But there is a cheaper alternative if all you want to do is back up your pictures and documents: Mozy. http://www.mozy.com. You can sign up for a free account and get 2gigs of backup for free. It’s a little program that runs in the background and pays attention to folders you’ve told it to back up. When you put something new there, it automatically backs it up to your online account. It works on both Mac and PC. You can just tell it to back up your documents folder and leave it alone. I also keep a backup of my keychain which is where all my passwords and serial numbers for software goes. If anything bad happens, it’s a piece of cake to restore. 

I still recommend a thorough backup strategy. I have my itunes library backed up to DVD. A bootable backup of my entire hard drive. And you should also have an offsite backup. I’ve heard of someone who backs up to DVD and mails it to his Mom. Or like me, you could get a a paid account to Mozy that is unlimited, so my applications, music library, documents and pictures are backed up there. That way if your house catches fire and your DVD’s and hard drive are destroyed, you still have your files. 

Like I keep saying to my friends, there are two types of people in the world: those whose hard drives have failed and those whose hard drives w-i-l-l fail. Don’t be like my friend who just lost her invaluable photos. Get a mozy account and get to backing up. 

Wisdom on the subject is that there are two types of people in the world: 1). those whose hard drives have crashed. and 2). those whose hard drives _will_ crash. In any event, be prepared. Backup!

Speaking of myspace, seeing theirs made me realize that if I intended to have an outreach to teens and college students I was going to finally have to jump in the ocean and enter the 21st century. So, Raul is going to be appalled, but you can now find me on myspace at http://www.myspace.com/jeffreyclong. Add me as a friend… leave a comment. Do all those fun things that myspacers do. Teach me. I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. Daren had to hold my hand the whole way.

Podcasting though gave them a new life. Leo got the crowd back together for conversations and began taping them. I made a CD of one of the shows and we listened to it on the way up to Sun Valley for our anniversary (hey! I’m nothing if not a fun date!) Funny and informative, just like the old show. “This week in tech” became even more of a staple for me when I got an iPod. Then Leo began branching out into more podcasts until it became a network. In many ways it is better then the TV show because I can listen to it in the car and while working out.

Check it out. Those of you who are geeks probably know about it. And those that aren’t probably don’t care. But it’s a part of my life, so I thought I’d share.

MacOSXHints has posted a tip for using a keyboard shortcut to outline in textedit. By pushing <option> <Tab> the text will automatically scoot over a half an inch and change the formating so that if the text wraps it stays inside the formatting.

I wonder if there is a similar feature in Wordpad for the PC. Please comment if there is.

Technorati Tags: text, mac, textedit, wordpad

Here’s how to do it. Create a del.icio.us account. In the itunes music store right click (command click on the mac) a link and select “copy url.” Then make a new bookmark in del.icio.us only paste the itunes url into the del.icio.us url field. Tag it with “wishlist” or any other and press save. It’ll get a little wonky now. When you hit save, it will snap back to the url, in this case it will open itunes and go to the page you saved. To get back to normal, just return to your del.icio.us/user page. From there, select the tag “wishlist,” and click on the link to your music, and voila, you’ll be sent to that page in the iTunes Music Store.

tres cool.

Addendum: My del.icio.us wishlist is a place that I store things I’m interested in that I want to get later. I’m not fishing for goods from my readers. If you feel generous, you can buy me something from my Amazon wishlist. That is my personal bridal registry.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, itms, itunes, mac

1. Turn it off. Or at least check it at greater intervals. Same goes for instant messengers like MSN and AIM. I’ve read this in lots of productivity sites but only recently put it into practice. It singlehandedly has increased my productivity in multiple areas.

2. Get different accounts for different purposes. This is a recent trick. I own the domain name jeffreyclong.com so I can create multiple addresses for different uses. For example, all my discussion groups go into talkATjeffreyclong.com. Registrations for sites go to register@jeffreyclong.com. This keeps stuff out of my regular inbox so that important things don’t get lost. A simple solution for those without their own domain is to set up multiple accounts at gmail and use their POP service to read email from your mail client such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mac’s Mail.app.

3. Filter flamers.

Technorati Tags: lifehacks, mac

If you subscribe to email discussion groups, you’ll discover flamers. People who get easily upset, tell you what to do and generally cause problems in the group. I’ve spent way too much emotional energy dealing with these people. And honestly, I believe that we need an extra level of filtering when we are participating in groups online then face-to-face. So lately, I’ve been setting rules in my client to automatically put messages with so-and-so in the subject field, from field, or body. And after a season of not talking to certain people in my messengers who weren’t healthy for me, I’ve deleted them from there as well. What remarkable peace of mind this has brought. This is probably a little controversial, but Proverbs 22:24-25 teaches us to “not befriend a hot-tempered man,

and don’t associate with one who harbors anger lest you learn his ways, and ensnare your soul.” Establishing relational boundaries is very important to all of us, but I think especially pastors.

4. Use IMAP, or a version of POP that keeps email on the server. As I said, I’ve had multiple email accounts on 4 different computers. Most of my accounts were POP accounts where the messages were downloaded onto my computer when I logged in, and taken off the server. So, when a computer crashed and wasn’t backed up, I lost all my email. Now, given, most of that wasn’t a terrible loss. But my email correspondence has gotten more important to me and I’d really hate to lose what I have now. With IMAP, or server side POP, a copy of each message is downloaded to your computer when you log in, but everything stays on the central server. This allows for two things: The first is that if you are on a trip and away from your computer and need an important email, you can log in from any computer and view your emails like you would a yahoo or gmail account. The second and most important though, is that if your hard drive crashes, you haven’t lost everything. It’s all there on the server ready to be downloaded again next time you log in.

Hope this helps. I’d love to hear your email tips. Please comment below.

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Did you know that since Mac OS 10.3 the Mac has a built in converter for Word .doc documents?

This means that Textedit can open Word documents much like Wordpad opens them in Windows.

This is fabulous, because I have been trying to migrate everything over to either Apple Pages or Devonthink. One reason is that i can sometimes wind up have upwards of 16 applications open including memory hogs like Microsoft Word. This can be a problem with slowing other apps down and winding up with memory warnings. So i’m trying to not launch word anymore except when absolutely nothing else will do.

I just did a “get info” on a .doc document and changed the default application to open it with to Textedit. Voila. All my .docs open with Textedit. Low memory. Less bells and whistles. Wonderful.

Technorati Tags: devonthink, mac

While inside the airport, I had been using my laptop on their free wifi. Knowing I needed to find a tire store, I opened my laptop to see if I could still access the internet out in the parking lot. Sure enough I was and before you could say “flat” I had found a Costco tire store and a map.

Once we got to Costco, we went inside to get some hotdogs for the family while I went to the tire department. Lo and behold, it was going to take over an hour to fix the tire. I knew that there was a Les Schwaub nearby, but this time I didn’t have wifi to find the number. Out comes the cell phone which has access to the internet to access the yellow pages. Within moments, I was on the phone with Les Schwaub and learned that they would be able to fix the tire in less time.

Now, I probably would have found a tire store regardless. But I wouldn’t have found Costco without the laptop and wifi. And while Les Schwaub was down the street from Costco, I saved a trip there to find out if they had the time for us. Otherwise, I would have packed up the family, and driven over there, potentially to discover that they were booked up.

The future belongs to the technologists. The people who have and learn how to use the information and communications technologies available to us.

Technorati Tags: culture