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26 April, 2014

Quick Review: Comixology

Posted by blackcampbell under Comic Books, Computers, Technology | Tags: |
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So, I’ve been an early adopter of e-comic books, and loved the Comixology app. I’ve been buying all the Atomic Robo stuff through the app. Problem: they just got bought by Amazon, and all of a sudden they’re doing the out-of-app purchases. Remember, Amazon is sticking to the prickish idea that you don’t own the book you bought; you just “licensed” it — so I suspect this might be part of the issue I’m about to relate:

All my bloody books are gone. I did their little two-step. I “restored my books, which only gave me three issues of the latest volume of one series, and one book from another. I keep trying. No joy. I download the new app — those aren’t even showing. That’s right, Stupid here dropped probably close to $100 on a series I no longer “own.”

That’s pretty bad. Worse is I know I’m not the only one. At the last check, the App Store was running almost unanimously 1 star rating for the new version, but hey! where are the hundreds of reviews? They’re not showing. Afraid to have your customers warn prospective customers what a sorry set of sticky fingered thieves you are?

Review: the app is gorgeous and worked beautifully. The downside: you’ll lose your stuff if you’re not careful (or in my case, even if you were.) Final word: don’t download, don’t buy from them, unless you want to shell out hundreds for nothing. Go to the local comic store and make them some money; Comixology wasn’t cheaper, anyway.

 

15 April, 2014

Quick Review: Any Font

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: , , |
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Do you want a certain font from your computer on your iPad? Hit the App Store and search for Any Font. It’s a $1.99 app (last time i checked) that allows you to do just that. You can do a sync through iTune with it, but I tried loading a few .tff files into a folder on Dropbox, then opened them on the iPad. Dropbox, of course, can’t view them, but you “Open with…”, then choose AnyFont. The fonts appear in that app, you check them, hit install, and the app will bounce you through Safari to the Settings, where you will get a dialogue that looks a lot like the updater (probably is.) Install. Open up your Pages, or what have you and there’s your new font.

Is it worth $2? Do you need certain fonts to work with between your desktop, laptop, or what have you? Then yes. Otherwise…well, I’m gonna say “yes”, but I absolutely needed/wanted Bank Gothic on the iPad.

 

25 October, 2013

Quick Review: Pages 5 for Mac

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology, Writing | Tags: , , , , |
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Yes, I’ll admit right off the bat: I’m a Microsoft Office hater. Their software is bloated, the interface a brick-to-the-face ugly, and the menus make no damned sense. I was a WordPerfect guy — it was the best word processor out there through to the early 2000s. When I bought an iPad, I found I truly loved the simplicity and surprisingly functionality of the “lightweight” Pages and Keynote apps, enough so that when my wife bought me a MacBook Air, i started using Pages and Keynote on the laptop, even though I’d have to sacrifice the clean fonts and layout when I had to shift the presentations over to Powerpoint (but that’s what we use at work…the cri de coeur of everyone sick of the MS Office suite.)

Pages, however, was a dream to create documents in. Especially for e-publication. ePub is the easiest of the ebook formats and everything looks like it’s supposed to when you go the publish a book (then Amazon makes you go to .mobi, which is like can spray-painting a Ferrari.) So I was kind of excited when the new iWork suite dropped on the iPad. Again, for basic work, it’s surprisingly good — easy to use, there’s a lot of template designs and other things you can use quickly, but it’s not for heavy duty work.

Liking what i saw on the iPad, I upgraded to Pages 5 (I haven’t even touched the other apps, other than to test how quickly they opened)…and I am disappointed I may have to work with Word for a while, assuming that Apple bothers to fix the disaster of Final Cut X proportions that it has foisted on its users. But hey! It’s free!

Doesn’t matter when it’s crap. Here’s a thread on the Apple Support Communities to give you an idea of how big a steaming pile Pages 5 is for the hardcore writer or publisher.

First the good (and there is a lot for the casual word processor user.): The big one — collaborations — now you can work on documents with others using iCloud. I don’t do this, and I don’t like sending my personal IP to someone else’s server if i can avoid it. You can track changes, and it works fine with Word docs that are imported. There’s also support for right to left script (Arabic, Hebrew, and the like…)

It still lets you export your work in various formats, you can still email a document right off, although there was a lot of bitching about this on the thread highlighted above — you “send a copy.” It’s no different from the last iteration, really. I did notice it zips some of the documents, depending on their size. It shouldn’t be necessary and might be a developer artifact that hasn’t been fixed.

It looks nice. I want to be able, however, to create a new button toolbar that suits my particular needs and which speed productivity. That was, perhaps, the single best element of WordPerfect; you could customize the toolbars so that you never needed to use the menu, and it wasn’t crowded or confusing. Apple and Microsoft could learn a thing on interface design from the old girl. The “Inspector” — essentially a condensed window of the most necessary control features is something a lot of people are lamenting is gone.

It’s not. they’ve just moved it to a sidebar on the right of your window and called it “setup” and “format”, much like in the iOS version. I like it. I can key it on and off fast, if I don’t want to leave it open.

Templates: there’s a bunch and they appeal to the casual user…and that’s a problem. It’s a pain in the ass now to create a template or import one. Setting up Styles has never been a great feature on Pages and it’s worse than before. but if you just need a canned newsletter, letter, resume, etc. — Pages 5 has probably got most student or non-publishing types covered. (And honestly, I think the market demographic they were shooting for was the student with the free pricing and the ease of use.)

However, that ease of use disappears the instant you want to do complex documents, or ones that can be quickly and easily reconfigured (like, for instance, a brochure where you want to move a single page of text and imagery around fast.) It used to be you could simply click and drag on a section and move it. That’s gone. so it selecting it to get rid of it or to copy it to another document…no, now you have to select in the document, cut and paste. It’s doable, but it’s more time consuming and a friggin’ hassle. No ability to duplicate or delete pages. (This is the most egregious of the idiot moments the Pages development team had here…did they not have one writer or publishing type in the team? If not, I suggest maybe having a user of your bloody product to review it might be in order.)

Worse, layout breaks, and the ability to do multiple layouts? Gone. Layout margin changes? Gone. Merge fields? Gone. Importing Numbers (their spreadsheet) into a document? Gone. Two page view seems to be gone. Find and replace special characters (like extra character returns so Amazon’s execrable .mobi doesn’t take a crap when you try to publish a manuscript)…gone. Bullet points in comments. Gone. Importing images not in bloody iPhoto? You can do it, but you have to open a finder window and drag and drop a photo into a document. Haven’t tries video dra g and drop, but I’m betting it will work. Unlike hyperlinks to external documents.

Oh, and it doesn’t work and play well with rtf… WTF?

In other words, if you do any kind of work that is more complex than the canned templates, you’re pretty much screwed. Your workflow will be slower and less efficient, and while you might be able to get there eventually, it won’t be without a lot of visits to the Apple community pages and a buttload of swearing. the kind of thing that leads people to say, “Word sucks and is a bitch to use, but it’s a bitch that you can actually use.”

Great job, Pages Development Team! How many of you idiots were on final Cut X? Just curious.

Style: 4 out of 5 — it looks nice and could be really useful for basic and casual users. The target audience seems to be students. Substance: 2 out of 5 — For the 11 or so new elements of functionality and a nicer interface, we lost hundreds of features that were kinda important if you do any kind of word processing for a living.

If you’re a writer or publish who uses Pages 4.3 right now DO NOT UPGRADE TO THIS CRAPWARE  until they’ve flayed the morons that released this, and added functionality back into it.

 

23 October, 2013

Quick Review: OS X Mavericks; UPDATE: Better Battery Life

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: |
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If you want the usual “look how great Mavericks is on the latest hardware!” kind of review, go to the big blog sites. I’m reviewing Mavericks or OS 10.9 on the kind of machine many users would — an older laptop, in this case a late 2010 13″ MacBook Air with 128gb SSD and 4gb RAM. It’s the kind of machine people might have rushed out to buy because it was the thinnest, lightest, and hippest laptop of the time. My wife bought me one because I liked my iPad so much, and I travel by motorcycle a lot, requiring a lightweight and small computer.

I heard OS X Mavericks was going to be free (at least yesterday) for download, so I backed up my data to an external drive and went for it. The download took 32 minutes on Comcast’s “Blast” internet (I’m pulling about 57-59Mb/s) for slightly more than 5gb. It took another 25 minutes for the OS to load and come up. Sign up is quick, but Mavericks forces you to create a new user profile for the computer — this caused some trouble as the new profile had all the admin privileges, so when I deleted it, I had to call Apple and have them help to repair my rights on the machine, as I could access the external drive. Your old profile will still be there, complete with all your files, settings, etc.

Now for the performance: Battery life is supposed to be much improved with the new OS. I did a couple of battery tests over the last day. The first showed a sharply reduced battery life, but I finally bothered to check and found it had been doing a 64gb backup through the first test, and was burning up the airwaves with the wifi transmitter. Even then, I got about 4 hours on the charge with moderate use. Today, I fired it up and did a usual work morning. Here’s how it looked.

Over two hours, with the screen at 40% brightness, bluetooth off,  wifi up and running a few tabs on Chrome, six Pages files open, mail up and running, the calculator, and notes open, Caffeine, a temp monitor and Sophos running in the background, I averaged about 4 minutes/1% of battery power, or a battery life of roughly seven hours. This is right about where the old Air was running under a similar load. The battery usage doubles if you have Flash intensive sites or iTunes streaming a movie, which is about what I was seeing with Mountain Lion.

So, no — you won’t get better battery life on an older machine, but you won’t see a measurable drop, either.

Heat and the screaming fans of doom was a feature that Mountain Lion brought to my Air. During the first battery test with the backup running, the internet seeing mild use, I was running between 150-190F, about 50F higher than usual. I would only see temps like this when I was ripping a CD or DVD under Mountain Lion. I was worried this would be the normal operating temperature (not good, and not just for the loud fan action.) The next day, after a rest, the Air was running at about 80/80F on the processors. I opened email and Chrome running up to five tabs, some with Flash. The temperature peaked at 169/175F with Daily Caller and other Flash intensive sites up and running. It dropped to 124/133F after a few minutes, once the Flash-enabled sites were closed. With the load mentioned for the battery test, the temp spiked at 117/129F and sat at 109/109F most of the time. So, Mavericks seems to run cooler for most tasks than Mountain Lion — but under any load, the heat spikes faster and seems to hold longer.

The last big thing is the memory management. Allegedly, the new OS compresses RAM use and makes it seem like you have about 50% more RAM than you do. I don’t tend to buy into this and remember software compression for memory that was out for Windows and worked about as well as a sieve to stay dry in the rain. This is unscientific, and totally anecdotal, but yes — I’m seeing more speed out of the Air. Boot time seems slower, as does shutdown — I would usually see about 20 seconds to boot up and 30 to close down; Mavericks is about a third slower coming up, and about the same shutting down.

I just tested a few apps I use regularly to see what I would get. iPhoto is a pig on the best of days — it opened and was usable in 5 seconds and shut down in about the same time; this is about 3x faster than it was. iTunes is similarly terrible about booting up — it came up in 5 seconds, but took 15 to connect to the external drive and bring everything up. It was laggy for another 10 seconds while it connected to my iPad. This is a good 3-4x faster than it was. Acrobat is a bit slow, but came up to a graphics heavy book in Acrobat in five seconds and closed immediately. Pages opened to a graphics heavy file in 3 seconds and closed immediately; Keynote was the slowest of the iWork suite at 7 seconds for a 20 slide presentation, and 5 seconds to close. Word took 26 seconds to open to a blank file — way to go, Microsoft! Thinking this might be related to the program being used the first time, I closed it (it closed immediately), I opened to a file. Three seconds. Fast enough to be well within my comfort zone.

So is Mavericks faster? Depends on the program or application, but it is noticeably faster.

There’s a bunch of additions to the OS — a maps program like iOS7 (won’t use it.) and improved Messages integration (but it’s still not syncing with messages received by the iPad and iPhone.) The notification center is mostly untouched, as are the gestures. iBooks is included (a nice touch and one I will use.)

Is OS X 10.9 Mavericks worth it? Yes. Even on an older machine, it seems to improve performance, without any real loss of battery life (nor an improvement on the late 2010 Air.) It will make your machine run hotter, but it seems to come in spikes, or whenever you are running Flash or video. Heavy wifi use seems to be tied to the heat. There’s a couple of new features that you might notice and a few your most likely won’t.

UPDATE: I’ve had a few days to play with the new OS X and I’m now more happy than I had been. I had a night out working for four hours with documents and a few images — in four hours I was at 71% battery, about a third better than I’d usually get. Not content to have one good cycle, I pulled the plug this morning at 1212 hours and spent the first hour streaming music from my external media drive, and bluetoothing it to an iHome speaker, while working on the internet and playing with Pages 5 (DISAPPOINTED!!!) and at this time, it’s been a bit over six hours with steady internet usage and writing and I’m at 38%. That’s roughly 10 hours of use out of a 2010 Air, or about a 25-30% increase in power.

 

12 October, 2013

Quick Review: iOS7

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: |
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I got my iPhone 5 (no bloody C or S) for Virgin Mobile about a month ago, and it’s been a marvelous device. The iPhone seems to much better access the Sprint/Virgin network in Albuquerque much better than the old HTC or the dumbphone I had before that. Here’s the original review when it was still on iOS6, so we’ll concentrate on the move to iOS7 here. I turned to the iPhone because the user experience of the iPad 2 has been so good, that I figured it would be recreated on the small phone. I was not wrong. So how did the new iOS7 change the user experience?

For me, it was an excellent switch. There’s a ton of articles online about the technical aspects, the bugs and glitches, the various interface aspects of the software. You can Google them if that’s what you are looking for, but here’s my experience with iOS7: The new interface is cleaner and the “flat” design and new typeface makes it easier to see and use for my LASIK modified eyes. (I’m now mildly farsighted.) The new notification center can be accessed by swiping down from the top of the screen and works from the lock screen, so you can check the weather or any message notes — this makes it very easy to do quick checks of your calendar, etc. without having to punch in your password. (No fingerprint crap here.) The command center, or whatever they call it, swipes up from the bottom. You can set airplane mode or do not disturb from here, use the camera, or the camera flash as a flashlight (a feature I’ve used more than I expected), or adjust the sound or screen brightness without going through your passcode screen.

Once you’ve passcoded into the phone, it operates no differently from iOS6; easy, intuitive, and I saw no slow down in performance, nor issues with phone or wifi reception. Battery life did drop about 10-15% percent. I can get through two days of use with a bit of internet access, messaging, and the occasional phone call. I was able to cut about half of the new battery drain by killing the background app updates, the fancy parallax effects, and limiting the location services to the essential apps. (By the way, if the parallax stuff is giving you some kind of motion sickness, you’re way too damned sensitive; I couldn’t even notice it unless i really concentrated — hence why I turned it off.)

The integration of email/Twitter/Facebook/other app sharing across the platform makes it easy to do most things you might need. Siri works better than I thought it would when accessing functionality on the phone, but still isn’t much use as a search engine. The voice recognition for speech-to-text is quite good and can handle my strange Amero-Scottish accent without too much trouble.

Otherwise, there’s it’s much the same user experience — just cleaner and a bit better integrated than the last iteration of the OS.

Now, on the iPad 2, the experience is much improved. I know others might be having issues with the upgrade; I’m not. As with the iPhone, the new notifications and command centers are handy; and the interface is cleaner, easier to read, but here the functionality is much improved by the ability to still get out of an app to the “switcher” with a quick four-finger flick up. (I wish the iPhone incorporated this, as it would save the double tapping on the Home button and increase the life of the device.) Once in the switcher, you simply flick with a finger the app closed. It cuts down on the use of the home button on the iPad — you almost don’t need it. I’ve also seen not dramatic drop in performance of the device — none of the reported keyboard lag, no hanging apps or sudden app closures (although I do occasionally get one on the phone.) Even Real Racing 3, which is a resource hog of Texas boar proportions (and kinda sucks now that they’re trying to squeeze every last dime out of the player with their new freemium paradigm) runs well, with just a few jitters in the initial menu screens.

So, was the update worth it? Yes, even for an older iPad 2. (My wife also reports no issues on her iPad 3.)

Style: 5 out of 5 — the new look is modern, simple, and easier to use than iOS6. Substance: 4.5 out of 5 — the OS works as advertised and integrates a lot of the functions in ways that make it easy for the user to access. Siri still isn’t too impressive, and Maps is still slower than the DMV if you use a sat or hybrid view; stick to the straight map function and this isn’t an issue.

 

20 February, 2013

iTunes Update Causing Constant Requests For Network Connections?

Posted by blackcampbell under Computers, Technology | Tags: , , |
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Sigh…I really like the OS X environment, I think the operating system works very well and is remarkably stable compared to Windows (although I do like Windows 7 very much)…but what the #$%@ is with iTunes? Every improvement is a pain in the ass — it either doesn’t work well, or it does something to piss me off.

The latest was that every time I would open the program, it woud ask if I wanted to accept network connections. It’s a firewall issue; you’d think iTunes would play nice with OS X’s own firewall. (Good job, iTunes development team; you still suck!)

Here’s what worked for me. Swear vociferously. Close iTunes. Open the application manager and kill the iTunes helper process. (Search — you’ll find it faster.) Delete iTunes — no you will not lose your library, files, or downloads. Mountain Lion won’t let you drag to the trash can, so open the terminal, type in cd /Applications/

Yes, capitalize Application.

Then type: sudo rm -rf iTunes.app/ It will ask you for your administrator password if it’s enabled.

That’s it. Nothing else will happen, but the iTunes icon will be gone. Restart your computer, go to the iTunes web page and download the new 11.0.2. If you want to throw in some verbal abuse at Apple, the iTunes developers, Macs and how much easier Windows is to use — hit it. I recommend swearing. Or hitting an inanimate object.

Now option+click iTunes in the application folder, find your libraries, and you should be good to go.

Now for the saying nice things portion of the rant: iTunes 11.0.2 is much much faster than the last iteration on my 2010 Air, even accessing my network drive for the files. It found the files quickly, and accessed the store remarkably fast. Usually I wait through a long slog just to get into the store, much less try to find something. At this point I apologize to the iTunes code monkeys — this is still a kludged mess in some ways, but it’s running better than it has in years.

 

30 July, 2012

Want “Save As…” Back in Mountain Lion? You Can Have That

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First you want to reset the keyboard shortcuts for Duplicate to something not what we’re going to do.

Go into System Preferences, Keyboard, then to Keyboard Shortcuts. On the right, click on “All Applications” and hit the + sign button. You’ll get a window something like this:

To get the command to work, you’ve got to do it right. Type Save As with the capitalizations. You can’t type the elipses, I found; you have to use Option+semi-colon. Then in the shortcut Shift+Command+S (or whatever you want.)

So long as the program allows for Save As, it should show up in the File menu, as well!

 

30 July, 2012

Mountain Lion Users Beware: Dictation Wants Your Contacts

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Now, allegedly it’s because names are notoriously difficult for speech recognition (and people for that matter) to capture, but Apple sends your speech-to-text data — and your contacts list — to “the cloud” (their massive server farms) to do the translation, much like Siri on the iPhone.

When you go to the Systems Preferences and Dictation & Speech, hit the button about privacy at the bottom. Here’s what you’ll get:

When you use the keyboard dictation feature on your computer, the things you dictate will be recorded and sent to Apple to convert what you say into text. Your computer will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; and the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (for example, “my dad”) of your address book contacts.  All of this data is used to help the dictation feature understand you better and recognize what you say. Your User Data is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.

Information collected by Apple will be treated in accordance with Apple’s Privacy Policy, which can be found at www.apple.com/privacy.

You can choose to turn off the dictation feature at any time. To do so, open System Preferences, click Dictation & Speech, and then click Off in the Dictation section. If you turn off Dictation, Apple will delete your User Data, as well as your recent voice input data. Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Dictation and other Apple products and services. This voice input data may include audio files and transcripts of what you said and related diagnostic data, such as hardware and operating system specifications and performance statistics.

You can restrict access to the Dictation feature on your computer in the Parental Controls pane of System Preferences.

So user beware.

 

26 July, 2012

Quick Review: OS X Mountain Lion

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By now the Mac fanbois have devoured the various gushings of the technorati on the internet and have seen all of the glowing reviews of Mountain Lion, the new OS for Apple’s computer line. I’m a relatively new user of Macs, having switched over when the wife bought me an Air back in late 2010. It’s a superb little machine, I like the interface, but I thought Lion was a disaster. Why? Because prior to that Snow Leopard ran quickly and quietly. Lion, not so much; I saw the beachball much more often, especially when external drives (a must for the small SSDs of the Air), hear the fan crank up to Boeing 787 levels of noise when doing things as simple as watching a short clip on the net or as data intensive as cutting a DVD so I could watch it on my iPad (the gateway drug of the Apple world.)

I was never happy with Lion, but was willing to ignore it. Then comes along Mountain Lion. Notification Center, just like iOS! Reminders, just like iOS! Airplay, just like iOS…unless you have anything older than a Mac produced last week. Hey, wait…I was able to Airplay on my “old” machine with Lion; what the hell? Admittedly, Airplay made my machine labor hard and ran the fans loud enough I had to crank the TV to hear dialogue (seriously, Hollywood, balance the damned sound in movies better!), but it worked. With Mountain Lion? It just locks up iTunes good and dead until you force quit.

No Airplay: Bad. the skeumorphic contact book and calendar interfaces: Bad. Dictation (voice to text) for most programs: Good, but not great — it’s got a very limited cache because it sends what you say to Apple for translation to text. I have a few security qualms about that, on top of it being slow and buggy.

I haven’t bothered with Safari’s new features, since I use Chrome. The share feature being all over the place (but not in Chrome): ambivalent. I use it a lot on my iPad, but perhaps it’s because the laptop is my “work” machine I don’t find it that useful. I’m not surfing the net looking for intriguing things to send my friends when I’m on the Air, unlike the iPad (the first bit of technology, other than vehicles, that I’ve named.) So I’m also not very impressed with the Twitter integration, either, although I use it heavily on the iPad.

iTunes, the bane of pretty much anyone’s existence, seems to run a bit smoother and it’s talking to my network drive without any lag that I can see. Mail having VIP slots for your important contacts? Good. Having reminders and notes separated from mail: Even better. Notification center: Fantastic. More so than I would have thought. Having all of my programs run on ML: Brilliant.

The best part: I haven’t had the fan come on more than once since loading Mountain Lion…and that was pushing a full backup of 52Gb to a network drive. Even then, it only came on for a short time. The beachball has only put in an appearance when iTunes locked up on Airplay, and as I type, I have a movie playing in the background, Mail open, Acrobat open, Word open, and Chrome with 5 tabs. No fan (temps did jump from about 100F or so to 160F.) No lag. Just like when I was running Snow Leopard.

Is it worth it? I blew some of my royalty money from my book sales on the $20 for Mountain Lion and unlike Lion, I think I got my money’s worth. It’s a definite buy — there’s not enough bad changes to not do it, and the bits and bobs (there’s no major changes anywhere) that improve the user experience are definitely worth it.

I just fired up iSkysoft’s iMedia Converter to rip a DVD to see how the machine would handle it. The processors hit a peak of 189F and 180F respectively, with stable temps about 5 degrees cooler. This is on par with the performance on Lion. Fans a-blazin’.

 

8 July, 2012

Quick Review: Seagate GoFlex Home 2Tb

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My “big drive” — a 2Tb Western Digital that I use to store our media library went sideways on my Friday, locking up while doing a simple shift of a video from movie to TV show category (thanks, iTunes; I know you were the culprit!) I could read, but not write to the drive and the Mac Air could not repair the drive.

As a result, I bought the Seagate GoFlex Home 2Tb network drive from Best Buy for $150. It’s an all-black unit that plugs into the networking base, which then plugs into the back of your router. Setup was simple, once I realized the drive was just not going to let me set it up without the Seagate software. I hate the way these companies set up the folders, and you can rarely mess with the higher level folders. Same issue here — I’ve got all these “GoFlex Public” and “GoFlex Private” folders. I’ll live with it because there’s a benefit — you can use their GoFlex Access app on your iPad to access the information from the drive via wifi, or through the internet (I’ve yet to try this, but the next trip to the coffee shop, I’ll experiment…)

Transfer speeds from the Air were very fast, the drive has functions, so far, flawlessly, and I was able to back up almost all of the iTunes library before the old Big Drive took a dump and had to finally be reformatted. I’m going to use the former for my Time Machine backups (as well as another disk) and to hold the iTunes library for my Air when it’s plugged in at home, but depending on how well the laptop and iPad can access the media through the internet, I may eventually ditch it or use it as a secondary backup for the media library.

My main concern about the drive is the same as the main benefit: it’s on the internet. Someone could , potentially, locate and crack the drive. The other issue is the Gestapo tactics of the RIAA and MPAA, and their minions in the Department of Homeland Security. These copyright trolls have been working hard to find any excuse to limit our free and fair use of media we’ve already bought form them in the name of preventing piracy (which studies repeated show do not impact sales, save to drive them up — it’s advertisement, like a radio station.)

If it doesn’t crap out like the WD drive, it’ll definitely be worth the $150.

 

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