Cloud-based backup after Mozy's price change

Mozy effectively let me know that they are no longer interested in my business by raising the price for just maintaining my current backup to $600 per year, up from $50. This is the company, which I trusted with the safety of my data: telling me to pay twelve times as much or they delete my data is not an ethical business practice for me. So better run from Mozy as far away as I can.
There are alternatives out there that maintain the $50/year plan for unlimited backups. And unlimited is the only way to go for somebody who works with photos, videos or music. Carbonite, Backblaze and CrashPlan all look good - for my part I'm trying Carbonite, which works quite well.
But my trust in cloud based services is shaken. If Mozy gives their customers the boot in order to maintain a profitable business, why can the others still provide it. What if they all cap the available storage? What if they go out of business.
Time to think about an alternative for offsite backups.

Update on Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 7:34AM by oliver

In a blog post Carbonite's CEO Dave Friend renewed the commitment to unlimited backups. For me that's good enough for now, even though the resaoning is not completely comforting: it's for the sake of simplicity. I don't want the company loose money with my backup - my data is far too important to rely on a bargain deal. What is the true price for an online backup of, let's say 1 TB? I doubt it's Mozy's $1,000 or so per year. Maybe I cannot afford it, but that's ok - then I need to look for a different solution.

What's up with Version Names in Apple Aperture?

Here is one thing that puzzles me in Apple's Aperture: It provides a field "Version Name" for each photo. This is the one field that can be populated automatically with some pattern, for example date and an index number. This is also the only field that can be used as the master file name.
But it is also the field that is used as caption for online publishing, books etc. So what does Aperture want me to use the version name for: a descriptive caption or a auto generated index code/number?

What to use due dates in OmniFocus for

OmniFocus, like pretty much every other task manager out there, tries to lure you into setting due dates for actions. Then it provides you with nice features to remind you on doing stuff: badges, special views, alerts - the iPad version even has a calendar-like screen for managing due dates.
The problem is only that - at least in my world - only a few actions have real due dates. Paying a bill, for example or filing the tax return. Everything else is more or less due asap, with different shades of urgency.
There is a certain temptation to assign artificial due dates. For example, I'm planning to post-process a photo project on the weekend, so I set the due date to Sunday. Then OmniFocus will remind me in time. However since it does not give you the slightest help in realistically planning the workload (like any other task manager I know), lots of overdue actions are inevitable. I have two choices then: ignore overdue actions, which renders the tools mentioned above useless or I constantly shift the due dates, which leaves me with the frustrating feeling of running constantly behind schedule.
That is why I'm only setting hard due dates, means that there are some sort of consequences if I miss them.
But how can I define a daily todo list? I can't.
So this is on the top of my wish list for 2.0: a way to select tasks for a day, a week or a month and ideally sort the freely, independent of projects and contexts.

Finally Google Voice for the Iphone? Not quite yet.

Google Voice is back on the iPhone! More than a year after the mysterious ban of all Google Voice apps from the iPhone App Store, Apple reversed its decision and admitted two third party apps: GV Connect and GV Mobile+.
So is Google Voice on the iPhone finally on par with the Android version. Not so much. While the apps give convenient access to the iPhone address book and the various voice and text messages stored on Google Voice, they still do the callback thing: you dial a number and Google Voice calls you back to the cellphone. Too slow, too cumbersome, too annoying. The web app at http://m.google.com/voice does it better: it calls a special number at Google to establish the connection.
This is probably due to limitations in the Google Voice API and not the developers' fault, but unfortunately we still have to wait longer until Google Voice calls are as straightforward as native cellphone calls on the iPhone.

So can the iPad replace a laptop?

In my opinion the iPad makes only sense, if it can replace a small laptop, such as the MacBook Air that I use. So how does it look after playing around with it for a an hour:

Google mostly presents the mobile versions of their applications, which are - except for Gmail - not yet optimized for the larger screen. Gmail works pretty good, except for e-mails with sophisticated formatting, which are effectively unreadable. Docs only allows limited editing of spreadsheets. Of course you can always switch to the desktop versions.

Good news is that syncing with Google via ActiveSync is working. Apparently even Google was taken by surprise, as Google Sync claims that it doesn't work with the iPad. This means that only the default calendar syncs for the time being.

Non-mobile sites, like Remember The Milk, generally seem to work with minor glitches.

Typing on the on-screen keyboard is not too bad, at least if you're used to type with two fingers and can place the iPad on a table or your lap.

Non-optimized iPhone apps look funny, but are usable. I imagine Steve Jobs having some sleepless nights, before he approved this.

Unfortunately TypePad presents it's stripped down mobile interface (so no bullet points for this post), so the bloggin fun is limited. Also the iPad still doesn't allow uploading files via the browser, also a limitation when it comes to sharing content.