (in iPhoto): Keyword Manager;
• To geotag photos: HoudahGeo;
• To tag email messages (in Mail.app): MailTags;
• To tag bookmarks: delicious.com.

Stay tuned, I will review these and other applications in the coming weeks.

The goal of an organization system, be it based on a hierarchical structure of folders, or on a flat structure of tags, is to help us finding specific objects in our information system, quickly and effectively. A beautiful organization system must not become an end in itself. It is a mean to access our information.

An example

The best way to prove that tags are superior to folders is probably an example. Let’s suppose that we work with different Companies, some of which are Clients, while some are Partners (for simplicity, let’s assume that a client cannot be also a partner). With Clients, we can have documents relative to three activities: Pre-sales, Training, and Support. With Partners, we can only have documents related to Pre-sales and Training.

Folders

No matter how we organize our folder structure, some duplication is unavoidable. In this first example we start from the company type: Client or Partner, and we drill down to the activities, which are replicated for each of the four companies:

Click on the image to view it full size

We can organize things differently, starting from the activities, but in this case we must replicate the companies within each activity:

Click on the image to view it full size

Things can get worse in case a document can be related to multiple companies, or multiple activities: this obliges us to replicate the document as well, not only the folders. We can try to find other creative solutions, like using links to the single instance of a document, but there is no clean way to manage this case with a hierarchical structure.

In most common cases, a tree structure brings information replication.

If wrongly categorized, finding an object in a tree structure is more difficult than in a flat structure.

Tags

Using tags instead of folders, no replication is necessary (neither of folders, nor of documents and other objects), as there are no hierarchical relationships among our attributes (company type, company, and activity). We can freely tag a document with whatever attribute we want to give it:

Click on the image to view it full size

Using tags is not so easy at the beginning, and requires some discipline; the biggest risk is to end up with hundreds of tags, many of which are duplicates of each other, with a slightly different spelling (i.e. travel vs traveling, partner vs partners, work vs Work). In this situation, tags are worthless, as they do not help to find the information.

Coming from a long experience with a classical hierarchical structures, it took me a long time to be able to use effectively to a tag-based system. Looking back, I do not regret having switched and I now use tags to organize everything: email messages, documents, photos, music, bookmarks, and whatever needs to be organized in some way.

Some tools allow us to define relationships among tags. While this is not necessary, it can help to tag objects more quickly. For example, if we can define that Singapore is part of Asia, whenever we use the tag “Singapore”, “Asia” will be automatically added.

Suggestions

• If you are starting with tags, choose flexible tools, which allow you to rename, delete, and re-organize tags. You are going to change your mind many times…
• Set some rules to create your tags: for example, singular nouns vs plural, all small-capitals, etc. This helps to avoid duplicates;
• Periodically review your tags and to some clean-up when necessary: if you realize that you have attributed a tag to a single document, you might decide to remove it or merge it with another tag;
• Never forget the goal: tags (or folders) are there to help us finding specific objects quickly. Modern systems allow to index the information and to perform search operations effectively. With this in mind, it is not necessary to give too specific attributes to your objects: all the words in a document will be indexed and will be valid search terms. The tags should indicate conceptual categories (i.e. a legal document will probably not contain the word “legal”, but this word would be an appropriate tag for the document).

My strategy consists of three different backup techniques.

Disk clone

This is a complete backup of a machine, which offers very fast recovery and is easy to set up. If you use this strategy the way it was designed to work, you simply have to plug your backup hard disk to a new machine, or use it to replace a faulty hard drive, and you are up and running. To increase the security, I actually backup to an encrypted disk image (two of them in truth, swapped weekly). The advantage of using a disk image, besides securing your data, is the possibility to store multiple backups on the same disk, with no interference with other data which might be on the backup drive. I use a mirrored RAID for this. Obviously, you cannot boot from an encrypted disk image; you can, however, restore it onto a new hard drive and the result will be bootable. The application that I use for the backup is called SuperDuper!, and has the advantage of supporting incremental backups very well, therefore being fast.

Time Machine

I have set up a Time Machine backup as well, to benefit from the versioning of the files and the tight integration in the OS. To guarantee security, my Time Machine destination disk is fully encrypted using PGP WDE. Time Machine also guarantees a short recovery time (though not as short as a clone), allowing you to re-create quickly a bootable copy of the disk you backed up. The catch, when using PGP WDE, is that you can’t restore booting from a Leopard DVD: you need a recovery system with PGP installed (and a copy of your encryption key as well). I keep such a system on a USB thumb-drive.

Offsite Backup

The previous two solutions can be more than sufficient, especially if you implement them at different locations. If you want to add even more security, you can use an off-site backup solution. I have tested a couple of them a long time back, and selected CrashPlan. The program is now free and it allows you to backup virtually everywhere: external disks, remote machines (folks at CrashPlan suggest using friends’ machines), and CrashPlan own data vault.

Obviously, data are encrypted before leaving your machine, and nobody but you can access the backup. Two big advantages of this strategy: you files are backed up in real-time (i.e. every time a file is modified, it is sent over), and you can access your data from everywhere. Ever needed that important file you accidentally deleted or overwritten? The files are versioned as well, so you can get back to previous versions of your files. Downside of this solution is the offsite storage cost, and the bandwidth usage: I do not recommend backing up an entire system this way, but for important data it’s probably the best solution. Also, depending on where your data are stored, the recovery time may be extremely long.

Remember: better safe than sorry!

I have chosen some applications that I use very often: OmniFocus and Twittellator Pro, and some that are quite heavy. The results are self explanatory.

The last section of the video shows the available memory on the two phones (using iStat).

Apologies for the reflections on the 3GS screen, I don’t have an anti-glare screen protector on it.

Let’s do a quick calculation, with figures from countries that I know well:

Note: Prices are approximate

Does it sound fair to you that the cost of 2GB of traffic while roaming is roughly 500 times higher than the cost of the same amount of data for a domestic user?

The official reason for such outrageous prices, is the scarcity of the 3G bandwitdh. I could agree with that, but I don’t understand how roaming users can have a significant impact on a network. The number of foreigners visiting a country is small compared to domestic users, and only a small party of them are likely to make an intensive use of data.

Let’s face it, nobody would accept to download even a single email message given the current prices. I understand that telcos want to avoid people downloading movies or other big media files while roaming, but why don’t simply cap the use to a certain amount and price that reasonably? In the current situation one can have bills of tens of thausands euros simply by ignorance or inadvertence.

Let’s hope change will come soon.