I wrote a download validator

Last night I whipped up a first version of Valium. It's an automatic file validator to ensure downloaded files haven't been tampered with. This is my first real OS X program, although most of it should work on Windows too. Fun!

Locking a Mac with the Keyboard

The default keyboard shortcut uses the eject or power buttons, neither of which is on my Kinesis keyboard. http://hpmalte.blogspot.com/2012/01/keyboard-shortcut-to-lock-screen-in-os.html has a good alternate method which worked like a charm!

Auto-clicker for OSX

I just bought a macbook pro and needed a break reminder and auto-clicker. I used to used RSI Guard which is a general purpose RSI tool with auto-clicking, break reminders and more. I didn't find an all in one solution for mac.

For break reminders, I'm trying out http://www.dejal.com/timeout/images/. It looks ok although I wish it lived in the tray instead of as a running program which shows up in apple + tab.

I found the auto-clicker http://dwellclick.com/. Sure enough it's more beautiful and slicker that the auto-click feature in RSI Guard. Sigh. Why don't windows developers make beautiful software?

Genie Backup Software

For years I've been looking for good backup software for windows. To me, "good" means as close as possible to Time Machine on OSX. Specifically:

1. Requires no interaction.
2. Flexible about running a backup. It knows that the backup drive will come and go and the computer won't always be on or idle at the same time every day and runs the backup when the drive is present and the machine is idle. Incremental backup is helpful for this, but not necessary.
3. If it is going to run when the system isn't idle, it mustn't kill performance for me.
4. Makes it easy to back up and restore the whole computer.
5. Backs up meta data like file creation times.
6. Backs up and restores in a sane amount of time.

I've used various versions of Norton Ghost which has been the best I could find but didn't meet all the criteria. I also tried one of the recent Acronis programs which was pretty similar.

A question on superuser.com pointed me at the Genie tools. I bought Timeline Pro 2012 and I've tried it out for a couple of months. It beats Ghost in some categories and loses in others. Annoyingly, there are a whole bunch of stupid easy things that they do badly. I just hit a couple more of these and got so aggravated I had to write a post about it.

Here's my list of problems with Genie Timeline Pro 2012 and the company's site:

1. Confusing products. There are 4 similar variants of the product and it's hard to figure out which to buy since they only compare 2 at a time in various pages on their site.
2. The process to select what to back up sucks. It's optimized for only backing up some kinds of docs. Dumb. The default should be to back up the whole drive/computer. Figuring out how to do that is way too confusing. It's also unclear if it'll make duplicate back ups when selecting certain file types + whole computer. Eventually support me that I should only select disaster recovery and that will get everything.
3. The initial backup of less than 500GB of data took days.
4. Trying to restore the full computer backup took over 24 hours. At that point I gave up and killed it.
5. I happened to look at their blog post for the end of 2012. It's negative, badly written, and has typos. (The irony of me complaining about their negativity in a negative post of my own isn't lost on me.)
6. The order process sent me 3 emails. First I got 2 slightly different receipts. No key. I started signing up for an account to log into the site in the hopes of finding my key there when a 3rd email with the key showed up.

Since I hate to be (only) a hater, on the upside:

1. Once it does the big initial backup, it only does incrementals, which are very fast.
2. It didn't hurt performance much while running incrementals.
3. The UI is nice and clean.
4. It doesn't have a temper tantrum when I disconnect the backup drive. (Ghost pops up annoying notifications that the drive is missing.)
5. There's a free trial.
6. The restore tool is nice if you ignore it's speed: it's easy to pick what to restore and it restores file creation time.

Phew, I feel better having gotten that off my chest. Happy new year!!

The Up Mouse!

I'm developing a new ergonomic mouse where you click by lifting your fingers. Check it out and pass along the word to anyone you know who has pain from using their mouse!

The Up Mouse Submitted to Kickstarter

I've been working on the Kickstarter campaign for my Up Mouse idea for a while. Today I finally did the last pass at editing the video and was all ready to make the campaign live and then learned that Kickstarter moderates them. Hopefully it won't take long!

Innovation

I just read an obscenely long New Yorker article about Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, etc. Here are some quotes which really resonate with me:


Peter Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and held it up. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the Apollo space program.

The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn’t created enough jobs, and it hasn’t produced revolutionary improvements in manufacturing and productivity. The creation of virtual worlds turns out to be no substitute for advances in the physical world. “The Internet—I think it’s a net plus, but not a big one,” he said. “Apple is an innovative company, but I think it’s mostly a design innovator.” Twitter has a lot of users, but it doesn’t employ that many Americans: “Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades."

...America—the country that invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer—has lost its belief in the future. Thiel thinks that Americans who are beguiled by mere gadgetry have forgotten how expansive technological change can be.


...without a new technology revolution, globalization’s discontents would lead to increased conflict and, perhaps, a worldwide conflagration.

The theory of an innovation gap as the main cause of economic decline has a lot of explanatory power, but it’s far from axiomatic. Trains and planes have scarcely improved since the seventies, and neither have median wages. What is the exact relation between the two? The middle class has eroded during the same years when the productivity of American workers has increased. (“I don’t believe the productivity numbers,” Thiel said flatly, defying reams of evidence. “We tend to just measure input, not output.”) Why, then, should breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence reverse this trend? “Yes, a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs, as you need fewer workers to do the same things,” Thiel said. “And it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things. There would be social-dislocation problems, but I don’t think those are the ones we’ve been having. We’ve had a globalization problem.”