TEDxNaperville 2011 is Official
(Updated Wednesday, July 28, 2010)
It is confirmed that there will be a TEDxNaperville this Fall on 11/11/11. Can’t wait that long? Then stop by our new TEDxNaperville Salon events!

A salon event is a monthly small group meeting of TED enthusiasts. We simply watch a few TED videos, eat and drink, and partake in stimulating conversations.

TEDxNaperville Salon events are the first Monday of every month, at Quigley’s Irish Pub in downtown Naperville from 6:30-8:00pm. More information and tickets (its free!) at Tedxnapervillesalon.eventbrite.com.

Registration is required, due to limited seating.

http://tedxnaperville.com/

Ads, we all hate them, or most of them. Some ads, we do seem to like. Apple ads comes to mind as some of the good ones.

Anyway, ads are now present on iPhones and other iOS devices along with on Android devices. The ads might be iAds from Apple, or they might be AdMob ads from Google or they might be from some place else entirely.

As a developer, it’s amazing how many people won’t spend $1.99 or even 99 cents for an app. They want the freebies. We’ve gotten spoiled that way with TV and radio. It’s the ads that support the shows we watch. And it’s ads making the development process affordable for developers.

In my first year selling my apps, I made about $75. Considering the cost of the developer program was $99, I lost out in real dollars. Not to mention the 100 hours I spent writing and testing the code. Add to that fact, Apple won’t dispense money until you reach $150 in sales. Now I’m $198 in the hole just to get a check from Apple for $150. Sure I enjoy it, but that only goes so far.

When iAds came out, I decided to give it a try. I’m a little developer with a not super popular app. But my iAd sales have been great to me. I can easily bring in over $300 per year. Not enough to retire on, but enough to bring back the joy in it.

How do the ad programs work for developers? Basically we reserve some screen real estate and put in a little piece of code that will display an ad when one is available. When an ad is sent to the app, the code comes active and the ad is displayed on the screen. Each time a new ad is displayed, I get like 1/10th of a penny. However, if you actually tap on the ad (by accident or on purpose), I get up to $1 (however usually closer to 10-25 cents).

So what can you do to help me and other developers? The obvious, tap on the ad. They usually don’t take much time and some times the ads are quite entertaining. Jokingly, I’ve been told to require my college daughter to tap on the ads 25 times a day to help pay for her education. But realistically, I’d rather each of you tap on anybody’s ad once per day to help all of us.

As a safely against self gratification, phones used by app developers can’t display real ads for our own apps. So I can’t fill my own kettle with my own efforts. That’s where you come in.

Ed Danley
Cassiopeia Information Technologies, LLC

For a bootable backup, consider a program like Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) or SuperDuper (SD). CCC is donation-ware. If you like it, they ask that you donate to support it. SD is a purchase product. SD has stated that they charge for their software mostly because of the support they provide. SD says nothing is more important than support when you need to restore from a SD backup. A bootable copy of this nature is a complete and exact copy of your boot drive. You can even setup a schedule to make a regular, timed, backup of your boot drive so it stays current.

Why would you want a bootable backup? The beauty is if your machine dies, you simply borrow (or use) another machine and boot from your bootable backup and everything is exactly where it should be without messing up the borrowed machine.

Holes? Time Machine can easily backup multiple source volumes into a single Time Machine backup. However if you have more than one drive hooked to your computer, a bootable backup only backs up the boot drive.

The beauty is that you can actually have both types of back on an external HD. However if you do so, it is recommended that you partition the external HD and use one partition for your bootable backup, and one partition for your Time Machine backups. For the bootable partition, make sure the partition has enough space to match all of the used space of your normal boot drive, plus a fudge factor for future growth. How do you know how much space you are using of your boot drive? Select the boot drive in the Finder and do a File (menu) then Get Info and look at the used space. Then simply point Time Machine to the second partition and you’re all set.

But continuing the discussion a little further, a backup sitting next to your computer is no good if your house burns down or floods, is a victim of theft or some type of disaster like that. In that case, you need an offsite backup. For an offsite backup, consider getting two more external HD’s (three in total).

Your backup strategy then turns into something like this:

• You make a CCC or SD back to one of the external HD’s. You take that backup off site (office, lock box, vacation home, trusted neighbor, etc.).
• Once the first copy is offsite, you start making the second backup copy. Do this for a week, then swap the two offsite drives. You now have a secure offsite for disaster recovery. Worst case you lose about a week’s worth of data. Much better than a total loss of data.
• For the third external HD, use that one for a Time Machine backup. That way you can still have a multi-copy backup so you can restore that deleted paragraph from a month ago. The third drive stays local all the time.

If the worst case scenario occurs, yes you lose the backup from a month ago, but you’ll be so happy just to have the offsite copy that you probably won’t mind that. Besides, 99.999% of the time, Time Machine will be the only backup that you’ll ever need to access. But for that 0.001% of the time…

Another option is cloud backup. Cloud backup is where the backup files are stored online or “in the cloud”. You don’t need to worry about backing up the backup because that is part of the cloud service. You can usually access your files from one or many computers. Usually 100% encrypted so your data remains entirely safe. (There is no way I or anybody else can see your data.) The down side is that you are backing up (and restoring?) your files over your internet connection. This can be slow depending on your internet connection. Remember, when backing up, this is your upload speed, which is often 10 times slower than your download speed.

Apple provides a very basic (bare minimum?) service with iDisk which is part of MobileMe. There are a growing number of independent services out there. Carbonite and Mozy are a couple of the brand name services. Bryan Pearce of DAUG (and Deneb Corporation) reports his company offers a product called CrashPlan Pro.  It just works. Select the directory or directories you want backed up for example, your home directory and CrashPlan looks for internet availability and will keep your data backed up in the background.  This solution works very well for laptops in addition to desktop machines.  You also don’t have to worry about your internet connection feeling slow due to the backup process.  CrashPlan does most of its work when your internet connection is idle or based on use preferences you can control.  The best part is, you don’t even know it’s working until you need it.

Ed Danley

http://www.apple.com/support/ (look in the bottom center panel)

http://www.apple.com/mac/ (look in the bottom panel)

http://www.apple.com/business/ (Quick Tip of the Week)

In all of the iLife and iWork applications, go to the Help menu and you will find Video Tutorials.

If you haven’t checked out the PodCast area on iTunes, you should. There are a lot of offerings there on just about any subject. Watch them on your computer with iTunes or send them to your iPhone or iPod. Some of the best PodCasts are fromScreenCastsOnline.com and many are free.

Other places to get a few tips and tricks:
http://www.mactips.org/
http://www.macworld.com/topics/mac_os_x_leopard.html
http://www.macworld.com/howto.html