I was making some pasta at the end of a long workday recently, and hunger had caught up with me. Now I don’t know about you, but when I’m hungry I get cranky and rather unpleasant to be around.

There’s something primitive that happens when you start to get hungry, theres a bit of the territorial lizard brain that kicks in as if you need to stake your claim to what food there is, even if there’s plenty. In my case I know this territorial instinct tends to manifest itself in a lack of social grace. When I’m hungry I tend to have very little patience for other peoples input, ideas, questions or interruptions. It also tends to affect my empathy and the filters for what I say or the way that I express myself.

I can work on my own fine when I’m hungry, in fact sometimes there even seems to be a slight edge that can help to make me more efficient, but in that state I’m not good at dealing with people.

I was in this state as I was making dinner when I started thinking about Jobs and his eating habits.

Jobs had inconsistent, but very restrictive eating habits. He would go for weeks at a time eating only a single food (like apples or carrots). He seems to have had a life long fascination with starvation diets. With limited calorie intake, I have to wonder if this had an effect on his notoriously rude and cruel interpersonal interactions.

I’m not suggesting that Steve Jobs would have been a fat and jolly man who never abandoned a child if he had a more normal diet. The man was an asshole and a perfectionist who helped drive teams to either self destruct or create some truly amazing things. I just wonder if he would have been slightly less of an asshole if he had eaten proper meals.

Offsite backups can be trickier, especially if you have a lot of data. Most services have limits to the data and monthly fees can add up. After looking around and comparing a few different options I settled on Crashplan. There are a few things that I really like about their service. First of all the software is robust and free. You can use it locally, or even across a network with a friends machine for free without any service subscription. If you do opt to use the crash plan servers the cost structure is very competitive and they offer a discount for prepaying up to four years in advance which I really like. If I’m going to use a backup system I’m going to use it for more than a year. They also offer web access to your backed up files and you can create backup sets to prioritize your files and schedule the backups.

I’ve been using crash plan for about a year now. I’m writing about it today because they just added a new feature that changes it from a great backup service to an indispensable daily tool – Crashplan has just released a mobile app for iOS and android. I’ve just tested the iPhone and iPad version and am blown away by the quick access to all of my files. It may be because the tool has just been release and not many people are using it, but navigating my backup file structure is zippy- it’s like browsing a local directory. To view a file you click it once and it downloads the file, then click it again to view it.

I can see this app being a huge lifesaver. Huge kudos to the Crashplan team for their service and this fantastic new app!

Obviously I’m posting this via the Blogsy app.

The interface is decent, I could see it taking a bit of time to get used to. My favorite feature so far is the two sided editor. You swipe the main screen to flip between the HTML code side and the media formatting side.

My least favorite thing about it is that there appears to be no way to upload photos from the app. You can insert photos from your flickr or picasa account, but you’d have to plan ahead and have your images already uploaded, or leave the app to add new images from your iPad.

It does have an in app browser and google image search tool, which would be nice for finding stock images to add to posts.

I’ve added my flickr account and am adding a photo from that here to test image embedding:

You can also add a YouTube account link, but for whatever reason that does not appear to working right now. I get to the ‘approve access for this app’ screen, but granting access never seems to stick. It would be nice if there were other online services that you could add, as I prefer vimeo for hosting my video work.

For certain kinds of blogging I can see this app being very nice. If you’re syncing your photo library with flickr or picasa and want to use them in an online diary, this app will work well for you. For me it feels to limited without in-app photo uploading and no way to set the wordpress feature image for the post.

The remarkable thing about WHS is how it manages to get the balance right between technical customization and ‘out-of-the-box’ usability.  For the average user there is very little setup or maintenance necessary, and most of it is of the simplest button clicking kind.  Windows Home Server boxes are a central place to keep files, allow for automatic backup and media streaming as well as remote access from external web browsers and mobile phones.

Part of the core elegance of Windows Home Server is Drive Extender, a technology that lets you plug in extra drives and have them automatically added to a single pool of storage, effectively turning them into one large drive.  As long as you have room left on one drive, you have room left in every shared folder available on your server.  On top of this you have the ability to set whether your content is duplicated across multiple drives or not, protecting you from drive failure.  This gives you the protection of RAID without the setup and maintenance complexity.

I was reminded of the importance of this system when my original Acer h340 Easystore Home Server hardware failed.  Because the drives are in a standard format I could simply plug them into another computer to retrieve the files.  By this point I’m addicted to all the additional functionality I get out of the Home Server system, so I’ve since replaced the server with an HP ex490 MediaSmart server, but it sure was a comfort to see all my data safe and sound before my new server was even ordered.

Microsoft is currently developing a 2nd version of the Windows Home Server system, but just announced that they will not be including this drive extender technology in that system.

Why?  It’s likely an economic decision.  I suspect Home Server never sold that tremendously for them and never had the profit margins that Business Server products have.  They’ve brought the two teams together and Home Server is obviously taking a back seat.  The official reasoning is that Drive Extender didn’t work properly under business demands, and they clearly see the next version of Home Server as a neutered business server if it’s ever completed.

It’s unfortunate.  This was a product that for the most part just worked, but it was also a product that people never really knew why they would want it.  A Home Server is a hard sell to non-technical people.

I like gadgets. And I like 60s muscle cars. Yet somehow I just can’t muster up enthusiasm about this product: The SoundRacer v8. Just plug it into the cigarette lighter in your economy car and get muscle car sounds coming out of your speakers. Be sure to roll down the windows so people can hear the new badass sounds your car makes. And such a bargain at only 50 bucks!

CC Photo by Lars P.

Here’s a product I’d like to find that just doesn’t seem to be available yet: a wireless heart rate monitor for the iPhone. I use RunKeeper when jogging to track distance, speed and elevation. This is a terrific app that produces beautiful graphs of your run allowing you to compile and share data, but there’s one data point missing and that’s heart-rate. A heart rate monitor would allow you to aim for target zones and optimize calories burned as well as track improvements in your fitness level.

There’s a couple of ways I could see this working, none of which seem like they’d be too difficult to implement.

1) A wireless bluetooth heart rate monitor.
This would strap on your chest and sync to your phone allowing data to be streamed and tracked as you run. You would need no extra hardware physically attached to your phone.

2) A dongle that picks up existing wireless standards from heart rate monitors
There are a few different standards already out there for wireless heart rate monitors used by Polar, Suunto and Garmin to name a few. Why not use one of the existing ones? A reciever that could plug in to your iPhone and send data to an app (ideally runkeeper) would be excellent as long as it wasn’t to large or unwieldy. Considering they fit recievers into watches, I don’t see why they would need to be very large.

So if you’re reading this and your work for one of the fitness equipment manufacturers out there, how about it?  Can we have a heart rate monitor that will work with the iPhone.

Or if I’m wrong and such a product already exists I’d love to hear from you – where can I get one?

There’s just one thing that I’m waiting for in a tablet, and the iPad doesn’t have it yet: a pressure sensitive touch screen.

Apple sensibly recognizes that I’m in the minority, and that adding a pressure sensitive screen would up the cost on this entry level gadget, but what I’m looking for is something I can draw on.  A device that doesn’t just mimic brush stroke thickness, but actually responds to the amount of pressure applied to the screen.

My old IBM thinkpad x41 tablet had pressure sensitivity, and I can tell you the difference between drawing on it vs. a non pressure sensitive surface is night and day.  I’ve seen some nice art done without pressure sensitivity, but it’s a bit like driving with square wheels. Sure it can be done, but why not just do it right?  Of course the x41 isn’t actually touch sensitive, you use a stylus to draw on it, and the stylus sends the pressure information similar to the way a wacom tablet works.

The best case scenario (imho) would be a light sturdy tablet that has enough power to be responsive to drawing in multiple layers, with the ability to use fingers or styluses.  Perhaps they could use something like Peratechs Quantum Tunneling Composite, though I’m not sure what that would add to the cost.  I’m eager to see a proper digital sketchbook on the market.  The iPad is almost there.  If Apple comes out with an ‘artists version’ that enables pressure sensitivity and has enough power to run Photoshop or Autodesk Sketchbook without any lag, I’m all over it.

Oh.. And would it kill you to put an SD card slot on it?