512 Pixels

Everyone dreams of launching their side project, but few of us manage to reach the finish line. This month, Shawn Blanc, David Sparks, Brett Terpstra, Brett Kelly and Adam King share from their experiences as professional “shippers.”

Kyle Baxter’s written a must-read piece on life and death. Blockquoting any of it would do the rest an injustice.

This week on the 512 Podcast, Myke and I discuss some follow-up, then walk through our respective workflows and the tools we use to get our Internet-based work done.

If you don’t listen to our show, this episode is a great place to jump in. I’m super happy how it turned out.

Holy cow.

Shawn’s guide is great, but he really didn’t go into the hardware that can make such a rig really sing.

Storage

If you want a lot of storage, and want it to be redundant, look no further than the NewerTech Guardian MAXimus. I’ve got several of them floating around at work and home, and the simplicity is just great. While hardware RAID shouldn’t be considered a backup, having your movies and music on two drives instead of just one is a good step in the right direction.

If you’re using a Mac to host your files, then an SSD can make your whole setup faster. I’m using a 512 GB Crucial m4 in my MacBook Pro (and home Mac mini), and simply love it. SSD prices continue to fall, but they are well worth the money today. I can’t go back to a spinning hard drive.

Don’t buy a NAS to use with iTunes. Ever.

Network

If you’re going to be slinging a lot of data around your house, you can’t beat a wired network. Gigabit switches are cheap, and play nicely with any router out there. I’ve had good luck with this one in the past.

Of course, AirPlay is a growing presence in setups like these. Apple’s Airport Extreme is the best consumer-grade wireless router on the market today, hands down. It’s easy to setup with most ISP-supplied routers.

(If you don’t spring for an AirPort, at least get something dual-band.)

AT&T’s U-Verse router is a locked-down piece of junk, though. Thankfully, this Macgasm article has tons of helpful information to get the box to play nicely with an Airport.

When in doubt, run some Ethernet. That’s my motto when it comes to these things.

The hey-I-run-old-ass-apps-too version of the Microsoft Surface here. So, is it any good?

Peter Bright at Ars Technica:

From the tablet perspective, Surface Pro is not acceptable. It gets too hot for a hand-held device, its battery life is woefully inadequate, and it’s too thick and heavy to be comfortable to hand hold for long sessions.

[…]

From a laptop perspective, Surface Pro falls down too. The traditional laptop has a stiff hinge to hold the screen at an angle of your choosing. It is hard to understate the importance of this hinge. I use laptops not just because they’re small and I want something that won’t take lots of space in my home, but because I actually need portable computing. I go to conferences, I stay in hotels, I ride trains, and take planes. My laptop’s hinge means I can comfortably use my laptop with coffee tables, dining tables, the little desks you get in hotel rooms, and wherever else I happen to be.

To be fair, the Surface RT version has this issue too, as the hardware is basically the same.

David Pierce at The Verge feels the same way:

Even a well-executed Surface still doesn’t work for me, and I’d bet it doesn’t work for most other people either. It’s really tough to use on anything but a desk, and the wide, 16:9 aspect ratio pretty severely limits its usefulness as a tablet anyway. It’s too big, too fat, and too reliant on its power cable to be a competitive tablet, and it’s too immutable to do everything a laptop needs to do. In its quest to be both, the Surface is really neither. It’s supposed to be freeing, but it just feels limiting.

PCWorld’s Jon Phillips:

The bad news: Surface Pro doesn’t run away with the Windows 8 hybrid crown. And based on your needs, it might not be the best Windows 8 portable you can buy in the neighborhood of $1000. This is a problem because Surface Pro needs to stand out as a kick-ass reference design, and not be just another interesting-but-imperfect hardware option for anyone taking the Windows 8 plunge.

Microsoft is Microsoft, damn it! It owns Windows. Its war chest is huge. If it can’t conceive, manufacture, and market the hands-down best Windows 8 hybrid in the world, it’s got unfinished business.

Turns out Microsoft’s “no compromises” device is still full of compromises. Shocker.

Also shocking? The boys over at TechCrunch are posting silly things:

The Surface isn’t supposed to be a tablet you drop on the coffee table and use when you want to look up something on IMDB. It’s a powerful computer with enough speed and graphics chops to give any other manufacturer’s laptop a run for its money. Previous Windows tablets have been hampered by a strange and messy amalgam of interfaces, pen input, and a focus on the slate form factor. This device, on the other hand, is a real hybrid – a laptop that is also a tablet that is also a media consumption device. You will use it just like you use a laptop whereas, by definition, the hobbled RT version of the Surface is meant to be used as a tablet.

Market Watch:

Dell Inc. today announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which Michael Dell, Dell’s Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, in partnership with global technology investment firm Silver Lake, will acquire Dell.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell stockholders will receive $13.65 in cash for each share of Dell common stock they hold, in a transaction valued at approximately $24.4 billion. The price represents a premium of 25 percent over Dell’s closing share price of $10.88 on Jan. 11, 2013, the last trading day before rumors of a possible going-private transaction were first published; a premium of approximately 35 percent over Dell’s enterprise value as of Jan. 11, 2013; and a premium of approximately 37 percent over the average closing share price during the previous 90 calendar days ending Jan. 11, 2013. The buyers will acquire for cash all of the outstanding shares of Dell not held by Mr. Dell and certain other members of management.

Karma’s a bitch.

Did you know that 49% of employees in 100–999 person companies are using consumer cloud services to store and synchronize their business data?

It’s because the consumer cloud is easy and fast. But it’s not always secure enough for your business’ intellectual property. It certainly doesn’t meet Corporate’s policies for auditing and data retention. It’s simply not the cloud you’re looking for.

Igloo is built in the enterprise cloud. We’re made for business, but still fast and easy to use. In fact, we have a full suite of social tools, like blogs, built around secure document management, collaboration and version control. (We have all the security acronyms you need. Really.)

It’s time you try Igloo (and check out our fancy new form, too.) Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Here’s what’s new, besides the security goodies:

• Caching Server to speed up download of software distributed by Apple through the Mac App Store.
• Time Machine service monitoring of which computers have backed up, when they last backed up and size of backup.
• Wiki Server support for MacBook Pro with Retina displays.
• Fix for deleting apps uploaded to Profile Manager.
• Ability to use Active Directory groups within Profile Manager.
• Centralized Certificate management interface.
• Fix for setup failures due to an SSL error.
• Fixes for upgrading from Lion Server.

“OS X Server” sits on top of OS X Mountain Lion, and runs just $20 in the Mac App Store.

Aaaaand I’m already bored with this news.

Pardon the self-link, but this was me, back in July:

This website isn’t my full-time job, but it likes to think that it is.

Currently, I’m under the gun with some pretty big pressures at work. So much so, that 512 has been collecting dust for a couple of weeks. It’s frustrating being so busy I don’t have time to read what’s clogging up my RSS and Instapaper accounts or write what’s bouncing around my head. I have to remember that my day job pays the bills, not this, so if things are little quiet for the coming weeks, please forgive me.

If it weren’t for all of the clinking and the graph I would need to use to tell time on it, this clock would be on my desk.