Hopelessly eclectic, Thoroughly geeky …
So, this conversation happened this afternoon on Twitter between ICM Web Super-Agent, and Deadliest Man Alive, George Ruiz, Queen of All Internet Geekdom, Felicia Day, and Nerdist Bloginatrix, Kiala Kazebee (who is definitively a top geek girl, even though someone forgot to put her on the list.)
I record it here for posterity, because, shit, somebody had to …
These people are why I <3 the Internet Age! It’s a great World we live in. 
After setting up iCloud with your master AppleID, and getting all of your various MobileMe, iCloud, and other email accounts consolidated, you’ve got all your “stuffs” on your Mac, or other iDevice, and everything his synching properly. Life is hunky-dory, so what next?
If you find yourself, like me, with a variety of email accounts, and a MobileMe account that is now a secondary, you probably want to start getting all of your “stuffs” (Mail, Calendar Appointments, Notes, etc.), into your primary iCloud account. Here are a few tips:
While you’re at it, move all of your saved emails into the primary iCloud account mail folder as well. Since you’re going to be re-directing all of your mail traffic to the primary iCloud account (or another email alias that forwards to your iCloud account), you can clear out your old Mobile me mail and start tracking down emails that are going to that address for re-direction.
Yeah, that’s some detective work, but getting your inboxes organized and minimizing all the directions your mail is coming from will be worth the effort. Not to mention that you’ll be able to see all of your email in one place if you need to use the iCloud.com web app for viewing.
If you’ve added all of your accounts (iCloud, MobileMe, Google Calendar, etc.) to your Calendar application, it’s pretty simple to change the calendar that the appointment lives on. You can go through and re-assign all of your recurring appointments and events from your old calendars to your primary iCloud calendar. (Note: I haven’t tried this with my Google calendar appointments, since I don’t really use it, just mentioning this as a possibility.)
After you’ve been working through this, and getting all of your stuffs in one online-place, you can, if you want, shut down your old accounts, like your secondary MobileMe account. After all, one of the goals of the iCloud tech is to make things simpler for you, and having all of your stuffs is one way to reach that goal.
2.4: Whiner Eligibility. Whiners are not eligible to compete. If you believe that you might be a whiner, please check with a domestic partner, guardian, or health-care professional before getting the rest of your team kicked the hell out of the race.
-24 Hours of LeMons Rules
Last week, I attended my first 24 Hours of LeMons race out at Infineon. In my last blog entry about LeMons racing, I talked about how I’m pretty much hooked on the concept, and have been doing more research/reading about the sport before making a full-on plunge into driving for one of the teams.
In reading the rules, a few things come through very clearly: LeMons is about having fun first, and foremost, and if you take the competitive aspect of this too seriously, or you cheat, it will likely not go well for you, your team, or, in the case of the People’s Curse, your car.
As stated, quite succinctly, in the official rules of 24 Hours of LeMons:
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In other words, you try and race a “cheater” car, one that everyone knows, or at least believes, to be more than a $500 investment (not including safety gear), and you leave yourself at the mercy of the other teams who may decide, by exercising the democratic power of the ballot, to have your car cursed and/or destroyed.
I was asking Anton about this yesterday, and he quickly threw out a half-dozen, or so, stories about how this has happened to teams, and their cars, in the past, with exacting detail on the pain and misery inflicted on the cursed vehicle.
To paraphrase Marsellus Wallace, when the People’s Curse comes down on your team, they’re gonna’ get medieval on your ass…Well, your car’s ass. Do cars have an ass? Whatever.
This is especially true if you fall into in that last-case scenario, the “totally nasty, mega-fatal, possibly frame-flattening Curse penalty.”
Attached is a YouTube video in which the People’s Curse is enacted on a BMW that everybody at the race thought was worth just a wee-bit more than 500 bucks. It is pure carnage, and I must say that the backhoe work involved approaches fine art.
More LeMons to come …
Last night I went on an expedition, fueled by a Cole Coffee binge (Yemeni Mocca Sanani. It’s brilliant), to un-hose my iCloud setup, which was quite, well…hosed.
The reason for this is pretty simple: I’ve been dealing with Apple directly for over a decade, and have wound up with a handful of AppleIDs, all with different, and now mostly defunct, email addresses. This is a potential cause of having your iLife getting FUBAR when converting to iClould from MobileMe.
The problem was, in a nutshell, that my mail, photo stream, calendar, and contacts were all hooked into my MobileMe account, and my iCloud account was hooked in to the AppleID that I use for the iTunes, and other Apple Stores.
It took a few hours of experimentation, but I finally managed to get the whole thing sorted out.
At the end of the ordeal, and in an effort to help bail out other poor schmucks, like myself, I wrote a long and comprehensive blog entry detailing just how to do it. (I’m here to help …) But after finishing the lengthy tome, the result was confusing as hell, and only likely to help someone who had the exact same mashup of AppleIDs and MobileMe, and who had gone through the MobileMe Migration the same way I had. So I trashed it, and am just going to provide a couple of suggestions for how to transition, along with some links to docs that were useful in working everything out.
1) Create your iCloud account using the AppleID that you use for iTunes/App Store and Apple Store.
This is kind of key, and will make your life easier.
2) If you have a MobileMe account that is under a different AppleID, or has a different email address associated with it, migrate it to iCloud, and use it as a secondary iCloud account.
What?
You can’t easily merge the two together, and MobileMe will be going away at some point, but you can add your secondary iCloud account to your Mail and Calendar apps and have everything in one place while you migrate your mail usage to your new iCloud .me email address.
What Apple Needs to Do …
Most of this mess could be a lot less messy if Apple were to take a more flexible approach with AppleIDs … Allow users to delete, or recycle them, merge them, and provide more flexibility about changing the name and underlying email account associated with an AppleID.
If you’re just starting down the iLife, with your first iPhone, iPad, or Mac, try to get it right from the beginning and use one AppleID for everything. It will save you headaches, and Saturday nights spent in an over-caffeinated-frenzy trying to figure out why your Photostream isn’t streaming and your email not going where you want it to …
Helpful Links
iCloud 101: Apple IDs and your iOS Device (GigaOm)
Apple IDs and iCloud (Apple Support Doc)
Apple ID FAQ (Apple Support Doc)
iCloud Support and Community (Apple)
For about as long as I’ve been having my bikes worked on over at Tyler Carson’s Hayasa Motorbikes, I’ve been hearing about LeMons racing (say Lemons, the capital “M” is just there for effect), or more properly, the 24 Hours of LeMons. Tyler, Anton, and a bunch of the other regulars at the shop have been into the LeMons thing at one point or another. In fact, Anton, has been very involved with the sport, and races for a number of teams.
So what in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is the 24 Hours of LeMons? (Hint: Click on the link and go to the website, slacker. Do I have to do it all for you?)
LeMons racing has been described as Halloween meets Gasoline, but coming from Planet Nerd, I like to think to think of LeMons racing as the Comicon of auto racing, where the cars do most (although not all) of the Cosplay.
The idea is this: You, buy a heap of a car, and get it ready to race without spending more than $500 , and create some kind of theme for the car … Like a Molvo (Half Miata, half Volvo wagon), an “Angry Birds” car or, this fine specimen, a car modeled after the Pokemon character, Pikachu.
Anton Lovett driving the Pikachu for Team Good Luck Everbody Else Racing at Infineon Raceway on October 22, 2011
That’s about it … Well, except for the part about finding a handful of your soon-to-be-very-best-friends for your driving team, and having a couple of mechanics, welders, and electronics tech folks comes in really handy. Then you go race, well, until you breakdown, and then you fix your heap, er, car, and go racing again.
This past weekend, after many years and a few false starts, I finally got my first whiff of LeMons racing at an event called “The Skankaway Anti-Toe-Fungal 500″, held at Sears Point/Infineon Raceway.
It…was…a…BLAST! (And not just in the oops, look, that car’s engine just exploded sense, although there was some of that going on as well.)
There are lots of interesting folks running around the race including cosplayers, whacky race judges who dole out bad driving punishments designed to educate, inform, and enlighten…like taping you to the hood of your car, placing your team in a chain gang (with real plastic chains) and parading them around the pit area while playing “Jailhouse Rock” on a car radio, doing repetitious writing assignments on the hood of your car, and other fun (to watch) stuff. There’s a whole show going on off of the track.
It’s pretty serious business that it is all geared towards the fun side, and the organizers (and many of the team members that I spoke with) prefer keeping the emphasis on the crazy circus sideshow, and less on the competitive racing aspects. There is also very strong sense of community evident here…Everyone knows everyone else, and folks seem willing to lend each other a helping-hand or some friendly advice when needed.
Oh, and don’t worry too much about the judges…They can be bribed, and bribery of judges is an encouraged form of informal business arrangement at LeMons races. It’s all part of the carnival fun, and I understand most of the food an other goodies collected by the judges as their “bribes” get kicked back to the folks out working the track all day.
Drivers can also buy their way out of penalties by writing a check to whatever the 501(c)3 charity that the organizers have selected for the event.
If only government worked this way …
Then there are the prizes…The winning team gets $1,500, usually in nickels. There are also a number of category awards, and special themed participation prizes at these regional events. For the Infineon race, there was a Bay Area, Jerry Garcia-themed award, the full title of which I can’t remember but it evokes the memory of an unfortunate incident in the late rock star’s past involving a cop, some smoking paraphernalia, and a BMW.
Anyway, I think I’m going to be writing, photographing, and doing videos (there’s one currently in the works) about this sport in the future … And who knows, maybe even driving on one of the teams.
Yeah, I think I’ve got bit by the bug pretty hard on this one.
Special Thanks to Nick Pon from 24 Hours of LeMons for allowing me to photo and video my way through the weekend, Anton Lovett for being the facilitator of my bad (and usually fun) moto-related habits, and “Judge Phil” Greden for … Well, it’s a long story, let’s just say I didn’t get taped to the hood of a car or anything.
Enjoy the photos.
He challenged everyone to “Think Different”.
Ever since moving up to the Bay Area in 2006, I’ve been hearing about the annual Maker Faire. It’s a sort of DIY’ers and crafters convention, but to describe it as that is a bit of an understatement. This year’s event was May 21-22 at the San Mateo County Event Center.
Maker Faire is a gathering of creative types from engineers to costume designers, and computer programmers to mechanics. Artists, thespians, cosplayers, carpenters, musicians … If someone can imagine something, and bring that idea to realization, there’s pretty much a place for them at the Maker Faire.
After about three years of planning to go, and false starts, I was finally able to make it there this year, and can safely say that the Maker Faire is something I will be going back to again, and again.
The range of creativity that’s represented, and the passion that all of the makers bring to their ideas, is awe-inspiring. There are demonstrations, lectures, presentations, and people running around cosplaying and riding around in all manner of custom designed vehicles, both vintage and never before heard of.
Kinectic Steamworks provided this awesome tractor, along with steam-powered player piano.
Okay, not going to lie here … This is a very nerdy, geeky, event. And I say that with all the pride my extremely nerdy, geeky, heart can muster.
There were both indoor and outdoor events and exhibitions. A lot of the indoor attractions focused on computers, electronics, robotics, audio, video, and music.
Speaking of music, there was a band there called Arc Attack, that features six live musicians, a robot drummer, and two giant Tesla coils run by a synthesizer (see video.) The coils bounce electrical current off of a metal cage during the performance, with the effect being a light show like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Likely, probably only because I’m a Faire n00bie, as I’m told these have been around for a while. Be that as it may, 1,000,000 volts flying through the air to music is nothing to shake a stick out…especially if it’s metal…cause that could hurt.
The crowd was pretty receptive as they played things like AC/DC’s “Back in Black (clever, eh?), but when they launched into the theme from “Dr. Who” (original BBC version), the place went berserk…That, my friends, is the depth of the geeky goodness going on here.
On the cosplay side, there was a heavy steampunk contingent, represented by groups such as Kinectic Steamworks, and a very interesting peformance group from the Los Angeles area called the League of S.T.E.A.M.
The League of S.T.E.A.M. is a steampunk Ghostbusters team that has done a number of webisodes, and appeared in a music video for Panic! At the Disco, called The Ballad of Mona Lisa (which completely rocks, and I’m going to have to get the download.) These guys go all out with character, costume, gear, back story and, oh yeah, a Zombie Gentleman’s Gentleman, named Zed.
Check out their website. It’s great stuff.
Zed, the Zombie Gentleman's Gentleman
There were just about every kind of vehicle imaginable on display (and driving through the fair grounds), from giant penny-farthing inspired bikes to a fire-breathing dragon fly recumbent, several custom steam-powered motorcycles and solar cars. There was even a bicycle made out of beautifully laminated wood.
Alternative energy/green resources was a recurring theme at the Faire (well, except for some of the steampunk guys who’s equipment seemed to need some emissions work, but in a post-apocalyptic steampunk culture I guess you’d have to make some allowances.) One of the bandstands featured a loudspeaker system that was powered generators run by audience members on bicycles.
Shovelman plays his guitar as an audience member pedals a bike to power the PA system.
Add to all of this unbelievable shopping (it was all I could do not to buy this giant robot kit from the electronics bazaar, and was lucky to make it out of there a couple of hundred bucks lighter, but happy), every kind of food imaginable, and it makes for a great day out, and an amazing experience.
For more photos from the Maker Faire, click on the link to go to my Flickr page.
Well, okay … This post really has nothing to do with the Zombie Apocalypse, although when one does happen, having your data backed up in off-site storage might just help pull your cookies out of the fire. (Unless, of course, you are bitten by a Zombie, and then it’s rule #2 for you.)
I got religion about regular drive backups about 2 years ago, when the internal drive on my MacBook gave up the ghost in between infrequent backups. It only has to happen once, and you learn.
More recently, as my collection of video, audio, and digital negatives, started nearing the terabyte mark, the idea of off-site storage in addition to local backups started sounding like a very good idea … You see, while the Zombie Apocalypse may be years off, my house sits right on top of the Hayward Fault, which, according to the geologists, is due for a 7+ earthquake at any time now (Note to self: MOVE!)
The field of choices for online backup providers has been quickly growing, and while the list was initially limited for us Mac users, there are more choices out there now than there were even as late as last year. I’m not going to run through all of the pros and cons of each provider, there is a lot of good information out there like this comparison at backupreview, or another article from PC Magazine. Instead we’ll focus on the online backup services I considered, and my final choice.
Keep in mind, every vendor is different, and our individual computing habits/needs can vary drastically, so what may be a perfect choice for one user may not be suitable for another …
After perusing a number of resources, I started focusing in on: Backblaze, Mozyhome, and Crashplan.
In general all of the backup providers provide storage retention, a variety of restore options (download a zip file, have a dvd or hard drive shipped), as well as some data encryption.
While some providers claim to give you unlimited storage, some, like Carbonite, will throttle the amount of upload bandwidth you can use based on how much data you back up per day … If you back up a lot of data, your bandwidth will get throttled back after a certain point, penalizing the user who needs the service the most. Seems kind of Catch-22-ish to me.
All of these solutions give you options for setting how much bandwidth you use … Some more flexible than others … to insure you can still function for the month or so it may take for your initial backup (do the math … Half a terabyte at DSL-like upload rates, and it doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.)
The first one I tried out was Backblaze. It’s cheap ($5.99/mo. per PC), offers unlimited storage, and is super simple to setup. In fact, if my Grandma was still around, I would probably have her using this to back up her iGeriatricPro, or whatever. This would have been my go-to as well, were it not for two factors:
1) Speed, or the lack of it
I’ve got a reasonably decent bandwidth as non-cable broadband goes … 1.5mbps up, and 12 down. Even at that, Backblaze plodded along at about .7Mbs while my available bandwidth was a lot higher. Backblaze has a really neat online tool for measuring your bandwidth called Backblaze Speedtest, which helped point out how fast their service wasn’t.
2) Limited ability to select files for backup
Backblaze automatically excludes your OS, System, and Application files from backup … and they sell this as a “feature”, telling you that it’s a waste of time to back this up. I don’t know about you folks out there, but configuring the environment and all my software on a new Mac is a multi-day affair.
Worse, Backblaze doesn’t allow you to select the files to backup, only to exclude files you don’t want backed-up.
Again, this would be great for Grandma or Aunt Perl (see what I did there … Aunt PERL? Geek humor), but it just doesn’t meet my computing needs.
Another issue with Backblaze is that it won’t back up open files. This wasn’t a problem for the other contenders.
Next up for consideration was MozyHome. This one didn’t even make it to the testing stage.
Mozy was, up until a couple of days ago, owned by a huge conglom called EMC. Mozy sold this as a key marketing point … “Hey, we’re owned by a big multi-national conglomerate, so you know we won’t disappear over night and take your data with us.”
That was a nice pitch, up until the announcement this week that EMC had sold Mozy to VMWare, and was going to be part of VMWare’s overall cloud strategy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that … It’s too early too tell what impact this will have for Mozy customers, but takeovers/sales between large companies have been known to impact customer service. We’ll have to wait and see.
The larger problem with MozyHome is the reported problems with bugs, and other useability issues, that are floating all around the ‘net. Too easy to walk away with so many other qualified competitors in the field.
I finally decided on Crashplan. Crashplan will let you download and use their software for local backups to your own storage for free. For about $12/month, you get unlimited storage for up to 10 PCs, and the price goes down with discounts if you pre-pay for longer chunks of time.
Crashplan is highly configurable, and lets the user decide exactly what files they want to back up. It’s a little more complicated than Backblaze but, for a user with even moderate computer knowledge, it is nothing close to brain surgery (Mmm … Brains … )
The combination of local and online storage is perfect, giving you the availability of instant backup in the event of a drive crash, with your off-site data safe and secure in the event there is a serious calamity with your home system.
So, whether you are preparing for a blown hard drive, an Earthquake, or a Zombie Apocalypse, having your files backed-up online will go a long way towards your computing peace of mind.
Photo Fried Disk by Fractal Ken. Licensed under Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
So I just got this book someone recommended to me … 51 High-Tech Practical Jokes for the Evil Genius
The thing sold itself on the title alone … Not that I’m either a big practical joker, or saying that I’m an evil genius (I try and only use my powers for good, not for evil), but it just had a certain appeal.
Continue reading “51 High-Tech Practical Jokes for the Evil Genius” »
I’m typically not an early adopter when it comes to an OS … Having survived the Windows 98 implementation, I learned to take it slow when I new one comes out. I finally broke down and upgraded to OS X Leoopard a couple of weeks ago … Mostly because it would work betterer with my iPhone 3G and under the delusion that I would actually be learning enough Objective C to be able to write some little iPhone apps that I thought would be fun.
Note to self: Any sentence with the words Objective C and fun in it is an oxymoron. C’s still a drag.
Anyway, the first thing I noticed after upgrading my iMac was that it started crashing, almost immediately. It was also running as slow as the old grey mare (you know, the one they shot because she was too old for the glue factory?) Someone suggested I up the memory to a full 4 Gb … and it worked.
The machine’s running well again, and doesn’t take forever to boot.