I don’t use a whole lot of photo services, but did want the ability to sent multiple photos to multiple services at once with one fell swoop. The Pixelpipe app for the Pre does just that. First I set up an account on their site, and then add pipes. Pipes are connections to other other sites and services where you’d like to send your photos. For me, that just means Flickr, Facebook, and my blog (the “latest mobile photo” section in the upper right). If you’re looking for services beyond what I use, chances are Pixelpipe provides support for it. They’ve got a GIANT list of blogging and photo platforms to add pipes from. So once I’ve added my pipes and fired up the application, I can select multiple photos to send out to all my pipes, or just pick and choose which pipes I want to send the current set of photos to. I can then add a title and/or caption, hit send, and the images move their way through the pipes around the internets to all the places I’ve specified. It’s as easy as that.

So let’s say you don’t have a Palm Pre to install the app onto… no worries, they have tools for a large number of platforms (iPhone, Android, Nokia, IM, Windows, Linux, Mac). I’ve been really happy with this little app, and it’s taken a multiple step, multiple app process down to one simple app.

My Previous Solution
Before getting into what system I ended up with, I’ll got into a little detail on how I was backing things up before. First, what I back up is probably pretty common. I keep recent copies of my music, photos, and documents, as well as my e-mail in-boxes up in the cloud. I do this with a great little app called Alway Sync and Amazon S3. I set up three profiles in Alway Sync, one for documents, one for music and photos, and a third for email. I should probably clarify that my music collection is currently living on a separate machine serving music to all the computers in the house. That small piece was a bit of a sticking point for some solutions that I’ll outline below. Alway Sync watches certain directories (or mapped drives) for changes and then uploads those changes to my S3 account on a weekly basis. This solution has been working well for the past two or so years, and would probably have continued to work minus one small thing… price. Turns out I added too much stuff, and S3 charges by storage and transfer. Constantly adding to my music library, and taking photos (many times very large images saved in RAW format) has bumped up the storage I need to a level where it’s cheaper to go with another provider. Amazon S3 works great, but after getting my invoice for S3 last month, I decided to see if there was anything out there that was a little less expensive and provided the same level of backup and storage. Fortunately, I was able to find something, that worked just as well, and maybe even a little better than my previous solution.

Crashplan (my choice)
Crashplan is the service I ultimately decided to use. Feature wise, it was very close to  many of the other services I evaluated, but had a few things that put it over the top. Crashplan has a nice multi-platform application that doesn’t seem to be a resource hog. It also seems to give me a bit more control of the directories that I want to upload. It backs up your home directory by default, and lets you pick any other directories you want to add to that. The one thing that Crashplan doesn’t allow (outside of a somewhat messy hack) is the ability to select a mapped drive for backup. Initially I thought this would be a deal-killer, and ultimately ended up being the one piece missing from from all the other solutions I tried. It turns out I just wasn’t looking in the right place. Crashplan offers two types of backup plans. Once is individual – one computer, the other is a family plan that provides backup for several computers. With the family option, I didn’t need to figure out a way to back up the mapped drive from my primary machine, I could just set up an instance of Crashplan on the media server itself, as well as any other computer in the house. Storage-wise, Crashplan provides unlimited space, and doesn’t charge for throughput like S3 does. And pricing for Chashplan isn’t really any higher than any of the other solutions I looked at, and more importantly, it costs less per month than what I was paying for all my data on Amazon S3. Another nice feature in Crashplan in addition to backing up data to their servers, is the ability to backup to another computer somewhere else. So if you’re running the Crashplan app, and I’m running the Chrasplan app, we can select and approve each other’s machines as backup locations for the other (I’m not taking advantage of that feature, but it’s nice to have as an option). All those things put together made the choice easy.

Carbonite
Carbonite Backup is actually one of the first backup solutions I tried. They advertise on TWiT regularly, so I figured I’d give them a try. Features and price are just about the same as the other solutions I tried. They charge a little under $5/month, and have unlimited storage space. Where Carbonite fell a little short for my needs was in their software. The backup application seemed a little clunky, and as I mentioned above, didn’t give me the option to backup a mapped drive. They also don’t offer the family plan that Crashplan offers. Also, I felt their the software was a bit intrusive. It really gets it tentacles into your OS. It adds a little colored dot to folder icons in Windows showing the status of the update. Some people may thing this is a feature, but to me it took over a little bit too much of the OS. I guess I want the backup program to do it’s thing, and get out of the way. Carbonite looks to be a good solution, and seems to get good reviews around the ‘net, but it just didn’t quite work out for my needs.

BackBlaze
BackBlaze is very similar to Carbonite in terms of features and price. The service is $5/month for unlimited storage. It also does not back up mapped drives or network storage. They do at least provide an option for multiple computers, but they charge an additional $5/month for each computer. The other thing about BackBlaze (similar to Carbonite) that isn’t quite right for my purposes is the software. The software by default determines what it’s going to backup, and you have to go through and deselect the things you want removed. Again, this could be seen as a feature, it’s quick and easy right out of the box, but I didn’t want to deal with digging through the default directories. I think BackBlaze looks to be a good solution, just not for me. I’ve actually recommended BackBlaze to a couple people already.

Mozy
Mozy is the last solution on my list, and probably my least favorite. Mozy offers the same song and dance on price and features, $4.95/month for unlimited storage. Their software is OK, really not any better or worse than the others I tested. They are also lacking a multiple computer solution, or an option for network storage. Mozy was looking promising until I started reading some reviews. Apparently several people have had issues with restoring data from Mozy. One would think the restore (heaven forbid you need it) is the most important part of backing up your data. After reading these review, I gave up on exploring Mozy as a backup solution.

Good: WebOS
In one sentence: WebOS is great! I am extremely happy with the OS running on the Palm Pre. It is elegant, well thought out, and very easy to use. I’m a big fan of the multitasking, or the “cards” metaphor that it uses. You open an app by touching it, then simply swipe up and throw the card away to close it. The UI is really different than anything else out there at the moment. I found myself taking advantage of the the multitasking right out of the box when setting up my email accounts. It was nice to be able to have the mail application running as well as multiple web “cards” open to look up server addresses. The gestures have become ingrained, and I find myself trying to use them when my iPod touch before realizing that that they’re not going to do anything. The shining star of the Palm Pre is definitely WebOS. If you haven’t tried it out, go visit a Sprint store and give it a spin. There are a lot of nice little touches built in that are way too numerous to mention here, but WebOS is definitely a great OS to work with.

Good: Hardware
Before I bought the Pre, I‘d seen quite a few photos and videos of the device, but you really don’t get a sense of how sleek it is until you hold it in your hand. It fits really well in your hand, and has a nice heft to it. The screen is a nice size, and the touch screen responds really well. The slide-out keyboard (another selling factor for me) works really well. I’m coming from a Treo 755p to this device, so I’m using to having a physical keyboard. The Pre is a bit smaller than the Treo, but I had no problem getting used to it very quickly. I like that there is a physical keyboard that I can slide out when I need it, but can leave it folded in when I’m just interacting with the touch screen alone.

Good: Browser
Apple set the bar very high for a mobile browser with the iPhone. Palm has taken most of the things that make Mobile Safari great and put them into the Pre. If you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPod Touch browser, you know what I’m talking about. Getting a full desktop browser feeling into the palm of your hand is probably one of the nicest features of the phone.

Good: Notification Bar
I honestly think this is one of my favorite parts of WebOS. When you get a notification for something, such as an email, or a text message, they show up really elegantly at the bottom of the screen in the notification bar. When they first appear, they pop up with a one-line description in the lower portion of the screen, keeping whatever application you have open. You can then touch it to make it larger (see more information about the notification), or you can swipe it away and go on with whatever you’re doing. If you get multiple notifications, they pile up in the lower portion of your screen, and show simply as tiny icons indication their type, allowing you to select later to go into the actual app, or swipe them away and ignore them. The notifications grab your attention, but don’t interrupt what you’re currently working on.

Good: Synergy
Synergy is the name that Palm gave their pull-everything-together-from-the-cloud-into-the-phone system. In a nutshell, what it does is pull contacts from various locations around the net (google contacts, Facebook, outlook, etc) and merges them together into the address book on the device. It sees that you have a Facebook friend named John Smith, and a Google contact named Jonathan Smith that share an email address. It assume they’re the same person, and makes one contact entry for them pulling all the contact data from either source. If that data changes, either on the device, or in the cloud, your phone is updated accordingly. This also works with the calendar, pulling all your calendars into one place, yet allowing your to split them up or view whichever you’re currently working on (i.e. home/work/holidays). It’s a really nice way to bring everything into one place, and keep it up to date. One area where it could improve (and I presume it will get added later) is more sources for data. Currently the Pre works with Google (docs/calendar/talk), Facebook, Microsoft Exchange, and AIM. I’d like to be able to hook in Yahoo and Microsoft (Hotmail/Messenger) as well, but I’m willing to bet that’s coming soon.

Good: Touchstone
Technically this isn’t part of the phone. It’s an accessory that you have to buy extra, but it is totally handy. The Touchstone is an induction charger for the Pre. So, you slap on a special back (battery cover), and drop the phone onto the magnetic touchstone, and it charges it for you. No messing with cables, just drop it on and charge. Even though it’s a great addition to the phone, I’d drop it in the “Bad” category for the high price tag. Luckily I had a gift card, so it wasn’t as painful of a purchase as it could have been. Ssuper-handy… but super-pricey.

Good: Quickies

• Fast!
• Screen is beautiful!
• GPS and TeleNav (turn by turn navigation)
• Email client is great!
• WiFi/Cell data switching works well (FAST)
• Good clear 3 mega-pixel camera (see photos from the Pre in my mobile gallery)

Bad: Battery
The Pre battery life ain’t that great. It isn’t unusable, but it’s not wonderful. I am probably a heavy user, and it gets me through the day… but just barely. The battery life is a tad bit worse than my Treo 755p (which wasn’t that great either). It gets me through the day, and I guess that’s good. There is definitely room for improvement (c’mon firmware update!!).

Bad: Note Sync
This one is really easy… notes don’t sync. You’d think with all the great synergy mumbo jumbo going on there would be some way I could enter notes (hello google notes?) without typing them manually into the phone.

Bad: Apps
The apps aren’t really that bad, in fact the apps currently available in the App Catalog are actually pretty good (woo hoo Evernote!). It’s the low number of apps that is bad. Again, the phone is young, and they haven’t opened up the SDK yet. I just need to have a little patience and wait a little longer. Palm has said the SDK will be released by the end of summer, so that will hopefully open the floodgates on the App Catalog.
UPDATE: The SDK has now been released – new apps added to catalog “sometime this fall.”

Bad: Bluetooth
There is bluetooth on the phone, but it can only be used for audio at the moment. It is stereo, and it does work with my bluetooth headset, but I’d really like to be able to transfer files with it… like I’ve been able to do with every single phone I’ve ever owned. This is nothing a firmware update can’t fix – the capability is there, it just need to be pulled out in the OS.

Bad: Video/Audio Player
The video and audio players do what they’re supposed to do, but are missing some polish in some certain areas. First of all, they don’t remember where you left off when playing media. I listen to a lot of podcasts (which the Pre can’t download BTW), and don’t want to have to fast forward (there is no scrub bar) to the place I left off in an hour long podcast. It is also missing a way to delete audio from the device from inside either player. I’d like to be able to remove a file without having to plug the phone into a computer. I think (hope) some of these features will come, but probably don’t use these apps as much as I would if they were there. I still carry around an iPod Nano when I want to listen to music of podcasts.

Bad: Quickies

• Can’t search email messages
• No data tethering
• The calendar app is a bit sluggish

Everything considered, I think the Palm Pre is a great phone. Is it an iPhone killer? I don’t think so, but I do believe it raises the smart phone bar, and does a good number of things better than the iPhone. I think any sort of real competition is good, and the Pre is the first phone that has really presented a challenge. There are some areas that need a bit more polish, but fortunately most of them should be able to be taken care of with a firmware update. It’s really just a matter of Palm actually doing it, and bringing the Pre up to the level it can easily be. I think many of the items in my “Bad” category can be chalked up to rushing the device out the door. Like I mentioned in my last Pre post, it was do or die for Palm with this device. They couldn’t afford to wait any longer to get it out, and some things may have suffered a bit because of that. So did Palm hit a home run with the Pre? I think they came pretty close, and time will tell as the device evolves and moves forward.

Book Army is a new site that focuses more on the recommendation feature, and less on the cataloging/tracking features that I use in LibraryThing. It is much closer to a Last.fm type service in that it looks at your likes, and suggests other books based on other people who like the same books. I spent a little while entering ratings on the books that I had been tracking in LibraryThing the past few years to see what I’d get back. There were a few good books that came back in my results – more than what I was getting from LibraryThing. I’m sure the service will get better over time, as the number of users goes up, and as I rate more books on the service. The things I like about Book Army recommendations is that it provides reasoning for a suggest book (you may like book X because you enjoyed books X, Y, and Z). The other nice feature is you can correct suggestions. If a book is suggested that looks incorrect for whatever reason, you can tell Book Army, that it was a bad suggestion to help it get even better data about your reading tastes. Since this service is new, the “Book Army” is still being recruited. We’ll see if recommendations improve as the size of the army increases. Who knows, maybe my tastes are just so eclectic (it certainly isn’t working for me in Netflix) that it’s hard to determine what I enjoy.

Asus Eee Keyboard [images via TechwareLabs.com

ASUS Press Release – Eee Keyboard
Being the first multi-media center enabled by ultra wideband HDMI, the Eee Keyboard is not only a fully-functional PC; it also serves as a hub that wirelessly connects all multimedia devices to utilize any monitor or TV as a viewing platform.

More info and photos:

• Asus releases EeePC Keyboard with Integrated Screen @ CES
  [TechWareLabs.com]
• Eee – that’s a lovely keyboard, pet!
  [beyondstandards.com]
• ASUS to reveal ‘Eee Keyboard’ with a 5-inch touchscreen and 32GB SSD
  [aving.net]
• Eee Keyboard: An Entire Touchscreen Home Theater PC
  [gizmodo.com]
• Cruchgear hand-on video of the keyboard in action

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Evernote allows you to throw just about any sort of information you’ve got on your computer up into the cloud to retrieve it whenever it is needed. There are desktop apps for just about every platform. There are web clippers for just about every browser. There are even cell phone apps that let you send information from the road. Whatever it is you capture, it all gets synced to your Evernote account. So, I can log into the website or pull up the Evernote app to get anything and everything I’ve added. Once the info is up there, you can tag it and organize it however you ‘d like. It also does text recognition on images you upload, so everything is searchable. Given my back and fourth situation, Evernote really helps me keep track of what’s goign on.

Given everything above, I don’t think we’ll be buying one of these. My wish came true that I mentioned at the enf of the Entertainment PC Software post. A plugin for Meedio was created to deal with Netflix. As I’ve mentioned before, we have an Entertainment PC that controls all of our media (music/video/tv/etc.). Meedio is the application we use for the main interface on that computer. An incredible plugin author (UFGrayMatter) created one that can handle all aspects of Netflix. The plugin is called MeeFlix, and works really well. We’re able to manage our Netflix Queue, and also view any of the Watch Now streaming movies right within the (remote control friendly) Meedio interface on our TV. So now our Entertainment PC does the same thing as this new Netflix Roku box and doesn’t cost $100.

Video of MeeFlix in action

The setup was pretty straight-forward. It installed like a standard DVD drive, though it was a little bit longer than most. I guess they needed to make room for those extra lasers. Once the drive was functioning, it was just a matter of getting the software to work correctly. This turned out to be more of a headache than I thought. If you don’t know anything about the new HD disc formats, they are loaded down with DRM. If you’re even thinking about playing them, you have to have a a video card AND monitor that can handle HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). According to the documentation on both my video card, (ATI Radeon HD 2400) and TV (Magnavox 37MF337B), they are HDCP compliant. Um… the new drive though differently.

The other key to this whole setup was software used to play HD content. I had been using Cyberlink PowerDVD as my DVD player in the entertainment computer, so a simple update to the newest version of that software was supposedly all I needed. Again, I was wrong. So, everything was hooked up, the software was upgraded, it’s time to fire up my Blu-ray copy of Planet Earth (thanks Netflix!), and see what happens. Once the disc is inserted, PowerDVD comes up and shows the FBI warning in beautiful HD quality, then gives me an HDCP error and says it cannot play… lovely! There is really no reason why this shouldn’t work. The (HDCP compliant) hardware and software a totally capable of playing a Blu-ray disc. Once again DRM ruins the day. I started digging around the web for fixes, and didn’t really come up with anything. What I did run across was a lovely little application called SlySoft AnyDVD that totally removed the evil DRM bit when playing HD content. I downloaded their demo and gave it a try. Sure enough, the disc played just fine. I didn’t want to have to hack this for it to work. After a little more digging, I found another update/patch for PowerDVD, that wasn’t mentioned anywhere other than a small area of their site and figured, what have I got to lose. After installing that, and disabling AnyDVD, it finally worked. It shouldn’t be this hard!

I guess the morale of the story is DRM SUCKS! It really just puts up barriers for people who want to use the technology legitimately. I’m not trying to rip HD content, I’m not trying to play illegal content from the Internet. All I wanted to do is play a Blu-ray disc on a computer and player that should be able to play it. I was finally able to get to that point (after quite a headache). And at least it’s good to know that AnyDVD is there if you need it.

It is missing a few things though. I’d like to be able to hook up to Skype with it, but there aren’t that many IM apps that do that now, so it isn’t that big of a deal. It is also missing message encryption which is built in for Adium, and available as a plugin for Pidgin. Digsby is still in beta though and at the frantic speed they’re adding features, I can only hope that those aren’t too far away. I haven’t totally uninstalled Pidgin or
Adium, but I find myself using Digsby for longer periods at a time. If those few extra features get thrown in, there isn’t much holding me back from going 100% Digsby.

Update:
This article was written before Digsby filled thier application with crap-ware. See this recent article from Lifehacker: Digsby Joins the Dark Side, Uses Your PC to Make Money. I get that a company needs to make money, but this is pretty shady. It’s a shame too since Digsby was such a great tool. If you took my advice, and installed Digsby on your machine, it’s probably time to uninstall and find another IM client.

The first thing you notice when you pull up Hulu.com is the slick clean interface. It is easy to navigate and easy to find shows to watch. Content is the next thing you notice. They’ve got a lot of stuff up there. Not only do you have content from NBC and News Corp. (Fox), also included is Sony, MGM, and many of their sub-brands like Sci-Fi, Bravo, USA, etc. There is definitely not a lack of things to watch. I do have some questions on why they chop up seasons or chose what shows and seasons get posted. Like for the show 24 (which I don’t watch), they start with Season 1 Episodes 1-5, then they jump to season 6. From what I know about that show, you need to follow it pretty closely from episode to episode, so jumping over 5 seasons doesn’t really make sense to me. Another example of this is the show Chuck, why are you starting with episode 5? How tough would it be to start at the beginning? That show hasn’t even been on that long! Maybe this is something they’re working on. I don’t know how things work inside the TV biz, but if I get hooked on 24 and don’t have the shows in between, where do you think I might get them (*cough* P2P *cough*)? Another thing that is somewhat random about the content selection in Hulu is when exactly a new show comes to the site. From what I have seen it is kind of random when a show that aired last night on NBC can be watched on Hulu. That, along with having irregular partial seasons makes it kind of tough to get into a TV series. Maybe that’s what they’re going for with Hulu. Doing that doesn’t make it that much different from standard TV, but maybe that’s what they’re going for. “We’ll hook ‘em with Hulu and then they’ll have to come back to NBC to watch the next show in the series… mwah ha ha ha ha!”

So, content selection aside, the player interface is pretty nice. It is a flash video player so it should be cross platform. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve read it even works on Linux. The interface is intuitive and has some nice features. It does full-screen, pop-up, or in-browser viewing modes and has a little “lower lights” button that dims the rest of the page if you decided to watch it in the standard window. They even allow embedding of the video into your own website ala YouTube. In fact before the private beta was over, you could access pretty much ever video on the site from openhulu.com which was a collection of every video embedded. The video quality is pretty good. It’s better than your typical YouTube video. There is a little fuzziness or graininess at full-screen, but all in all, the quality is pretty high.

There are commercials in Hulu videos (you knew there would be). There is typically an intro “brought to you by” commercial for a few seconds when you start a video, and depending on the show, there are a couple commercials dropped throughout the video. You can skip around the show, but cannot skip a commercial break. They tell you how long a break will be with a counter at the top of the video window (letting you know how long you have to visit the kitchen). I think it definitely less obtrusive than a regular TV commercial. It sure takes up less time in a typical TV episode vs. watching it on broadcast TV.

Overall, Hulu is much better than I expected. There are still some things that get me though. The content isn’t portable. It is essentially streaming to me over the internet as I watch it. With iTunes, I could take the shows with me on an iPod or on a laptop if I didn’t have an internet connection. Hulu ties me to my internet connected computer screen. I think that is probably the biggest thing that prevents this from really taking off right now. It’s a paradigm switch to go from comfy living room setup to sitting at a computer desk, or even huddling around a laptop. I’m one of the rare people who have a computer controlling my TV, and I still haven’t pulled up Hulu on the big screen yet. I think that the reason I haven’t done that yet is there isn’t a slick remote-controllable interface for it yet. Navigating the web on a TV is tough. For this to become really on-demand TV it needs to be easy. We need some sort of Hulu set-top-box or something. So, Hulu is good… but there is definitely room for improvement. At the very least, the networks are finally seeing that people want their shows on their schedule, online, and in a convenient way. Hulu does fit that need. But how far does it go? I think most people download content illegally because it is available and easier to do it that way. Once getting legitimate content becomes easier, the need to download it illegally disappears. I think people would even be willing to pay for that content (the way iTunes does it). So I think Hulu does some of these things, but also fails at some of them, and convenience is a fine line. This effort by NBC and News Corp. is definitely a step in the right direction, and is way better than what I (and many) were expecting, but they still have a little further to go.