Posts from January 2007.

Copilot for Mac!

Hey, good news for us Mac based peeps that help out peeps on remote machines now and then, Fog Creek’s Copilot service is now Mac compatible!

And, what’s more, the Copilot 2.0 day pass price has been cut in half from $10 to a very attractive $5, that’s nearly free!

 I also like the new “direct connection” feature whereby after an initial connection mediated through Fog Creek’s servers, if it can get a direct connection between the two helper and helpee machines, it will. I doubt this feature will actually be used all that often by casual users who have the ports closed on their firewalls, but for those that use Copilot a lot I expect this feature will further speed up an already pretty fast service.

But, probably the top feature for current users will be the ability to transfer files directly to the remote desktop, this’ll make it so much easier if you’ve got a file you want to use, such as a new build of your software or the remote debugging stub.

That’s a great update, me likes.

Managing Media

Merlin Mann pointed out a great article on TechDigs that addresses a lot of the problems people have with managing their ever increasing volume of media data, and how to back it up. I’ve been thinking about getting a ReadyNAS+ for a while, now I have some better information on how to use it more efficiently.

In the article Amazon’s S3 service is used for the off-site backup, but I wonder if something like CrashPlan wouldn’t be much better. With services like CrashPlan you backup over the internet to your own external disk that you’ve given to a friend to connect to their computer/network. It doesn’t incur any service charges, just a software purchase for the party wanting to backup, the friend doesn’t even need a license to be able to act as your backup target (just a pint every now and then to say thanks for the electricity).

What I really like is that you can do the initial (huge) backup locally, and then give the disk to your friend for the daily incremental backup offsite. I’m thinking about setting this up with a friend of mine, it’d backup early every morning while my ADSL bandwidth is free. If things were to go terribly wrong at home, I can pop around to my friends place to pick up the backup drive ready to do a local restore, much better than spending days downloading data from a server somewhere off in the cloud. Oh, and just in case someone nicks the device you’ve given to your friend, the data is compressed and encrypted before being sent, and saved encrypted too, which is nice to know.

I’m seriously considering CrashPlan and wonder if anyone out there has any experience of it or similar software?

Under The Wire

Oops, nearly had a month with no posts, better correct that!

So, umm, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Better late than never eh? ;-)

The last time I spoke about stuff going on in my life, I mentioned that I’d slowed things down and wasn’t going to get too uptight about lack of progress with CaseDetective. Well, although I’m still not rushing things, after a little rest I did start getting things done on CaseDetective again, and there’s a small release forming at the moment. There’s a couple of things I want to fix up before I finish testing and release unto the World, but it’s not too many weeks away. The latest release of REALbasic is working well for me, finally I’ll be able to get a Universal version of CaseDetective out for the Mac.

I’ve recently updated my IMiJ Software and CaseDetective websites with a new look. I’ve decided to stop bamboozling people with a myriad of menu options listed down the right hand side, using a much reduced horizontal menu at the top instead.

As well as looking more “business like”, it’s allowed me to add nice big “Free Download”, “Buy Now” and “Only $69″ buttons in the sidebar of the CaseDetective website. I’m hoping this will make these options even more obvious than before and encourage people to try it out.

I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of drop-down menus, but this new design uses them. I’ve been very careful to make sure nothing has actually moved in the website layouts, all the paths should be the same for now, but the actual menu options have moved around a little. I doubt anyone will notice though.

The design is Blueball Design’s Pro Colors 3.5 Theme for RapidWeaver, which I’ve actually had for quite some time, and may be the first theme I bought for RapidWeaver. I’ve made a few tweaks though; I took the Platinum version and changed the header and sidebar backgrounds to be white rather than grey as I wanted a lighter feel and think icons and logos always look better on a white backdrop. I also moved the header logo to the left and removed the header text so that it wouldn’t interfere, as well as making sure the page title has the website name included rather than just the page name. I personally think it looks rather good, nothing spectacular and pretty boring compared to some, but it works well on Windows and Mac and I believe it won’t turn anyone away.

Apart from my treadmill dying last week, my attempts at getting healthier in body and mind are coming along. I’ve lost a pound of weight every week this month, and am eating much healthier. I’ve also started to get back into reading before hitting the sack, so I might even start making a dent in that huge pile of books and magazines sitting beside the bed waiting to be read. There’s other little bits and bobs I’m doing or looking into that all add up, but I’ll not bore you with them.

Mandy’s at the “very uncomfortable” stage in pregnancy, she can’t seem to find any kind of sitting or sleeping position that stops her from getting sore in a few minutes, she’s soooo looking forward to getting her body back all to herself in approx 2 months time.

It’s an exciting and nerve-wracking time all round. We’ve been buying lots of bits and pieces for the baby, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what pops out, but also very aware that life isn’t ever going to be the same again and just hope that it all goes OK when the time comes. Tick, tock goes the clock!