The things I over-think! How difficult is to store your digital files: photos, books, music, movies and documents?
In the old days we put books on shelves or in boxes; photographs in albums, or in boxes; records and CDs on shelves, or in boxes; and any documents we generated in files, or in boxes. How easy was that? Then computers came along and made everything simpler by making it more complicated. Everything was stored on the hard drive - passing over the days of floppy drives and diskettes - but what happened if the hard drive packed up? Hence backup which meant taking a copy of everything on another disk and storing that somewhere safe. Real Men did backups daily, weekly, and monthly. The daily and weekly ones were cycled, the monthly ones kept forever. On tape. Lots of people didn’t do backups, and every now and then they wrote to Jack Schofield at the Guardian about the disaster, and Uncle Jack scolded them lightly.
Backup is copies you make on a storage device and then leave alone unless disaster strikes, when you copy them back to wherever you copied them from. You never edit backup copies. Ever. You should keep at least two generations of backups.
Cloud drives in particular and synching services in general, are not backup. Do something dumb on one synched device, like delete everything, and all the other synched devices will lose everything as well. iCloud, One Drive, Google Drive and all the other services have this feature. To make up for it, some of them add a versioning, recovery or history feature that gets over this. When I tried using the versioning on Pages on my 4GB Mac Air, it choked so bad I had to turn it off.
A Cloud drive is what you use when you want to access, edit and save back your work-in-progress files from a number of different devices. Put your photos up in the iCloud and you can regale everyone with your holiday snaps on your iPhone, iPad, Macbook or even Windows device. Ditto music, though why you would when you can get it from a streaming service is another question. Unless it’s a recording of your band, or a track you’re working on. Same for videos.
Cloud drives offer you the assurance that even if your device gets lost, goes crazy or gets broken, you won’t lose your files, which will be there waiting for you to re-connect to them after you have bought a new device. But that’s not backup.
What to backup on? Storage is the physical medium on which you place the files. Internal hard drives, pen drives, external SSD’s, Network drives and NAS, cloud drives, tape, CD’s. You can also store files on a disk in some company’s cloud service, effectively renting a hard drive from them. You have to backup to a physically different device, which you should then keep somewhere else. (So if someone drops something on the computer, the backup is in another room.)
How to backup?
Both Apple and Microsoft offer a continuous backup service: Time Machine for Apple and File History for Windows 10. Setting these up requires an external drive that can be configured for Time Machine / File History: that’s not always a given. Note also that both those are complex pieces of software. If you take your Time Machine disk to someone else’s computer, good luck if that other computer is a Windows 7 device. Time Machine and File History are good insurance against something stupid happening to your files, but not against something stupid happening to your computer.
A good backup sits on a drive that any computer can read and copy from. Since every operating system can read Windows file system disks, put your backup on a NTFS drive, in other words, get an off-the-shelf external drive from Amazon, PC World or any other major retailer. I am not going to get involved in USB types at this point. Roughly, make sure the USB port on the drive looks like one of the USB ports on your computer. Or use a NAS, which plugs into the router so you connect over Wi-Fi.
How to get the files over? There are back-up programs available that have nice user interfaces, but there are also much simpler options. On Windows 10 (and any other version) look up the xcopy command. This is a thing of wonder. There seems to be an OS X version called rsync that does the same thing. Both these tools only copy new or updated files relative to the destination folder. So the first one is painful, but the following ones can be quite fast. At work I use a Powershell script to sync my local drive to a personal network drive at the end of each week, or whenever I’m taking the laptop to and from work.
What to backup? Your ‘data’ of course. You may want to backup the software you’ve downloaded (the files in your Download directory) so you can re-install it if need be: this may be sensible if the latest versions are not compatible with your machine or operating system (OS X users will understand).
So let’s take a work-in-progress document. It’s in my iCloud drive, and hence on my laptop, maybe another device, and on Apple’s servers. iCloud is a synching service, not a backup. So I need a backup in case I do something stupid on iCloud. The laptop drive is the first stop: I save from the iCloud drive to my Documents folder daily. I backup my Documents folder up to my NAS at least once a week. And I backup my NAS to an external drive every month, or straight after I add significant amounts of data to the NAS (by ripping a bunch of CDs). I have two external drives and rotate them.
A professional photographer, video-maker or musician may want to take archive copies of the original files before even thinking about importing to the editing software. In the future it will be those archives that scholars want, not the finished product, which will reflect the fashions of the moment.
Having reviewed all this, my shortcomings are not so bad. I’ve understood the correct role of cloud drives, and the limitation of the Time Machine / File History technology.
I need to backup my Mac Air Documents and Photos folders to the NAS more frequently than I do. I’ll do that with rsync. I need an external drive to backup my NAS, and I’ll do that with xcopy. I could do with tidying up the NAS and taking the plunge of doing a soft reset because I forgot its admin password (!).
(Later). I sorted out the NAS. The filesystem works fine, but the bit that runs diagnostic tests and sets up a Time Machine volume seems to have gone astray. Or it isn’t compatible with Catalina (I updated to Catalina after finding enough people who said it worked fine on their Early 2015 Air. It does.)
Monday, 16 March 2020
Thursday, 12 March 2020
Making a Pizza
I defy you to watch this all the way through and, at the end, not be whining like a hungry dog watching the humans eat. Next time, if there is one, I go to Rome, I am eating at his place.
Monday, 9 March 2020
The Coronavirus (COVID-19 / Wu Flu) Hype
Every year there’s a new flu virus, and it kills a lot of people. Some years it’s mild, and some years it’s pretty darn vicious. 2020 is one of the years it’s pretty darn vicious. Cernovich makes the good point (hidden under a flurry of insults in all directions) that just because coronavirus is a flu, doesn’t mean we should ignore it, it means we should pay more attention to flu. There are reasons this doesn’t happen, none of which are edifying and all of which have solid cost-benefit figures, and is roughly the same reason the Brits don’t spend bajillions on snow ploughs and other winter equipment.
However, there’s something suspect about the hype. The last Big Flu was Bird Flu, and it was clear that Big Pharma was behind that. Big Pharma off-loaded millions of pounds worth of nearly-past-sell-by drugs on Health Services over the world. That’s a pretty clear motive. This time Big Pharma is very quiet, which means it doesn’t have any drugs to unload. Which is pretty much a first. Big Pharma claims to have drugs for everything, and a PR machine that shifts those drugs like hot dogs after a football match.
The Big Tell is that the victims are very rarely described. They are just “people”. Not one “We Lost Our Lovely Susan, 10, To Coronavirus” headline? Finding Susan, 10, thirty minutes after she dies is what Big Pharma PR firms do. There’s a muttering that the people who die have pre-existing medical conditions, but that’s it. If the majority were women, we would see headlines like “New Virus Targets Women”, but we’re not. Which tells you that most of the people who die from it are older men who are already in bad health and spending too much time in close conditions with others - like cruise liners and the Iranian Parliament.
Now look at who is reacting to it. Aside from the mainstream media, which stopped being a reliable guide to anything in 2016.
Panicky people are cancelling flights or not making reservations, which causes airlines to cancel entire flights in the future because the margins on most flights are tiny. The airlines are cancelling because profits, not because they know anything about viruses.
The University of London cancelled its graduation ceremony for the Class of 2019. Graduation ceremonies make losses. The James Bond movie delayed its release - because panicky people won’t go into packed cinema screens, so first-weekend takings will be down, and that ain’t a good look. Profits again, not viruses.
The markets are all over the place, as people sell on what they say is uncertainty and fear. The Coronavirus is benefitting short-sellers and people who want to get out of a position without other people asking why. Just say ‘Coronavirus’ and you can sell or buy anything and hide your real reasons.
Health services are using it as a funding pitch, but they use rainy days as a funding pitch. CEOs are using it as an excuse for their lousy trading results, but they use school holidays as an excuse for their lousy trading results. People who don’t want to do things are using it as an excuse not to do whatever it is they don’t want to do, and a virus sounds more plausible than global warming.
This is the never let a good crisis go to waste crowd.
Important things are still happening.
Commuter trains are still running. So are the metros. All full. Nobody is cancelling work. Odd how that never happens. (Except in the industrial powerhouses of northern China and Italy - those Southern Italians have been waiting forever to get back at the northerners.) All those International Women’s Day celebrations went ahead. St Patrick’s Day is going ahead, because are you going to tell the Irish they can’t? (Edit 10/3: OK, the Irish Government changed their mind. This does not mean it knows more than you do about how Covid-19 spreads and who is susceptible. It means they need to be seen to be doing something.)
I have no idea where the panic buyers are, but they don’t live near me. My supermarkets are full of Brits determined to prove that a panic is for taking calmly should it ever actually happen. (Edit 10/3: some of my colleagues at work have mentioned missing toilet paper and pasta. However, if the toilet paper thing doesn't turn out to be a guerrilla PR stunt, somebody's lying.)
There’s a real flu virus out there. It’s nasty. Some people in China got it, and so did some people on cruise liners, and the press covered that, because why wouldn’t you? If nobody’s interested, the media drops the story. But then the never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste crowd got going and the media kept on running the story. It’s a good story behind which to hide all sorts of things. There’s a lot of things to hide.
Ten million people are not going to die of it. And, before anyone else calls it one, a ‘pandemic’ is not one hundred people in the whole of California. A ‘pandemic’ is when your neighbour has it, and the corner shop is closed, and half the people at work are off, and the hospitals are full and the nurses are dying of it. We haven’t had one of those for a long time.
However, there’s something suspect about the hype. The last Big Flu was Bird Flu, and it was clear that Big Pharma was behind that. Big Pharma off-loaded millions of pounds worth of nearly-past-sell-by drugs on Health Services over the world. That’s a pretty clear motive. This time Big Pharma is very quiet, which means it doesn’t have any drugs to unload. Which is pretty much a first. Big Pharma claims to have drugs for everything, and a PR machine that shifts those drugs like hot dogs after a football match.
The Big Tell is that the victims are very rarely described. They are just “people”. Not one “We Lost Our Lovely Susan, 10, To Coronavirus” headline? Finding Susan, 10, thirty minutes after she dies is what Big Pharma PR firms do. There’s a muttering that the people who die have pre-existing medical conditions, but that’s it. If the majority were women, we would see headlines like “New Virus Targets Women”, but we’re not. Which tells you that most of the people who die from it are older men who are already in bad health and spending too much time in close conditions with others - like cruise liners and the Iranian Parliament.
Now look at who is reacting to it. Aside from the mainstream media, which stopped being a reliable guide to anything in 2016.
Panicky people are cancelling flights or not making reservations, which causes airlines to cancel entire flights in the future because the margins on most flights are tiny. The airlines are cancelling because profits, not because they know anything about viruses.
The University of London cancelled its graduation ceremony for the Class of 2019. Graduation ceremonies make losses. The James Bond movie delayed its release - because panicky people won’t go into packed cinema screens, so first-weekend takings will be down, and that ain’t a good look. Profits again, not viruses.
The markets are all over the place, as people sell on what they say is uncertainty and fear. The Coronavirus is benefitting short-sellers and people who want to get out of a position without other people asking why. Just say ‘Coronavirus’ and you can sell or buy anything and hide your real reasons.
Health services are using it as a funding pitch, but they use rainy days as a funding pitch. CEOs are using it as an excuse for their lousy trading results, but they use school holidays as an excuse for their lousy trading results. People who don’t want to do things are using it as an excuse not to do whatever it is they don’t want to do, and a virus sounds more plausible than global warming.
This is the never let a good crisis go to waste crowd.
Important things are still happening.
Commuter trains are still running. So are the metros. All full. Nobody is cancelling work. Odd how that never happens. (Except in the industrial powerhouses of northern China and Italy - those Southern Italians have been waiting forever to get back at the northerners.) All those International Women’s Day celebrations went ahead. St Patrick’s Day is going ahead, because are you going to tell the Irish they can’t? (Edit 10/3: OK, the Irish Government changed their mind. This does not mean it knows more than you do about how Covid-19 spreads and who is susceptible. It means they need to be seen to be doing something.)
I have no idea where the panic buyers are, but they don’t live near me. My supermarkets are full of Brits determined to prove that a panic is for taking calmly should it ever actually happen. (Edit 10/3: some of my colleagues at work have mentioned missing toilet paper and pasta. However, if the toilet paper thing doesn't turn out to be a guerrilla PR stunt, somebody's lying.)
There’s a real flu virus out there. It’s nasty. Some people in China got it, and so did some people on cruise liners, and the press covered that, because why wouldn’t you? If nobody’s interested, the media drops the story. But then the never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste crowd got going and the media kept on running the story. It’s a good story behind which to hide all sorts of things. There’s a lot of things to hide.
Ten million people are not going to die of it. And, before anyone else calls it one, a ‘pandemic’ is not one hundred people in the whole of California. A ‘pandemic’ is when your neighbour has it, and the corner shop is closed, and half the people at work are off, and the hospitals are full and the nurses are dying of it. We haven’t had one of those for a long time.
Thursday, 5 March 2020
Sonos in the House
Finally I splashed out on some Sonos kit. I’ve had a Beam Soundbar for the TV a while now. I bought two SL1’s, because I did not want a bunch of offshore contract workers Alexa listening to my conversations. One SL1 went into my bedroom, to replace the Bose Colour II. The other went into the kitchen, to replace the little Roberts radio. And I got a Connect.
A lot of people complain about the cost of the Connect. If you have a CD-player (Marantz CD6005), radio tuner, turntable, tape deck or cassettes, which you play through a proper grown-up hi-fi amplifier (Maraztz PM 6003) through proper adult loudspeakers (B&W 686’s), or you have a headphone amp (Creek OBH-11) to power proper headphones (Sennhieser HD650), then the hi-fi is the centre of your listening life. What I really wanted to do is have what I’m playing on the CD also be played in the kitchen and maybe somewhere else, and for that, the Connect is compulsory.
The Connect also links my proper grown-up hi-fi to streaming music, which I did up to a couple of weeks ago by the very satisfactory iPod Touch and the Dragonfly + Jitterbug combination. Streaming the iPod Touch through the Connect blows the Dragonfly away. Nobody talks about how good the DAC on the Connect is.
Streaming through the Sonos app, all the speakers, even attached to the hi-fi, are in sync. Using Line-In, there is a small lag, about 200ms or so, between hi-fi speakers and the rest of the Sonos speakers. It’s only audible if you are close to both the hi-fi and a Sonos speaker.
I don’t know who developed the Sonos app, but they are among the very few proper developers designing apps and cutting code. It walked me through the set-up of each piece of equipment and detected everything. I can group rooms together, and remove rooms from a group, with a couple of taps at the screen. I can choose my Spotify, streaming radio, and Line-in (aka, the CD player). At some point I will add Bandcamp and Soundcloud to the Services. I really can play different music in each room at the same time.
Because I’m a late adopter, it took a while to discover how to add the files on my NAS to the app (Settings -> System -> Music Library -> Music Library Setup -> +Add Shared Music Folder and enter the "\\192.168.n.n\(root directory of your music files)”. Press Done and the app will tell you it will now scan that directory.) You won’t see anything happening, which confused me, until I went to Browse and found a big orange square with Music Library next to it, and the assurance it was scanning when I touched the icon. About twenty minutes later, all my digital music files were there. Why I’d do that when Spotify has (almost) everything, I’m not sure: I rip AAC, not WAV. Anyway, there it all is.
And if you really must stream from your Macbook, then you’ll need SonoAir I’ve installed it and tried it, and I’m sure it will be useful when I need it, but it’s not going to be a thing.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. Will I be adding any more? Such as a pair to complement the Beam? Maybe.
A lot of people complain about the cost of the Connect. If you have a CD-player (Marantz CD6005), radio tuner, turntable, tape deck or cassettes, which you play through a proper grown-up hi-fi amplifier (Maraztz PM 6003) through proper adult loudspeakers (B&W 686’s), or you have a headphone amp (Creek OBH-11) to power proper headphones (Sennhieser HD650), then the hi-fi is the centre of your listening life. What I really wanted to do is have what I’m playing on the CD also be played in the kitchen and maybe somewhere else, and for that, the Connect is compulsory.
The Connect also links my proper grown-up hi-fi to streaming music, which I did up to a couple of weeks ago by the very satisfactory iPod Touch and the Dragonfly + Jitterbug combination. Streaming the iPod Touch through the Connect blows the Dragonfly away. Nobody talks about how good the DAC on the Connect is.
Streaming through the Sonos app, all the speakers, even attached to the hi-fi, are in sync. Using Line-In, there is a small lag, about 200ms or so, between hi-fi speakers and the rest of the Sonos speakers. It’s only audible if you are close to both the hi-fi and a Sonos speaker.
I don’t know who developed the Sonos app, but they are among the very few proper developers designing apps and cutting code. It walked me through the set-up of each piece of equipment and detected everything. I can group rooms together, and remove rooms from a group, with a couple of taps at the screen. I can choose my Spotify, streaming radio, and Line-in (aka, the CD player). At some point I will add Bandcamp and Soundcloud to the Services. I really can play different music in each room at the same time.
Because I’m a late adopter, it took a while to discover how to add the files on my NAS to the app (Settings -> System -> Music Library -> Music Library Setup -> +Add Shared Music Folder and enter the "\\192.168.n.n\(root directory of your music files)”. Press Done and the app will tell you it will now scan that directory.) You won’t see anything happening, which confused me, until I went to Browse and found a big orange square with Music Library next to it, and the assurance it was scanning when I touched the icon. About twenty minutes later, all my digital music files were there. Why I’d do that when Spotify has (almost) everything, I’m not sure: I rip AAC, not WAV. Anyway, there it all is.
And if you really must stream from your Macbook, then you’ll need SonoAir I’ve installed it and tried it, and I’m sure it will be useful when I need it, but it’s not going to be a thing.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. Will I be adding any more? Such as a pair to complement the Beam? Maybe.
Monday, 2 March 2020
Catch-Up
I’ve missed a lot of posts this month. It’s a darn good thing I don’t do this for a living.
One reason is that I’ve been working on a particular project, and that has taken a lot of the little spare time I have. (Said every blogger ever at least once.) No, I’m not telling you what it is.
Another is that my mother has been in and out of hospital, and that’s more time- and attention-consuming than one might think. It’s family stuff and therefore complicated and not for discussion as it happens.
I’ve been fighting off a cold as well for about a week, probably as a result of standing around too many cold, damp South West Trains stations so I can visit my mother in hospital. And go to work.It got the better of me this weekend.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything in the news. Too many You Tubers do that and listening to them after a while starts to feel echo-chamber-y. Reading the Guardian, which I did for a while to see what ‘They’ were thinking, is now painful. Even browsing the Financial Times makes me wince. Seems the Fifth Columnists are still alive, virtue-signalling and trying to spread despair. Understand that the majority of news articles are about raising money for some charity, cause or government agency or department, and you will see that the print media is not about news. News is something somebody it’s about doesn’t want you to read: everyone wants you to read about how they need more money or the sky will fall in.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything that’s going on in my life, or that I’ve been reading. I am leading the classic ‘figure-eight life’ as somebody described it, and once you’ve been round the figure-eight once, that’s all you’re going to see.
Yep, I went in and back-filled the missing posts on Blogger.
One reason is that I’ve been working on a particular project, and that has taken a lot of the little spare time I have. (Said every blogger ever at least once.) No, I’m not telling you what it is.
Another is that my mother has been in and out of hospital, and that’s more time- and attention-consuming than one might think. It’s family stuff and therefore complicated and not for discussion as it happens.
I’ve been fighting off a cold as well for about a week, probably as a result of standing around too many cold, damp South West Trains stations so I can visit my mother in hospital. And go to work.It got the better of me this weekend.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything in the news. Too many You Tubers do that and listening to them after a while starts to feel echo-chamber-y. Reading the Guardian, which I did for a while to see what ‘They’ were thinking, is now painful. Even browsing the Financial Times makes me wince. Seems the Fifth Columnists are still alive, virtue-signalling and trying to spread despair. Understand that the majority of news articles are about raising money for some charity, cause or government agency or department, and you will see that the print media is not about news. News is something somebody it’s about doesn’t want you to read: everyone wants you to read about how they need more money or the sky will fall in.
I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything that’s going on in my life, or that I’ve been reading. I am leading the classic ‘figure-eight life’ as somebody described it, and once you’ve been round the figure-eight once, that’s all you’re going to see.
Yep, I went in and back-filled the missing posts on Blogger.
Thursday, 27 February 2020
John Adams: The Chairman Dances
Radio 3’s favourite minimalist for a long while. I saw Nixon In China a long time ago, and I don’t recall any special dancing when this was playing.
Monday, 24 February 2020
Nils Frahm: Says
Nils Frahm was born many years after Riley, Glass and Reich popularised Minimalism. It was probably just another influence on him. Says is a wonderful piece of music. Headphones, sit back and let it do its thing.
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