It is that time of the year again. As I emerge from my writer’s block (I have not blogged for a year- not counting the reproduction of my Pangong post in Jan 11) I have this strong desire to de-clutter & organize all over again. Over the past year I have acquired a ton more gadgets, been getting fair doses of nature’s fix through wildlife outings and been leaving a trail of Gigabytes accumulated over various mediums for consumption on a variety of screens. The whole attraction of what the Mac stands for in my mind – to simplify clutter and to do it ably and efficiently sometime gets challenged with the sheer amount of content explosion in the digital medium I seem to get myself into lately these days.
My contribution to Apple's market value - all in the name of Convergence - gadgets in various screen sizes - all geared for multimedia of all kinds - Audio, Video, Ebooks, digital magazines, pictures. Pictured L to R - 20" iMac, Magic Mouse, 16Gb iPhone 3G, 32Gb 3G iPad1, 13" Macbook Pro, iPhone4. 500Gb Lacie & 1TB WD hard drives behind iMac. Another 1TB WD drive behind the Macbook.
After cleaning my audio collection and digitizing my home DVD concert collection (in 2009), I have to deal with other mediums now – primarily photographs taken from every other week. The rest are still manageable – eBooks, digital Magazines, the latest applications. Movies and gripping TV serials from across the pond.
Will be quite the feat when I get through with this. Will this be the year I get on a cloud (Mobile Me)? or invest in a RAID backup setup? Will I organize all my photos with Aperture? How far back will I need to go for geotagging? The task of simplifying seems that much more daunting as it requires clarity with respect to organization!
While I have managed digital Convergence in the last few years – most of the clean audio and video content stored in a few hard drives, streamed over Wifi, controlled via the “Remote” app on iphones and the iPAD and played on the home theater through the Apple TV. How far can I extend this to other mediums? I hope to write about more Use Cases soon on my digital Convergence at home. Stay tuned.
So here’s the thing.
You’ve gotta first figure out a couple of things.
1. Which is your primary machine
2. How much data will you generate each month
3. Multiply that into 2. One will be an online backup. Time Machine. Second will be Carbon Copy Cloner.
4. All good pics should be uploaded to Mobile Me’s Gallery. You can upload hi res versions there, so that acts like a Backup / Viewer in the cloud
5. Where will you view Video ? Apple TV ? iPad ? iMac ? Put everything in a 2 TB Disk connected directly to your Mac. Using Airplay view on all 3.
6. Backing up on Raid is a long term project. Use Raid with Hot Swappable drives.
7. Get yourself a faster wifi connection and use an Apple Express to increase range within the house with 802.11 N
My $ 0.02
Valid points Gaf. Just signed up for Mobile Me. Let me see about getting Aperture too. Will talk soon.