But when I wanted to transfer ma CD library to a more user-friendly form (did you notice that the CD player has disappeared from the new cars, like the dinosaur audio tape player?), I came to consider that the MP3 recording format has a slight issue for the audiophile (even the amateur): It is a compressed data format, that is reducing audio quality (supposedly an inaudible reduction though). Oh! You can choose the compression ratio (or rather the more imprecise data flow rate in kbps). But I’m still convinced that this a way to inelegantly balance between an unsavory compression and the space used on the storage media.

While it is a pity admitting that after the near-Earth-shaking launch of a CD-A able to faithfully record (within limits sets by 16 bits and 44kHz), here we are back to state where we are stuck with a technical solution invented to solve the problem of many years ago when thumb drives were so small… Today, any recording storage you will find (USB thumb drives, MP3 players, partable discs, smartphnones, etc.) contains so many gigabytes of space that you can store as many albums you’d like to.

So, why not come back to the original quality? This is exactly the proposition from the FLAC recording format. It reduces the original size by 50% (sometimes a little more), via a lossless compression algorithme wich is faithful to the original. Moreover, except some prehistoric MP3 players of dubious origin, no reasonable MP3 players will rejct FLAC files (some other lossless recording formats exist but they less well globally accepted; And we still want the ease of use when got used to wiht MP3).

FLAC: Try it once, keep for life!

For years, I used Google authenticator applet on iOS. I knew that it would be a pain if my phone stopped working (or if I replaced it). The only reason I was OK with this, was that I had setup Google authenticator on two phones (I happen to have one for business and one for personal use – don’t ask why…)

Actually, replacing one of these smartphones pushed me into testing Authy as a replacement for Google. And I should have done this earlier. There is no way I will switch back to Google after this.

Authy provides:

• A cute user interface
• Shared accounts between several phones (and a fast way to switch from one old phone to a new one)
• All the needed 2FA bells and whistles (compatible with the TOTP standard)

In thirty/forty minutes, I recreated all the factors for my accounts (e.g. Google, Outlook, Evernote, Dropbox, or even Ubisoft). And this was needed because I could not transfer this knowledge from the old phone to the new (even though I had both phone working in front of me). But in three/four minutes I could extend it to my other phone. So, any time I need to replace a phone, I can extend/transfer in a matter of minutes, independently of the number of web sites are included in Authy.

I feel much safer. What would have been happening if I had lost/broken my phone with the codes from Google Authenticator? (graceful degradation, no risk of losing access to many web sites at a time in case of a single failure).

I feel much more positive about extending my use of 2FA/two-factor-authentication to  much more web sites because of the added ease of use (longer-term commitment).

Furthermore, Authy is available for several Operating Systems:

• iOS
• Android
• Windows
• Google Chrome

Go and install it!

1. Backups
2. Synchronization between several machines (several PC and several iPhone)

CrashPlan easily provided the backup feature despite a high volume of photo files (more than 2 TB as of today), but was relatively poor interms of synchronization. So, it was time to spend some energy defining the whole need/specification and finding a true solution.

Specification

For backup, my requirements have long been defined:

1. At least three backup copies
2. At least two different technologies (e.g; not to rely only on optical drives or hard drives)
3. At least one off-site location (to be protected against theft, fire hazards, etc., think off-site, or cloud, or external/bank safe box)

For synchronization, previous use of DropBox and Evernote (on small volumes) allowed me to confirm the precise needs I had:

1. Real-time sharing of some critical files with daily updates (as for Evernote note files, or the database for my password management application, etc.)
2. Encryption of all comms (I don’t want to leak my passwords or my bank account data).

Solution

I was clearly influenced by several factors in my choice, and I will try and make these explicit (your solution may not be strictly identical to mine). So, let’s start by what I chose to deploy.

A smal file server (a Synology DS413j) at my home. It hosts 4 hard drives of 3 TB (initially, four Western Digital RED) in SHR/RAID 5 mode for a total capacity of 6 TB.

The large capacity was defintely dictated by the the need to host a large multimedia server and a large quantity of digital photos (Today, we have altogether much more than 100.000 pictures on this server).

The choice of RAID 5 was a very early one because of its optimum balance between overall dedundancy (you can loose one hard drive with no data loss) and cost (you loose less data to redundancy than in other two-disk RAID configurations). The Synology SHR technology is even better because is allows disks with different capacities (the two smaller ones define the maximum capacity. So, you’d better have one 500 GB with three 4 TB bigger ones; It would be a waste) and it accepts (like all RAIDs) to replace one failed drive with a new one (during the rebuilding of RAID/SHR, you have no more data protection but this is temporairy – and you can keep working in paralle).

Going to Synology was even more justified by a single important item rarely listed in RAID sevrer comparisons: The software offering is specially attractive at Synology. DSM (Synology OS) hosts  “packages” for many applications. The complements I installed (see below) are provided as ready-to-use instalations and can be easy to install even if you have minimal understanding of the inner workings of a server.

So, I was able to deploy a two-stage solution:

1. PC-to-Synology synchronization (three PC via Cloud Station Server)
2. Synology-to-Amazon synchronization (Amazon Cloud Drive through Cloud Sync)

Cloud Station Server and Cloud Sync are two applications from Synology which are installed in about 5-6 minutes (including download time) from the  “Packages Center” of Synology DSM.

If we start looking at the synchronization between PC (or iPhone) and Synology, merely opening the Cloud Station Server in the list below (in the management interface of my Synology DS413j DSM) leads us directly to a menu allowing to download the Windows application (or iPhone app) to install before starting synchronizations between PC and Synology cloud server.

A few clicks and it’s done. Nothing could be simpler. a few minutes and synchronization is starting. It runs in background (it does not hinder normal PC activity) and you will only notice the new change to the file icons showing that it is already synched ot the cloud (see examples below) or that it is still waiting for synchronization (blue tag).

At this point, PC are synchronized, via the Synology server. You can consider that this is a backup since I chose to keep all most recent 32 versions of each file modifications and to not let Synology wipe deleted files (they are stored in the server dust-bin). So, this is a Time Machine feature on top of a backup.

Important notice: The synchronisation between PC and Synology cloud server is very fast and does not eat up resource even on a small/old PC (contrary to some backup programs I would not dare name, like Cobian Backup). this is re-assuring: The end-users can forget about the backup running in the background, stopping if the PC goes to sleep and starting again when it wakes up. This whole process has nearly no impact on the PC behaviour.

Similarly, the iPhone and iPad can use synchronization (of some files, I don’t want them overwhelmed) when on the move.

The second feature replicates these data to another location (here, I chose to synchronize with Amazon Cloud Drive aka ACD because its cost is only 70€/an which appears very reasonable and can be reduced if you have Amazon Prime and a lot of photos). I understood that transfer speed would be limited by my RAID server (the DS413j is quite old and has a very cheap ARM CPU, but it defintely did not break the bank) rather than my bandwidth (I have optical fiber broadban) or by Amazon (all users observe that Amazon is going fast).

Synology Cloud Sync provides this in a matter of a few clicks. Just provide your Amazon login and password. Synology will do it all for you. Synchronization will start in a minute at most (I tried it with Google Drive too. this is as simple and as fast – bandwidth is quite high, which is a good thing; I thought about trying c hubic from OVH, but Internet comments and face-to-face talks with past users seem to point to a product without the needed performance and reliability you want here).

Observations

A few remarks I may have to add after some real-life use:

• The DS413j has a very small CPU from ARM. the CPU workload stays very high (~100%) during all the synchronization phase.
• The first synchronization is lenghty (several days or several weeks depending on the data volume). I recommend to build the data set progressively (not to bunch all your data on the first day).
• Next synchros will generally be much faster (nearly instantaneous).
• Recently modified files tend to be synchronized first.
• I used Cloud Sync to link my server to Amazon, but there is also a solution to synchronize from Synology to Synology: Cloud Station Share Sync. I did not try it but it could be worht exploring if you already have to geographical locations (A second home? A company with two offices?) and two Synology servers. It seems to be as simple as synchronizing with Amazon Cloud Drive.

• In order to elevate the RAID server reliability, you’d better choose hard drives designed for 24/7 use. I would point to Western Digital RED (specailly designed for RAID servers) or Hitachi UltraStar (24/7 version of the DeskStar drives). Also, if you can avoid having all 4 or 5 identical drives, it will reduce the risk of seeing them all failing nearly simultaneously. See BackBlaze statistics on hard drives reliability.
• You may ask where are my “three backup copies”. I actually have the following:
  • The original files on a master PC
  • A manually-copied copy on a separate hard drive (at least one, sometimes two or three of them on spare drives)
  • A synchronzied copy on the Synology server
  • A synchronized copy on Amazon Cloud Drive
• While the Synology DS413j is no longer listed, you can stil purchase the DS416j ou DS418j.
• On the Synology NAS server, I ensured that the synchronized directory is not visible to Windows: A ransomware can’t see it, it would have to hack through the Synology software. this is protecting me against those ransomwares which try to encrypt netork drives too. (Anyway, I can still control my data through the web interface of DSM).
• If a ransomware tries to encrpyt my files (they may then be synchronized in encrypted form), I made sure that versioning is enabled on Synology (This way, I could travel back in time and avoid “paying the ransom”).

I had to change the calendar used “by default” by the iOS Calendars application. Nothing really difficult except that it took me hours to find how to do it. Here is the right way:

• Open the Settings applet
• Select Mail, Contacts & Calendars
• Scroll down to the Calendars category
• Select Default Calendar
• Choose the calendar you want to select

That’s all folks! But I advise you not to change it too often. And, this is better if you do not have too many calendars on the same screen (you’d easily be lost in the diversity).

This video from Bill Hammack explains it all in details.

Lien YouTube

Here is how they made books in this long-gone era:

Don’t stop at these first images, and keep reading the article down to the comparison with printed paper:

Kindle at 26x	iPad at 26x

Opera just announced that, while they are not the larger player in the browser field, they cornered a nice piece of turf: 100 million users of Opera (about 50 millions on the Desktop, and a 50 million chunk on the mobile phone).

This impressive position in the mobile phone market is probably going to get a serious boost with the other announcement from Opera: Apple just approved the Opera free browser on iTunes for application on the iPhone. Up to now, the iPhone user had no other choice than Safari (from Apple), but it seems that the competition will now be open with Opera mini which is generally considered as the best mobile browser (at least on the Windows-based phones).

I started to test it as early as this morning on my own iPhone 3G-S and I can tell you: it feels great.

• Installation and configuration in a whizzzz (near instantaneous (including the synchronization of bookmarks and Speed Dial with my Opera on PC Win7)
• Overall feeling: Very fast browser, a little jumpy. Sometimes, it even feels more nervous than most iPhone applications, but the operating mode is still 100% consistent with the rest of the iPhone apps, so it feels right)
• Screen surface well used and very good rendition of all the web sites I could rush to.

Highly recommended up to now.

New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

Then, you apply that to a set of high-end phones: iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One (the most prominent product on this mobile market). Of course, there is a difference if you press very lightly or if you push significantly on the screen with your finger.

Light finger touch

Medium pressure

All in all, it seems quite obvious that the iPhone has a strong advance in terms of sensitivity (light touch) while the HTC and Nexus One (HTC apparently designed this phone for Google) are quite good if you accept to press a little more.

So, Apple is not only marketing the iPhone through the roof; They also have a very good product and this explains (in part, at least) that the customers are so happy with the man-machine interface.

Video

DIY Touchscreen Analysis from MOTO Development Group on Vimeo.

Although MOTO usually uses sophisticated tools to test touch screen accuracy, we have also developed a simple technique anyone can use to evaluate the resolution and accuracy of a touchscreen device. All you need is a basic drawing program (download one if necessary), a steady hand, and a few straight lines drawn very slowly on the screen.

To read more, visit http://labs.moto.com/diy-touchscreen-analysis/

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

There are few things that you can do to significantly improve the speed of your Internet connection. Of course, you can switch to another Internet Service Provider, but it’s a mess. On the opposite, it is easy to have an sub-optimal connection because of the response time of the DNS server of your Internet Provider. This server offers a translation service a domain name (for example, www.roumazeilles.net) into its equivalent numeric IP address (the only one that the web browser really understands and needs).

But all DNS servers are not born equal and if those offered by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) have an advantage (they are nearer to your own computer), they are not always the fastest ones. NameBench gives you the opportunity to easily and automatically check what DNS server is the most efficient (and to compare it with your own current DNS configuration).

In my own personal case, I just reduced DNS times by 50% (no less!) while I thought I had a rather good configuration. As a matter of fact, Neuf Telecom servers are faster that those from Free…

This works on Windows, MacOS as well as GNU/Linux.

By the way, for those of you who may be wondering, Yes! I included the all new Google DNS as one of the tested options and it was far slower than most of the other freely available possibilities.

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

I just took one part of the simplest category: Rain drops.

I’m sure that you will find whatever you need for your web site, for your Windows desktop or any other icon-based application.

For me, this was reason enough to get my own iPhone 3G-s last Saturday.

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

It’s new version, Safari 4, is just out. Faster, still as good and powerful, but Apple is now claiming the crown for the “fastest” web browser. It could well be possible when Snow Leopard OS-X becomes available later this year. Running natively as a 64-bit Mac application, it could gain 50% from today’s already powerful base of Safari 4.

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.