I thought I’d commemorate that achievement (the one where I put the page up, not the one where I actually wrote thie books) buy offering an excerpt of one of my favorites of those books, Mac Backup, Maintenance and Troubleshooting.

Enjoy “Approaches to Backup” after the jump.

Approaches to Backup

Once you’ve decided that backing up is important, the next step is to decide how you’re going to do it. You have a few different options:

• Cloning. The simplest way to back up is simply to clone your entire internal drive onto an external drive, such as one connected via USB. Using special cloning software, you generally can create a bootable copy that works just like your Mac’s internal storage. In an emergency, you can boot your Mac from that external drive and continue working. Booting from an external drive also puts the tools at your disposal to troubleshoot the internal drive that’s having trouble.
• Full backup and incremental updates. In this situation, you make a full backup of your drive and then periodically update the backup. The initial full backup might be a bootable clone, or it might just be a comprehensive backup of your files in some other format, depending on the backup software you use. This is the most similar approach to Windows Backup and Restore.
• Partial backup. Because the Mac OS and many of your applications could, conceivably, be reinstalled from their original media, you could do a partial backup that focuses only on important documents and items that change frequently. This is ideal if you need backups to happen relatively quickly and/or you’re using small external drives or online storage for your backups.
• Versioning backup. A versioning backup differs from an incremental backup in that changes to files aren’t simply overwritten, but each change to a file (within certain parameters) is preserved. This makes it possible to retrieve different versions of a saved file, based on when it was changed and resaved. This is one of the tricks of Time Machine (which also does full and incremental backups), as well as Microsoft’s new File History feature in Windows 8.

Tablets More Popular Than Smartphones – Business Insider.

Not all that surprising, but still something that’s interesting to note for folks who develop websites (or have websites for your businesses or ventures) or apps or eBooks or news. There’s more and more mobile out there, and it’s one reason I want to focus on publishing for tablets in 2013… I think we’re starting to see some serious volume out there of tablet users.

Here’s a great video laying out the task at hand:

• Category: Utility
• URL: http://www.airparrot.com
• Company: Squirrels LLC
• Price: $9.99

I was chagrined to learn that my MacBook (late 2008 aluminum) was too old to make use of the AirPlay Mirroring feature in Mac OS X 10.8 and higher. I recent bought an Apple TV and, while I’ve been a devoted Roku user for a number of years, I hoped the Apple TV would enable me to further empower my life as a cord-cutter.

With the Roku connected to our HDTV, we could watch movies and TV using Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix and Hulu Plus; the Apple TV really only adds support for iTunes-based video, plus YouTube on the big screen—which isn’t enough reason to buy it. Yes, there’s sometimes a better deal for a show or movie on Apple, but if Apple TV doesn’t offer more than that, it’s tough to justify the $99.

My reason for adding an Apple TV to the mix, then, hinged on AirPlay — particularly the ability to display HBO via Apple TV (we pay for HBO even though we don’t get it on our TV from the cable company and Comcast, inexplicable, doesn’t support HBO GO) and to play many (unfortunately not all) of the ESPN broadcasts I want to see on my HDTV.

With HBO, fortunately, I can do AirPlay Mirroring from my iPhone via the XFinity app; for ESPN broadcasts, though, along with a variety of other items (Daily Show clips, various Flash and other browser-based videos), AirPlay Mirroring on my old MacBook would be ideal. It’s just not supported.

Enter AirParrot. For $10, it adds the ability to stream from your earlier Mac to your Apple TV (or other AirPlay-enabled device). It has its limits — motion can be a little jittery (I’m talking college football), but it does work — video and audio stream to your Apple TV, whether you’re mirroring your entire screen or just mirroring a particular application to the Apple TV.

AirParrot can also be used to extend your display onto the TV, effectively giving you a considerable amount of additional real estate for working on visual projects or sharing information with a crowd of folks. Oh… and it works for 10.6.8, so you don’t have to upgrade to 10.7.x or 10.8.x to use it.

Truth be told, AirParrot is probably best suited for wireless presentations and group situations where you’re displaying your Mac’s (relatively static) display for others to see. It’s great for letting older Macs — and even Windows machines — connect to an Apple TV for the purpose of giving a presentation. (Side note: Apple TV just blew up a whole industry of wireless presentation equipment that was coming on the market for education and corporate collaboration. Apple TV makes wireless screen-sharing dead simple.)

For home entertainment, there’s a reason Apple requires newer hardware — the Intel video chipset is specifically designed to stream video wirelessly, an Apple doesn’t want people complaining about choppy playback. Plus, AirParrot does seem to be paying attention to some Apple DRM shenanigans—it wouldn’t let me play a James Bond DVD on the big screen, even as it played on my laptop.

But if you’re willing to deal with the limitations of your hardware and the occasional bump in the road, AirParrot is a thrilling hack for those of us using older Macs with AirPlay—and it’s a bargain if you need it for presentations or other paying work.

Rating: Recommended

• Category: Utility
• URL: http://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/
• Company: Ergonis Software
• Price: $25

If you’re like me, you spend hours a day in e-mail. A lot of the e-mail I’m sending for Jackson Free Press says something similar—what our current advertising promotions are, what our upcoming issues are, and some boilerplate for answering questions from potential advertisers and readers. To deal with all of that, I rely on Typinator from Ergonis Software.

When active, Typinator sits in the background and watches for you to type certain letter combinations. On my Mac, when I type “upissues” all as one word, Typinator will replace that word with a long list of the upcoming issues of the Jackson Free Press and the topics planned for those issues. Likewise if I type “staffmail” as a single word, all of the e-mail addresses stored for my staff are pasted wherever I typed that — including in the To: or Bcc: entry box in Apple Mail or Gmail.

Typinator is also designed to enter the current date and time, and to autocorrect certain frequently mis-typed words, giving you a feature in any app that you’ll usually only find in word processor and some e-mail clients.

You can get really creative with Typinator, especially if you’re comfortable with AppleScript; Typinator also offers some pre-built sets of “snippets” to, for instance, making coding in HTML or working with FileMaker Pro move much more quickly.

My only major complaint is that Typinator doesn’t work with attachments, so when I’m sending e-mails with, say, a media kit that I’d like to attach, I do that part manually. It’d be nice if the attachment could come along for the ride. (Typinator can place images in your documents, but not items such as multi-page PDFs.)

Otherwise, I use it every day and find it works quick and comes in very handy in the background; there’s nothing like the feeling of not typing a long document over and over again when you’re trying to get a lot of e-mails or letters out in a short period of time. If you spend a little time thinking through what it can do for you I’ll bet you’ll find it’s a life-saver… or at least it saves a few keystrokes.

Rating: Recommended

Which makes me start to think about the iPad. Can they use the same tech to make the iPad—even a 10-inch model—feel solid and sturdy and also remarkably light? I want to love my iPad (I currently have an original model) and really do like it, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed how I read books or consume anything other than video while I’m cooking, instructions for making beer and fantasy football stats while I’m watching the game. (It’s also a great sales tool, handy for meetings and demoing websites and I’ve found it handy for tapping out notes at trade conferences.)

The iPad is great, and maybe iPad Mini will be the answer to my book-reading woes—except I’m not sure I want both an iPad and and iPad Mini. But a super-light 10-inch iPad. Hmm.

I just read this blog entry by John Battelle and it got me thinking — while I don’t feel like my Mac is particularly difficult to use, it’s probably because using a Mac is fundamentally one of the few things I’m good at. I know them well and can troubleshoot with relative ease.

But, it’s true, troubleshooting a Mac is not always easy — and other people probably don’t want to know what I know or study what I study — so the author has a point.

At the same time, though, I do get a little — word? – tweaked – when people don’t seem willing to take responsibility for even a little maintenance or management of their Macs.

Yes, Macs are reputedly easy to use. Fundamentally, there’s an advantage because Apple controls the hardware and software an thus knows exactly what their code is going to run on. Still… Mac’s aren’t flawless. They’re complicated. And, really, any smartphone, computer, tablet or similar device is going to require some care and feeding. Even your Prius requires a pitstop every few months and major maintenance every 18 months or so.

It is problematic (as illustrated in the screen grab above) that the iPhone can experience that much corruption without some sort of clean-up by iTunes; Apple should work on that. But sometimes crap happens. If the instructions are to restore your iPhone, then maybe that works. Here are Apple’s instructions:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414

They seem simple enough. (This weekend I’m going to set aside some time to walk through the process of restoring my own iPhone — I’ve never had to do it before — and see how hard it is, and if I keep my data or lose it. Hard to believe I’ll lose the data since I see it sitting there in iTunes.)

Other complaints by Battelle include trouble with shared calendars and Contacts; I get that. Frankly, I’m disappointed in iCloud right now; it’s really more about one person synching his or her own stuff on multiple devices, not workgroups or businesses working together. In that respect, it’s worse than .Mac tools were. Apple has taken a step backward on collaboration to take a step forward with effortless synching for one person and her gizmos. Google tools are better at collaboration, although not perfect.

In my experience, the best solution is to look for tools designed for the job. If you have thousands of contacts, get a CRM application, whether something like Elements CRM (http://www.ntractive.com/mac-crm/en/) or an online service such as Capsule CRM (http://capsulecrm.com) which we use in the JFP offices. Yes, it costs a little money. Yes, it’s better and offers you cool tools for tracking all of those contacts and doing business with them.

Battelle takes issue with iPhoto, saying he’s shot thousands of photos and iPhoto doesn’t help him much; I get it, and I agree. At the same time, he says “fan boys” will tell him he needs a different app.

I don’t know if I’m a fan boy or not — probably qualify — but I say he needs a different app. We deal with thousands of photos here at the newspaper and I wouldn’t dream of using iPhoto to do it. It’s a consumer app. I’d say get Apeture or Lightroom. If you’re going to take thousands of photos — and take them seriously — then realize the limits of bundled consumer software and move on up.

Otherwise, there’s good stuff in the piece, and I’m going to think about how address some of it and figure out what might be the simplest way around some of these complaints.

I’ll say one other thing — yes, I write books (and, soon eBooks) about Macs. So I’m biased.

But the idea that you need to learn stuff and figure stuff out — like how to switch back the scrolling behavior in Lion if you don’t like it, or turn on/off your hot corners — I don’t think that’s so bad.

Sure, we need new and better and more exciting documentation. But these tools are pretty complicated, as well as being sophisticated. Macs aren’t blenders. They’re crazy, wacky, capable multi-functional devices we could barely conceive of 20-25 years ago. Smartphones? Call it 10 years — at the outside.

So even if it’s not the user’s fault, it is the user’s problem. And you know what? I’d love to help if possible. I’m going to try to do just that as I relaunch MacBlog.com.