The Lance J. Technoweb

In 2006, Apple released the 13 inch white plastic MacBook.  It wasn't nearly as great looking as the MacBook Pro, but it had a decent CPU and had a lot of built-in capabilities not seen in many other entry level laptops.  It was nearly as powerful as the MacBook Pro, and was really only missing the rarely used FireWire port. And then what happened??? 2006: Plastic MacBook (A1181) is released.  Apple sells a ton of them. 2008: Surprise! A new Aluminum MacBook (A1278) appears.  Is plastic dead??? 2008: Surprise!  Plastic MacBook continues (A1181), likely due to the price tag of the A1278. 2009: Surprise! That fancy Aluminum MacBook is renamed the "MacBook Pro" (A1278). 2009: Surprise! A new Plastic MacBook is released (A1342).  It is capable and affordable. 2009: The MacBook Air is released.  It is expensive and under-powered, but great looking. 2010: The MacBook Air gets more powerful and more affordable every year, and then... 2012: The plast...

Roomba definitely has the biggest name in robots, but there are a lot of great looking competitors out there.  So why get a Roomba? Because robot vacuum cleaners have a lot of moving parts.  And moving parts need to be maintained. The beauty of Roomba and iRobot is that spare parts are readily and inexpensively available.  Sure, there are consumables available for every robot out there.  But new wheels and motors?  How about upgraded parts?  iRobot is unique in that there is the expectation that you can affordably keep an old Roomba going forever.  Everyone else?  Not so much. My Roomba gets a lot of use, and it's 7 years old.  I've upgraded the entire cleaning head assembly - which includes the primary gearbox and brush motors and dust bin.  I've also repaired a failed power jack.  Other machines would likely already be disposed of. But my Roomba keeps on going.  I suspect that it will last as long as I need it to....

Time Machine is Apple's backup solution.  It's the best backup in the business, but it needs to be updated. Time Machine is amazing because it is by far more effective than any other backup solution.  You attach a backup drive to your computer, and your Mac asks you if you want to back up.  Say yes, and the backup happens. Time Machine does full disk backup.  It backs up periodically and automatically. You can step back in time to recover old versions of stuff.  It smartly ignores files that don't need to be backed up (like /tmp and /proc and whatever).  It automatically manages backup disks.  TimeMachine has configuration options, but they're simple and straightforward - perfect for anyone except perhaps the data center backup pro who has spent countless hours developing an optimal backup strategy. The backup industry has not responded to Time Machine.  It focuses on "every feature under the sun", with countless options and capabilities....

My primary backup service, CrashPlan, decided to drop home backup services to focus on other things.  So now I'm left with an old home IT problem: how to deal with backup. I take care of a full fleet of family Macs that are scattered around.  Crashplan helped me make sure those Macs were backed up.  I liked CrashPlan because it was easy, automatic, and reliable.  Now I have to start all over again. The biggest problem with backup is where to stick the copied data.  I'm a big fan of remote storage, in case of a fire, flood, or other disaster that impacts more than just the local hard drive.  So I'm going with S3-compatible storage services, which is an efficient way to move and store a lot of data remotely. There are many S3 storage providers out there at a whole bunch of different price points.  At first I was planning to use a commercial provider, but I've decided to give it a shot using my own SE solution to save some money.  My own soluti...