Blurts

Backing up your stuff must be made a priority. Our computers have larger and larger capacity and we store more and more stuff. Consider what you might lose if your hard drive crashes or some one takes your machine. Money might be an interest. I notice that between the two computers I use I have accumulated more than 4000 songs in iTunes. Most are purchased rather than ripped. At approx. $1 a pop, the music is worth more than the computers. I could replace the music. Expensive, but I could. I could not replace the photos I have taken at the weddings of my 3 children or the photos I took the day I became a grand parent for the first time.

I have at least one backup attached to each of my machines. With the research servers I run, I have 7 external harddrives attached to various computers. Still, not enough.

I listen to Leo Laporte and he describes a backup strategy that requires two copies in two formats from two locations. His second format and copy tends to be Carbonite. This commercial service will automatically backup the content from one machine to the cloud for $60 a year. The price is reasonable, but I have some many machines.

Leo did discuss a product on one of his shows that we have decided to try. The product is called Pogoplug (my wife is the master of online shopping and I think she found it for $65. Plug the pogoplug into your router and attach an external hard drive and you have cloud backup you can reach from anywhere and from both computers and other devices (iPad). I purchased a 1.5 terabyte and the total cost was just a little over $200. Setup was easy – a couple of minutes and nothing fancy to figure out.

Pogoplug access from the iPad.

I connected the Pogoplug in my basement. This violates the two location rule, but attaching personal devices at the U is prohibited.

I watched the Apple announcement today. The new Apple TV will likely be a purchase, but this would mostly be a way to feed my tech habit and not because I would be exploring educational potential.

After watching some of the announcement program, Cindy made an observation that had not occured to me. “Will this be the end of the Flip”, she wanted to know. I was watching the Apple announcement in my office and must have been doing other things as I waited for “one more thing”. Cindy worked on a iPod Touch project and immediately saw the potential in the camera available on the new Touch. Is there a limit to the length of video segments that can be recorded? I did not see anything on the specs page.

It is a little like the Kindle – iPad comparison. Of course, the Kindle is a little less expensive, but you can only use it to read books. Of course, the Flip is a little less expensive, but …

Nice post today on the Landwitches Blog on student use of video.

Here is a long article from The Journal of Second Life’s decision to close teen grid. The article also considers the issue of educators investing in free, but undependable online destinations.

I follow one podcaster on a regular basis – Leo Laporte. Here is a feature from the LA Times blog.

This article on the spread of malware via USB drives caught my attention because I encountered this problem last year. I would think this would be a big issue in education at all levels. Students carry content on USB drives so they can use computers in multiple labs (and at home). I am not a big Windows user, but the classrooms in which I teach offer the Windows operating system for instructors. I prepare content on a Mac and present using Windows. This switching experience offers some interesting insights. When I bring the USB drive back to my Mac, I can see files that were not there when I took the drive to class. The instructors are sharing a machine and also malware.

Henry Jenkin’s book “Confronting the challenges of participatory culture” is presently available at no cost from Amazon (Aug. 24). If you own a Kindle or want to try the Kindle app on other devices (e.g., iPad), I certainly recommend what Jenkins writes (at least the previous works I have read). I also highly recommend the personal experience of reading a lengthy work from the screen as a way to understand advantages and disadvantages.