As such, this site will be reinvented soon to be more appropriate to what I do these days. I’ll try to retain archives of the high-traffic areas for reference (and just in case anyone’s still looking for iPhone lookalike themes for a 4-year-old BlackBerry…really, I’m shocked at how many people are). In the meantime, for anyone dropping by because you’re e-stalking me, just keep in mind this site is horribly out of date!

Picks are generally doubled up, with a “best” and a “budget alternative”. “Best HDTV” doesn’t necessarily mean the absolute best TV money can buy, it means it’s the best one for reasonable money. Then I’ll offer a low-cost alternative if you’re willing to sacrifice a few features to save some bucks.

Let’s dive in…

Quick jump to the best…

• HDTV
• Portable GPS
• Laptop
• Portable music player
• Point-and-shoot camera
• Consumer DSLR camera
• Blu-Ray Player
• Overall gadget under $100

Best HDTV

Samsung LN46B650 46″ 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV

This updated version of last year’s pick is still a great performer at an exceptional value. Although I’m still not wild about Samsung’s obsession with putting red gradients on the bottom of their TVs, the quality of their sets can’t be knocked. I’m a big fan of Samsung, and other techheads I speak with generally agree. Good connectivity, good user interfaces, solid build quality, and a great picture at a reasonable price.

You might be surprised that I didn’t pick one of the newfangled LED-backlit LCD televisions. As much as I like the promise that the technology holds, I feel it’s still too early. There’s a lot of change still to come with LED backlighting technology, and what’s out there now is a mixed bag. You could spend quite a lot on an LED television now and have a radically better one out in just a few months. That’s true to a certain extent of all technology of course, but it’s especially pronounced with young tech like LED backlighting.

You’ll generally find this 46″ Samsung set in the $1400-$1500 range, but right now Amazon has it for a stupidly low $1199. Not big enough? Grab the 55-inch version for just $1749. I don’t know if these are short-time sales or what, but they’re fantastic prices.

Budget alternative: Want a big screen under $1k? No problem. The Samsung LN46B550 46″ 1080p LCD HDTV is available for just $869. This very similar set has just one big difference: it only refreshes at 60Hz rather than 120Hz. It’s still a great TV, but be aware that high-speed scenes (like action movies or sports) may not be quite as smooth on this one as the LN46B650.

Best portable GPS

Garmin nuvi 765T 4.3″ GPS navigator with traffic

I’ve had a Garmin for awhile now and I still think they make the best overall GPS units around. The one thing I wish I would have sprung for when I got mine though was to have an included traffic system, so it could route me around traffic jams <em>before</em> I get into them. At the time though, that was only on the really pricey units.

Fortunately, that and much more can now be had on the Garmin nuvi 765T for just a little over $200. Along with built-in traffic and a large 4.3″ screen, it sports what appears to be a much friendlier use interface than what’s been on nuvis for the past few years. The 765T also features a Lane Assist system that tells you which lane you should be in as you approach those Medusa-like splits on large freeways. In metro areas, it will model some buildings in 3D to help you get your bearings. Finally, it can connect to your phone and operate as a hands-free Bluetooth speakerphone.

It also just happens to be an Amazon Editor’s Pick for their Best in GPS & Navigation for 2009. See, they agree with me.

Budget alternative: For about $100, the TomTom ONE 140 is a great inexpensive GPS. It has a smaller screen and doesn’t have all the convenience features like traffic or 3D buildings, but it should get you where you want to go.

Best laptop

Apple MacBook Pro

Probably no shock to anyone, my love affair with my MacBook Pro continues. My ravings are justified, however, every time I see a coworker or friend buy one of these and love it to death also. Yeah, you pay a bit more, but with every product update they get a little more affordable and you get a lot for your money. The 13″ starts at $1199 now and you can save a bit if you buy from Amazon; the 15″ starts at $1699. The build quality in particular of these unibody aluminum chassis is unbelievable. Everything else feels cheap and flimsy in comparison.

Of course, the performance and ease of use with OS X on the machine is nothing to sneeze at either. With a growing user base and record sales every year, the Mac universe is growing and there’s tons of great software available. I made the switch about 3 years ago, and I never have to boot Windows unless I want to test a web site design in Internet Explorer. Fortunately, with a Mac you can run any operating system you want — OS X, Windows, Linux — and even run them all at the same time.

Budget alternative: The non-aluminum 13″ MacBook can be had for a bit under $999. You lose a bit of expandability and the aluminum body of course, but still a great computer. If you want to spend less than that, the Apple Refurb Store is a great place to look and often has amazing deals. I’ve bought many Macs from there; they come with full warranties and are just like new. If you want a PC, I’m afraid I can’t help you.

Best portable music player

Apple iPod touch/iPhone

Believe it or not, this isn’t as much of a slam-dunk as last year. Microsoft’s Zune HD has been impressing a lot of people with its gorgeous screen and beautiful user interface. However, while there are some applications for the Zune, it doesn’t have the enormous app ecosystem that’s available on Apple devices, which enables the iPhone/iPod touch to be so much more than a music player and web browser. For just $180, you can get an 8GB touchscreen portable computer that happens to have a fantastic iPod built into it.

Budget alternative: Looking for something a little more basic? Grab an 8GB iPod nano for $134. No apps, but has a nice screen, plays video, has an FM tuner, and is extremely thin and light. Really, though, it’s almost a sin to buy a nano when you can get the Touch for $45 more.

Best point and shoot camera

Canon PowerShot SD1200IS 10MP with 3x optical IS zoom

Point and shoots are practically appliances at this point — there’s so many to choose from, they all do nearly the same thing and have the same features. It’s mostly a matter of personal preference and how good their user interface is.

Fortunately, you can always rely on Canon PowerShots to be excellent appliances. Even though you can pick up decent cameras in the low $100s these days, it’s worth springing for the $150 SD1200IS to get Canon’s quality image sensor and solid build. Just watch the megapixel count: this 10MP is the absolute highest I would ever want to go in a point and shoot. It’s ludicrous that 10MP is now the “middle of the road” for point and shoot cameras; the more you cram on to that tiny sensor, the more difficult it gets to generate quality low-light images. Unless you’re printing life-sized posters of Chewbacca, 10MP should be more than you ever need. Resist the temptation to “upgrade” to 12MP or 14MP cameras. More MP is not better.

Budget alternative: I don’t even know where to start. There’s so many cameras around the $100-$130 price point it’s impossible to choose. Go to the store and see which one feels right to you. My only point of guidance would be to make sure it uses SD memory cards, because they and their readers/adapters are so ubiquitous.

Best consumer DSLR camera

I did have a pick for this category last year, but this is such a personal choice and the market’s so competitive that I’m not sure it’s responsible to make a selection because the parameters are way beyond what we can get into here. I own a Nikon D90, which is a medium-level consumer DSLR, and I love it to death. Canon has improved their mid-entry-level offering with the T1i, while Nikon has gotten serious about the budget DSLR crowd with the D5000. If you’re interested in getting into this level of camera, there are tons of great choices out there and many more web sites that can help you. I’m a Nikon guy so I can talk all day about what Nikon might be best for you, but you might prefer the feel of a Canon. Try them out and see.

Best Blu-Ray player

LG BD270 Blu-Ray Player

Unlike last year, I do actually have a Blu-Ray pick this time! I think the technology has matured enough and prices have come down (way down) to the point where it totally makes sense to pick one of these up if you have an HDTV.

This LG model gets positive reviews and is quite affordable, available from Amazon now for just $125. The kicker is that it has Netflix integration, meaning that if you have a Netflix account this will connect to their servers and allow you to stream movies and TV shows without any additional cost — or waiting around for discs to be delivered in the mail. Not everything is available on Netflix streaming (yet), but it’s a fantastic feature to have and any Blu-Ray player that doesn’t include this should be instantly off your list. Generally you’ll find it on LG and Samsung players.

Best overall gadget under $100

Joby Gorillapod Flexible Tripod

This year, the best “gadget” under $100 isn’t really a gadget at all — it’s more of an accessory, but it’s just that awesome. The Gorillapod is a great tripod that has flexible legs which can be bent over and around anything you want to secure your camera to — the back of a chair, a tree branch, a fence, the edge of a table, pretty much anything. It’s fantastic for quick self-portraits at family gatherings without going through the hassle of carrying around and setting up a full-sized tripod, or for steadying your camera for long-exposure shots or positioning it at awkward angles. At just $20-$30 depending on the size (you’ll want a beefier one if you’re using it with your big DSLR), it’s one of the most budget-friendly and useful camera accessories out there.

I’m proud to announce that the first iPhone app I’ve worked on, TextTumble, is now available for sale in the App Store! TextTumble is a unique word game that challenges you to spell words using falling letter and picture tiles. Check out the web site for a video and a link to buy the game.

For quite some time, a business partner and I have been working on the first product for our new venture together. My Magellan Media business partner and developer Chris wrote a great post on his personal blog about all the gory details of the development process, so I’ll leave that to him (definitely read that, it’s a great article). I do need to offer my own perspective.

In late summer of 2008, shortly after the App Store first opened for business, several ideas for possible apps began germinating. A lot of my thoughts coalesced around a word game, because they’re both entertaining and ever-popular (at the time, the developer of a crossword app was making several thousand dollars a day), and because it wouldn’t require 3D graphics, a degree of difficulty that was higher than I wanted to get into for an initial effort. I wanted a game that was somewhat unique, and I started thinking of combining several classic gameplay mechanisms into something different. Combining ideas from Boggle, Tetris, and Scrabble, TextTumble was born. The basic idea is simple: spell words with falling letter tiles.

But I needed someone to develop it, because while I dabble in code and can handle building a web site, I’m really not an expert. I started bouncing ideas off Chris Zelenak, and he immediately saw the potential in my nascent concepts and began adding the perspective of a much more experienced gamer. One of the coolest parts of the game was all Chris — the pictowords. These are tiles that have pictures on them which represent various synonyms — a picture of a cat could represent cat (obviously), tom, tiger, or puss, for example. Combining that single tile with one or more letter tiles and you can spell much longer words — and score much higher point value.

Neither of us having much experience developing games, and no experience developing for the iPhone at all, our initial timeline of a few months was quickly shot. As I said, Chris goes into much more detail on his blog. But the long and short of it is…I was not prepared for how much iteration it takes and how much time processes can take when you’re trying to make something good enough to sell. I didn’t fully think through every single point of interaction with the game before we got into development, and as a consequence we had to rebuild some things. On top of the technical and user interface challenges, I was trying to deal with all the legal and financial issues you face when you establish a new business entity, and trying to organize all those ancillary things that you need for a business to function and define some processes for us to follow.

As I learned, all that will evolve no matter what practices, tools, or tactics you try to establish, because very rarely in business is the first answer the right one. The key lies in being able to look forward and predict other possible answers and evaluate which course to take before expending too much energy on one path, and staying flexible enough that if you need to change something…you can. In our own small effort here, I have learned a great deal. I know Chris has too, and if and when we make another effort I know we’ll be able to make it happen more efficiently than before.

As it stands, we’re very proud of TextTumble 1.0. It’s something we built and it’s actually out there on the App Store! We’re confident in saying that among the 65,000 other apps in the App Store, ours rises above a good many of them in quality and complexity. That said, this is a tough nut to crack…getting noticed among sixty-five thousand applications, even though 98 or 99% of them are crap, is no small feat. We’ve submitted review requests to a number of iPhone-loving sites out there, and we hope to get a bit of traction that way in addition to spreading the word via our blogs and Twitter.

But we know we have quite a battle ahead of us. If you have an iPhone, please consider giving TextTumble a shot — and if you like it, tell your friends! We have lots of ideas and enhancements to add to TextTumble for future versions, so keep an eye out on the Magellan Media blog and let us know what you think!

I’ve discovered numerous opportunities and solved many problems by interacting with people on Twitter whom I may never have met otherwise. Never has there been a better example of this, however, than what has transpired over the last month or so: the investigation and removal of a negative item on my credit report because I complained about it on Twitter after the usual channels failed me.

My wife and I started house shopping (we ultimately decided to build; more on that later) so I obtained a copy of my credit report via AnnualCreditReport.com — the only (as far as I know) truly free and legit website to get you the copy of your credit report that you are legally entitled to receive once a year. (All those other sites, such as the one with the catchy jingles on TV, require you to sign up for a trial monitoring service to get your “free” report.) Lo and behold, my credit was perfect except for one thing: a collections account in the amount of $141 from late 2005, passed on to the collections agency in 2007, with the original creditor listed as “Comcast Chicago.”

My first thought — what the hell is this? First of all, I’ve never been late on any kind of bill, nor have I ever received any letters or phone calls about a past due account somewhere. Second of all, I’ve never lived in the Chicago market. And I’ve been a Comcast customer for years; don’t you think they would have let me know if I owed them money on some other account? So…how is this possible?

First I initiated a request for an investigation via the site I got my credit report from; I filled out the forms and stated that I had no knowledge of the collections account and I believed the information to be inaccurate. I got a message back from the credit bureaus several weeks later stating that the investigation had been completed and the account had been “verified.” Uh, sure. Now what?

I tried calling the collections agency listed on my credit report. That got me nowhere. To be fair, they probably have people calling all the time saying, “That’s not me, I swear!” At any rate, when I actually did get them on the phone, they could do nothing.

So I wrote to Comcast and stated my case. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, if you request an investigation from an original creditor and they cannot prove the account is valid or do not respond to your request within 30 days, it must be removed from your credit report. However, I missed the part of this law that says they don’t have to bother doing that unless you send certified snail mail that will “prove” you contacted them. I just sent an email, and after about 28 days (after I wrote in again reminding them to get back to me or else I would contact a lawyer), they wrote back and basically said “Sorry, we can’t help you with account issues via email.” Oh, thanks so much for taking a month to tell me that.

At this point, I vented on Twitter, specifically calling out Comcast for putting a negative item on my credit report for an account I never had. In no time, one of Frank Eliason’s crack executive customer service reps who seem to constantly prowl Twitter replied to me and asked me to email them. I told her my story, she apparently had words with some people, and put me in touch with another wonderful rep who would spend the next three weeks pushing to get my case resolved. Long story short, I had an account with a different cable company back in the summer of 2005 who, as this little investigation revealed, didn’t really cancel my account when I called and told them to just before I moved away…they just kept billing me at that address and never called me and asked “Hey, how come you stopped paying?” Then Comcast bought them, and eventually sent the account to collections. Comcast agreed the original technician I had spoken with to cancel the account screwed up, and since no one had ever called me and given me a chance to correct the situation they said they would have the collections agency close the account.

Well, today I got that letter. It’s a letter from the collections agency stating they have received notification from Comcast that the account is to be closed, and they have notified the three major credit bureaus. Considering this one detrimental account made the difference between a very good credit score and merely an OK one, I am extremely happy. If it weren’t for @ComcastBonnie and the ever-present @ComcastCares (Frank Eliason) watching out on Twitter, this may have never been resolved in time for us to save thousands on the financing of our new home. So huge thank you to them for coming through, and wish us luck building our new house! (Dedicated blog for that coming soon!)

Some of you may have heard of the term, but if you’re not into photography there’s a good chance you don’t know exactly what high dynamic range (HDR) photos are. Simply put, the goal of the HDR technique is to expand the dynamic range (difference between the light and dark areas) of the image so that it’s closer to what the human eye sees. Camera sensors, although constantly being improved upon, still can’t match the range between detail in light and dark areas as well as your eyeballs. If a scene has something in direct sunlight and something else in deep shadow, you’re going to lose detail in one or both areas when you rely on just one exposure.

To solve that problem, the premise of HDR is simple: take several exposures of the same scene, one for the darkest areas, one for the lightest areas, and one or more in between, and then combine them in post-processing so that all areas of the final image have detail and are not blocked out (shadows) or blown out (highlights).

The image at the top of this post is an HDR comprised of three separate exposures (see below). The wine was in shadow, sitting on my balcony railing (which faces east, and this was sunset), while the background (a treeline) was in bright sunlight. There was no way the camera sensor could capture the color and detail in the wine glass and the nice bright green of the trees. So the solution was combining these three exposures. There are a number of ways to do this; I personally love Photomatix by HDR Soft (standalone $99, also available in various plugin flavors). I’m not going to dive into the details on how to use that particular tool, but basically you load up the relevant exposures in Photomatix, and then play with the sliders until you achieve the desired result.

While Photomatix does offer to align the source images when you first load them, it’s obviously best to shoot the scene with your camera on a tripod — actual stability from frame to frame is no substitute for software tricks. Most DSLR’s have a feature called bracketing which makes firing off multiple exposures of varying compensation easy; on my D90, I turn on bracketing and then with one press of the shutter release it will fire off all the exposures to fill that bracket in less than a second, automatically adjusting the exposure compensation in between each frame. If your camera doesn’t have bracketing, you can of course adjust exposure compensation manually and then fire each shot — it will just take a little longer.

What I’ve shown here — and really the only type of HDR I’ve ever personally done — is a subtle style whose purpose is to closely mimic reality, and do so in a way that only a trained eye would even suspect it might be an HDR. At the other end of the spectrum are the wildly rich HDRs (such as this one), which are a style in their own respect but certainly not representative of reality. Some criticize these more intense HDRs as “cartoony” and there’s a definite divide in the photographic community among those who hate the style and those that appreciate it. There are, of course, also plenty of people — myself included — who say “Art is art” and, you know, do whatever makes you happy.

As I said, there are a number of methods out there to combine photos into an HDR image. It is possible to do it in newer versions of Photoshop too, if you have that…which I do, but I prefer Photomatix because it’s so easy to manipulate the various properties relevant to an HDR image. If you’ve got scenes with huge dynamic ranges, try it out!

Want to see more HDR photos?

• 35 Fantastic HDR photos (Smashing Magazine)
• HDR group pool on Flickr
• Quality HDR group pool on Flickr

I was able to attend a pre-screening of the new Star Trek movie last night (opens everywhere Friday, May 8th) with a few friends. It’s been known for some time that this particular Trek film — the 11th in the franchise — was going to be substantially different from all the others in several ways. First, it’s a “prequel”; second, it’s directed by J.J. Abrams, who has no prior history with Star Trek and in fact wasn’t even a fan before he was handed the script; and third, it introduces an entirely new cast. To say that die hard fans were apprehensive would be an understatement.

As for me, although I was a fan of Star Trek — I grew up with The Next Generation series with Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, but I watched a good portion of the later series as well — I approached this one with an open mind. I knew it would be different, but I figured that it needed to stand apart, to attract a new audience and inject some life into a franchise that’s more than 40 years old and has been through ten movies and five television series. Still, I was unsure to what degree I was comfortable with Abrams and co. messing with what makes Star Trek…Star Trek. So when I sat down last night, it was definitely with mixed feelings, but I had high hopes.

Simply put: it was excellent. So far, everyone I’ve spoken to that saw it loved it, even the non-Star Trek fans. Lots of colorful performances, lots of action, lots of comedy, lots of pretty special effects…in short, a lot of bang for your buck. It’s a vastly different flavor from the other films — very little technobabble, far less nerdy, far more action, sex, and explosions. The story focuses on how the crew of the original series (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty) got started and how they wound up on the same ship together. You actually begin with Kirk’s birth, which gives some backstory on his father, and then jump forward to when Kirk is in his early twenties. Kirk, being a miscreant (surprise, surprise) needs some convincing to join Starfleet, but the memory and legend of his father, combined with some prodding from then-captain of the Enterprise Christopher Pike, pushes him to go for it. Some famous Trek lore is finally put on screen here (like Kirk “beating” the Kobayashi Maru test at the academy — a story referred to in at least one of the other movies and more than one TV episode of later series), and it’s all executed in a way that makes it entertaining and amusing to new viewers as well as satisfying to those who are familiar with the backstory.

As I said, the performances were great. Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock), having the lion’s share of the screen time, really shine and slide into their well-established characters quite well, staying faithful to their personalities while layering on their own take on what these guys must have been like when they were young. One point that seems to ring loud and true: Kirk and Spock were total badasses. The way they (and most of Starfleet) just go to town on their enemies and dive into dangerous situations with little regard for personal safety in this film makes the Starfleet officers of past films sort of look wimpy in comparison. The rest of the cast is very entertaining as well, although Karl Urban (Dr. “Bones” McCoy) might have overplayed the famously irascible doctor just a bit — but it was funny enough to let that slide.

Although we only got backstories on about half of the main cast, the only thing I really missed in terms of character development was that of the bad guy — Nero. You don’t find out why he’s doing what he’s doing until too far into the movie, in my opinion, which I can understand from a storytelling perspective but if you’re going string the audience along without knowing his motives then you at least need to make him a more three-dimensional character. Nero just didn’t get the screen time for you to feel how threatening he was. Still, it’s a minor quibble because the rest of the movie is executed so well.

However…(minor spoiler alert) it’s actually an alternate reality, giving the writers tons of room to explore the Star Trek universe in new and interesting ways. When I first realized this was happening (if you know even the slightest bit about “history” in the Star Trek universe, you’ll figure this out pretty early on), I was pissed off because I thought that the movie was just going to end with a massive “timeline reset” and none of it will have actually happened — a plot device that’s been used so often on the TV series that if it were a horse I’d take it out and shoot it.

Thankfully, they didn’t do that — this Trek movie stands now in its own universe, similar to but not the same as the one we’ve known for the last 40 years. That means that the producers and writers are free to create any new fantastic adventures they like without being locked into Trek historical continuity — which, after hundreds and hundreds of TV episodes, all the movies, not to mention hundreds (if not thousands) of books, has been pretty well hashed and rehashed into oblivion. If you were stuck in the “normal” Star Trek timeline, there’s almost nothing left to make a story out of without running the risk of messing something up.

Although it’s going to undoubtedly anger some really hardcore fans that there’s now this “alternate reality,” it’s really the only way they could create totally fresh adventures. I don’t know much about comic books, but I suppose it’s roughly analogous to all these newer comic book movies (like the new Batman ones) that have sort of pushed the “reset” button on their respective universes in order to give the producers some artistic freedom. In this case, it was done admirably — and this is coming, remember, from an old fan. The new Star Trek is a great ride, and is pretty much guaranteed to be enjoyed by Star Trek veterans and neophytes alike. Go see it!

Check out my favorite of the trailers embedded below, or go check it out in HD (it’s Trailer #3):

“Your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes. He saved 800 lives. Including yours. I dare you to do better.” Don’t you just love that line?

I’ve been meaning to regain control of my email for quite awhile, but for some reason I had just never gotten around it until a few weeks ago. For years, I’ve had at least a half dozen primary email accounts that I need to check daily. I didn’t do any sorting — everything just came into each account’s inbox and stayed there forever. Clearly, this is not ideal.

The problem

You can imagine what that looks like when you’re trying to find something — an endless list of messages with no organization at all. I would most often use my mail client’s search function to find something, but that wasn’t always reliable and tended to result in a lot of hits I didn’t want. I often found myself sitting down to complete a project and wanting a series of emails that were spread over the past few weeks with various questions, concerns, and feedback from the client/stakeholder for that project. Finding those messages in an unclassified inbox was a nightmare. In addition, if I had near-term action-required emails (bring something to work from home tomorrow, pay a bill within the next couple days, or anything that required a response), they would get lost in the noise of less important emails. If I didn’t (or for some reason couldn’t) act on those emails right when I read them, I was at risk of forgetting about them.

The solution

The core of a solution was some kind of sorting methodology, clearly. But what to do? I needed something flexible, powerful, and mostly automatic — because if I have to manually sort a hundred emails every day, it will never happen. Most importantly: the Inbox is a sacred place. The only time a message should be in the Inbox is if it is unread or if it requires me to take further action.

Put it all in one place
The first thing I decided was that I wanted all my email going to one place so I could more easily parse it — I forwarded it all to my main GMail account, and configured that account to be able to send mail as those other accounts, so I can still send out messages under my various addresses from one place. I also moved from a desktop mail client — Apple Mail — and decided to work solely out of the GMail web interface, because of the way GMail’s labels and archiving work (not to mention that Mail and most other desktop clients I’ve used start falling on their face when you get tens of thousands of messages in them).

Filter it out
Next, I setup a whole bunch of filters — automated rules within GMail that perform various actions based on criteria you specify. They’re very powerful — I have various rules applying labels (GMail’s version of folders) to emails depending on such conditions as who they’re from, what keywords are in the subject or body, which of my various accounts the messages was originally sent to, or any combination thereof. I spent quite awhile setting up my filters and occasionally still add to them, but for the most part I’m happy with my filter setup.

Archive it
However, having all my mail in one place and applying those great labels still doesn’t solve one big problem — all my messages are still just listed in my GMail inbox. Important messages, despite being labeled, are still going to be surrounded by tons of noise. This does not jive with the Sacred Inbox directive.

One huge feature that most GMail users overlook is the “Archive” command. When you archive a message, it no longer appears in your Inbox — it’s still accessible via “All mail” or by viewing any label with which that message is tagged (or just by searching), it simply doesn’t show up in the Inbox anymore.

So what I’ve started doing is archiving messages when I’m done with them — anything that doesn’t require a response or to which I have already responded gets archived. When reading a message from the Inbox, the Archive button is right up there next to the “Back to Inbox” link…and it also takes you back to your inbox after it archives the email. So it takes no additional clicks, no additional work. I read the email, I respond if necessary, and if I’m done with it, I hit Archive and go to the next message.

I’ve also worked the archive command into some of my filters for emails I don’t need to see immediately. For example, notifications from Twitter get tagged “Notifications” and archived automatically. I like to peruse these emails a couple times a week to see who started following me on Twitter, but I don’t need them cluttering up my Inbox.

Results and observations

I’ve been operating this way (sort of my own version of Inbox Zero) for a few weeks now, and the difference has been amazing. I feel less overwhelmed by my email, it’s easier to find relevant messages when I sit down to accomplish a task, and I don’t forget to take action on messages that require it.

I was hesitant at first about switching from a desktop app to a web interface, but since GMail does a good job with keyboard shortcuts it makes the experience quite a bit more palatable. I also use Fluid to setup a dedicated GMail “application” on my Mac which always runs in its own window, separate from my regular web browser, and has a few niceties like an unread count on the dock icon and additional keyboard shortcuts.

If your inbox is an unorganized disaster and it stresses you out sometimes, consider some of these methods to reach Inbox Zero. It’s made all the difference for me.

About six months ago I laid out my opinions on home-based backup solutions. As my some commenters quickly pointed out, you’re not really backed up until your data resides in more than one place, geographically speaking. That is to say: using scheduled nightly backups to an external hard drive or something like Time Machine is great, but if your house burns down, so does your data.

For the past several months I’ve been getting better acquainted with online (off-site) backup services, as I’ve prepared to reorganize how we store all our data at home. I looked at popular file syncing services like Windows Live Mesh and Dropbox, but those are limited in space (only a few GB) and not really intended for backup. I realized I needed something huge, because I have at least 50GB of must not lose files and something like a terabyte of really would prefer not to lose files. Here’s what our home setup looks like now:

• 1 TB primary everyday work drive (in my main machine…in this case, a 24″ iMac); stores all important documents, photos, etc
• 160GB mobile drive (in a MacBook Pro); contains about 80GB of critical work files which I do not trust our own IT department to properly back up
• 80GB drive in wife’s MacBook, which contains documents and photos important to her
• 1.5 TB D-Link NAS (two 750GB drives) storing non-critical archived media like TV shows, movies, software

So I at least would like to backup the drive in my iMac, the drive in my MacBook Pro, and the drive in my wife’s MacBook, which total around 300GB between them of used space. I’ve already got a 500GB external USB drive for nightly backups of the iMac’s critical files via Time Machine, OS X’s file preservation backup system, and I plan on using SuperDuper to periodically make smart backups of the MacBook and MacBook Pro onto the iMac. But what about getting all that data off-site? Enter the cadre of relatively recent and cheap backup services: Mozy, BackBlaze, Carbonite, and a few others all cost about $5 a month and all offer unlimited — or nearly unlimited — storage space.

I’ve decided on BackBlaze, and while this won’t be a full review because I’m not done backing everything up yet (that review will come later), I can tell you why I chose them. First and foremost, they have a great looking control panel for both Windows and Mac that gets you started really quick — it makes a couple assumptions about what you don’t want to back up, like system files that can just be reinstalled, and the rest is good to go. Despite this rapid setup, the control panel offers plenty of information and options for power users to tweak to their satisfaction. They also, like some of the other companies I looked at, offer a great service where you can (for a fee, of course) have your data overnighted to you on DVDs or a hard drive, in case things go boom and you don’t have time to redownload it all from the BackBlaze servers.

Ah yes, time…when backing up over 300GB via the Internet, it’s clearly going to take a long time. Fortunately, just the initial backup is so lengthy — after that, updates are incremental and (supposedly) nearly instantaneous. Based on my research, that was one big advantage of BackBlaze over a number of the other options — while most of the competitors will upload your changed files on a certain schedule, BackBlaze will do it in the background more or less as it detects changes happening. I’m still doing my initial backup, which will take an extremely long time, so we’ll see if that fact holds true during normal use.

What about security? Hopefully, most of you got some sort of nervous tick at the thought of transmitting so much of your data out into the “cloud”. Fear not…every one of the backup services I researched uses pretty high-strength encryption to encode your files on your computer before they’re ever sent out, and the data connection to the server itself is also encrypted. So you have encrypted files traveling via an encrypted server connection. BackBlaze has a blog post with the nitty-gritty details, but suffice to say the schemes they’re using are good enough for the government and good enough for me.

For years I’ve just been backing up my stuff to whatever extra drives I’ve had laying around at home — if I was doing it at all. I’m being proactive and have chosen to do two layers of backups — one local and one off-site — but I think at the very least everyone should consider trying out one of these online backup services. For only $5 a month (and most of them let you try the first month for free), how can you go wrong? Remember this maxim: your data doesn’t exist until it exists in at least two places.

Full review of BackBlaze to come.

It’s been a month since I started my photo-a-day project, known around the web as Project 365. So far it’s proving to be a great challenge and a great learning experience. I’ve built a lightbox, learned how to use (in the most basic way) an off-camera flash, and spent more time rigging shots than I would have ever thought possible. If one thing has been proven, it’s that I still have a lot to learn.

Trying new things and learning to see the world differently is a big part of what Project 365 is about. It’s certainly succeeded for me on the former; as I mentioned, one big new part of my skill set is now off-camera flash. I only have one so far, and no significant rigging to speak of, but even with my relatively simple setup I have learned a lot about how to perform certain types of shots that I never would have understood before. For example, On the Rocks demonstrates two of my favorite properties of using off-camera flash: a blacked-out background and frozen motion (without the harshness of on-camera flash). This is really, really basic stuff in the realm of lighting, but it’s valuable to know.

Seeing the world differently is definitely still a work in progress. Looking around me and knowing what might make a good picture is still a great challenge I deal with almost every day. I don’t live in an area with much in the way of beautiful parks, gardens, or architecture, and it often isn’t an option to spend much time driving somewhere else for a shot every single day. As a result, I often look for things around the home; at least until spring comes, I expect this trend to continue. I still, some days, have trouble honing in on what in my surroundings might make a good photograph, however. Someone once said that painting is the art of inclusion, but photography is the art of exclusion — you have to decide what to keep out of the shot to make it meaningful and balanced. That is what makes it such a challenge.

One interesting observation from my first month on this project is that my most popular shots have been the unplanned, unrigged, spur-of-the-moment ones. For example, Heat was shot while I was at a friend’s apartment and she was making dinner. I just looked over at the stove, saw the glowing burner, and asked her to lift of the pot for a second. I spent ten seconds taking a few shots, and that was it. As it turned out, Heat become one of my most popular shots (by my modest measurements — 477 views and 12 favorites, and a spot in Flickr Explore). Conversely, shots that I spent a long time setting up and fine-tuning (like Drink Drama, my first shot of that kind, which took nearly an hour of experimentation) got far less attention. And that’s perfectly fine, because that shows me what’s good and what’s not, and what I need to improve upon.

In just one month on this project, I’ve improved my throw-away ratio (the number of “good” shots I take vs. how many get trashed), made a serious effort at a portrait, built a lightbox, learned to use off-camera flash, and greatly improved all my post-processing skills with Aperture and Photoshop. All that, while also learning to better drive my camera — I got a Nikon D90 the same day I began this project, and that’s quite a bit more camera than the D40 I used to have. Shooting every day has made me quite comfortable and quick with the myriad settings available on today’s DSLR.

So, as a learning experience in more ways than one, I can’t recommend this project enough for anyone who has a passion for photography and wants to improve and try new things. I can only hope that I continue to improve, and that the next 30 days are even better than the first.

See all my Project 365 photos on Flickr