I’ve reviewed three different desktop backup applications on wonko.com over the years: Carbonite, Mozy, and CrashPlan. I stopped using Carbonite because it was too basic and too expensive. I stopped using Mozy because I lost hundreds of gigs of data due to a hard drive failure and Mozy’s horrendously broken restore process made it impossible to restore many of my backed up files. I still use CrashPlan, which I love and which has reliably saved my ass several times.

My backup software reviews are among the most commented-on posts on this blog. People find them in searches and can’t resist adding their thoughts. These posts still get several new comments each week. Since my blog has become a repository of comments, both positive and negative, on backup software, I thought I’d tally up the totals.

To produce the graph below, I perused all the comments on this site that were attached to one of my backup software reviews or which contained the name of one or more of the aforementioned backup applications. I excluded my own comments and comments from users who clearly hadn’t actually used the software in question. This graph is a tally of all the positive and negative comments that remained for each application.

The totals are as follows:

Carbonite: 1 positive, 3 negative
CrashPlan: 7 positive, 1 negative
Mozy: 10 positive, 88 negative

I’m not sure the totals for Carbonite and CrashPlan are even statistically relevant, but it’s clear that people hate Mozy (or at least that people who search for Mozy and find this blog hate it).

Update: I’ve updated the totals and the graph to reflect the comments on this post as of 2009-08-14 17:53 PDT.

Now that I’ve been using my Dash Express on a daily basis for several months, it’s time to sum up my thoughts on the device and the service. In a sentence: The Dash Express is good—and getting better with each software update—but not great.

Is it worth $300 plus $10 a month? Maybe. It depends heavily on where you live and what kind of driving you do. I commute about 34 miles a day through San Jose, California on Highway 101, so the Dash’s live traffic info is both very accurate (due to the high density of Dash users in the area) and very useful. On the other hand, if my commute were shorter, or if I lived in an area where traffic was less of a problem, the Dash would probably be a waste of money.

It’s possible to use the Dash as a plain old GPS device without the live traffic info or Yahoo! Local and avoid paying the monthly fee, but without the always-on connectivity the Dash is nothing special. Its routing functionality, mapping capabilities, and turn-by-turn directions are respectable, but as you would expect from a first-generation device, the Dash isn’t as refined as competing devices from companies like Garmin and TomTom, who’ve had years to perfect their products.

Case in point: the Dash’s directions, while usually accurate, occasionally fail in inexplicable ways. On the final leg of my morning commute, there’s about a 50% chance that the Dash will instruct me to keep left on the Great America exit ramp when I really need to keep right. Some days it knows I should keep right, some days it doesn’t; there doesn’t seem to be any pattern.

Routing oddities aside, the live traffic information and the ability to choose from multiple routes (and route around unexpected traffic) are the Dash’s killer features. For me at least, they make up for its shortcomings. I’ve found the traffic info and drive-time estimates to be absolutely spot on. When Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps tell me my commute will take 35 minutes and the Dash says 23, I always trust the Dash. So far it hasn’t let me down.

The ability to search Yahoo! Local from the device is nice, but sometimes backfires. A month or two ago I ran over a bolt and needed to find a tire shop. The first three tire shops Y! Local directed me to didn’t actually exist (one was a house). This is more Yahoo!‘s fault than the Dash’s, but it was frustrating all the same. In the end, I used my iPhone to find a shop and then entered the address into the Dash.

Third-party hacks and POI feeds are touted as major selling points of the Dash. While there are certainly some cool hacks (like Twitter and Fire Eagle integration), they don’t mesh well at all with the Dash UI. This makes them feel flimsy and bolted on. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, but the good news is that the Dash’s over-the-air software updates make it very likely that, if we’re patient enough, we actually will see improvements.

It’s important to note that while many device makers claim they’ll offer fancy new features and bug fixes in software updates but fail to follow through, the Dash software has already received several minor updates and one major one, and many of my early gripes have been fixed.

This is really the key: if these software updates continue to be as frequent as they have been so far, especially if they keep fixing common complaints and adding useful features, then the Dash could easily become one of the best GPS devices on the market. At the moment, though, it’s still a 1.1 device with room for improvement.

I’m convinced that the single most important factor in implementing a successful Internet video on demand service isn’t selection, video quality, or home theater integration; it’s bandwidth.

YouTube, the most successful Internet video service (at least in terms of overall usage), has gotten it right from the beginning. Their selection is limited to whatever crap users upload and the quality is horrible, but videos begin playing almost instantly and rarely get choppy.

Hulu and Netflix have also gotten this right and are successful despite suffering from a lack of home theater integration options and, in Netflix’s case, a laughably bad selection of content.

However, two players in this field seem to have gotten everything right except the bandwidth issue. Microsoft’s Xbox Live video service and Sony’s new PlayStation 3 video store both offer an excellent selection of recent movies and TV shows, many of them in gorgeous HD with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, but both services suffer greatly from limited bandwidth.

On Xbox Live, videos often download fast enough to be watchable as long as you don’t mind waiting five to fifteen minutes before you can actually start the video. Occasionally, though, the service seems to fall flat on its face and you’ll be forced to wait an hour or more before you can start watching. Not exactly convenient when you just want to plop down on the couch with your dinner after a long day and watch a movie, but at least it doesn’t happen too often.

The just-launched PlayStation 3 video store is, in my experience, far worse. Like Xbox Live, it’s unable to even come close to taking advantage of my available bandwidth, but unlike Xbox Live, it tries to pretend that this isn’t an issue by allowing me to start watching the video instantly. Every so often the audio cuts out, then a moment or two later the video pauses (yes, in that order), and I’m forced to wait while the bytes trickle slowly in and the buffer fills back up. Then I have to manually rewind to the point where the audio cut out to hear what I missed.

Last night it took nearly an hour for the PS3 to download a half-hour standard definition TV episode (about 350MB) that cost me $1.99. The same episode is available for free on Hulu at the same quality and without the bandwidth problems. If I were less scrupulous (and I often am) I could download it from Usenet in about four minutes flat, since my Usenet provider doesn’t seem to have any problem saturating my bandwidth.

The astonishing thing about this is that bandwidth is ridiculously cheap these days. It’s surprising that Microsoft and Sony are allowing their otherwise excellent on-demand video services to suffer by ignoring such a basic component.

My head is still reeling after seeing the new Indiana Jones movie yesterday. It keeps coming back in flashes, like a bad dream. I’m not exaggerating; the movie is so ridiculous and incoherent that my memories of it feel exactly like the memories of some of my more nonsensical dreams. My biggest fear is that watching the first three movies will now remind me of this one, and I’ll enjoy them less as a result.

If you’re an Indiana Jones fan and haven’t seen Kingdom of the Crystal Skull yet, here’s my advice: don’t. For godssake don’t. See something else. Anything. Speed Racer even. Please don’t make the same mistake I did.

I recently devoured The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a riveting account of the Terra Nova Expedition, which culminated in Robert Scott’s fatal journey to the south pole and (almost) back.

The polar journey itself didn’t actually occur until two years into the expedition and, while spectacular in its own right, is not really the focus of the book. The titular journey, in which the author and two others set out during the Antarctic winter of 1911 to retrieve eggs from what was then the only known accessible Emperor Penguin rookery, is an epic tale of suffering and perseverance, but it’s not the book’s focus either.

Interweaving his own recollections with the letters and journal entries of himself and his companions, Cherry-Garrard tells a story not about a single expedition to Antarctica, but about mankind’s inherent need to explore the unknown fringes of the world we inhabit and to expand our knowledge of it at any cost.

I strongly recommend this book.

Early last year I wrote a positive review of the online backup tool Mozy. Like a fool, I neglected to test its restore functionality, and a few months later when I suffered a hard drive crash and tried to restore 20+ gigs of data from my Mozy backup, I learned that Mozy can’t restore for shit.

After extensive testing of both backup and restore functionality, I decided to switch to CrashPlan for my online backups. Back in September, after having used it for several months, I gave CrashPlan a glowing review.

So, seven months later, would I still recommend CrashPlan? Yes. Hell yes.

CrashPlan has backed up my data quietly, reliably, and without fail. It hasn’t ever crashed or frozen and it doesn’t hog my system resources. Most of the time I don’t even remember it’s there. But most importantly, CrashPlan has saved my ass several times, and each time it’s worked so well that it almost makes me want to do stupid shit more often just so I can experience the pleasure of having my ass saved again. It works that well.

When I migrated from a PC to a Mac last year, I copied all my important data off the PC’s hard drive, then wiped it clean. At least, I thought I had copied all my important data. Naturally, as soon as I finished nuking the drive, I realized I had only copied one of my two partitions. A few clicks later, CrashPlan was happily restoring the lost files to my new Mac from the PC’s most recent backup. I didn’t lose a thing.

That’s been the story every time I’ve needed to restore something. Whether it’s a single file of just a few kilobytes or a whole directory containing several gigabytes, CrashPlan begins restoring the files instantly and only seems to be limited by the download speed of my Internet connection. Mozy’s painful, slow, unreliable restore process is nothing but a distant nightmare now.

CrashPlan and Mozy both make lots of big promises about how safe and secure your data will be and how easy it’ll be to restore in the event of a disaster; the difference is that CrashPlan actually keeps its word.

Netflix just pounded another nail into HD DVD’s coffin. Here’s hoping it’s the final nail. This nonsense needs to end.

I have both a PlayStation 3 (which plays Blu-ray disks) and an Xbox 360 with the HD DVD addon drive, so I’ve been sampling both formats for a while now. It seems like the HD DVD camp wasn’t even trying. Even the biggest HD DVD releases seem like they were shoved carelessly out the door, much like those horrible first-gen DVD titles I remember watching back in the late 90’s.

I can’t actually think of a single HD DVD title I’ve rented or bought that didn’t use a hideous default menu template with generic music and a rotating studio logo, whereas most of the Blu-ray titles I’ve watched (even the ones that were released in both formats) had the well-designed custom menus I’ve come to expect from quality releases.

It also doesn’t help that some of the more recent HD DVD releases are “Web enabled”, which just means they’ll lock up your player for 10 minutes (or sometimes crash it entirely) in order to download “exciting Web-enabled content” before allowing you to watch the movie. Fuck that.

Apart from a few games, Quicken is the last piece of Windows software that I just haven't been able to replace since switching to Mac OS X. The Mac version of Quicken is pretty much universally hated and is, from all accounts, a buggy piece of crap, and I have no desire to boot up a Windows VM in order to run the Windows version.

I tried a few other OS X finance apps and wasn't happy with most of them. MoneyWell was nice enough that I actually ended up buying a copy, but after a few weeks of use I discovered that it's just not as convenient as Quicken was (it also suffers from a few annoying bugs).

In terms of web apps, Mint is okay, but pretty limited, occasionally glitchy, and spammy. Buxfer is nicer, but often frustratingly slow, and still not as advanced (or as automated) as I'd like.

Somehow, while searching high and low for a Quicken replacement, I completely failed to discover Quicken Online until today. I was blown away. It doesn't have the full featureset of desktop Quicken, but it's got all the stuff I care about, wrapped in a gorgeous, responsive UI. They even officially support my new favorite browser, Safari, and there's an awesome iPhone interface for when I'm not near a computer. Within five minutes of signing up I had imported all my accounts and was ready to go.

If you haven't taken a look at Quicken Online yet, I recommend checking it out.

Chris Kohler's review of Assassin's Creed for Wired pretty much sums up my feelings on the game. I'm as disappointed as he is that it didn't live up to any of the hype. Luckily Rock Band and Call of Duty 4 have washed the bad taste out of my mouth.

Yesterday afternoon, after waiting for what I hoped was a long enough time for the Black Friday morning crowds to abate, I headed out in search of Rock Band. The huge new Best Buy down the road was sold out, but the huge new Target next door had two left, crammed into a tiny space on the bottom shelf near the Xbox 360 accessories. The box this thing comes in is pretty huge, so I can see why stores are having trouble keeping it in stock. There's just not enough room.

Anyway, I got it home, set everything up, and Loren and Felicity and I rocked out until the wee hours of the morning. For the most part, the game is absolutely awesome, and even after hours of continuous rockage we didn't experience any of the hardware problems some people have been reporting. However, there are three things about Rock Band that really, really suck:

1. When you start a band, one player must be designated the leader. This player is now the band leader for all eternity, and the band can't play without him or her. Period. The game won't let you change who the leader is, it won't let you swap the leader to a different instrument, and it won't let your band play without the leader. This sucks epic amounts of ass.
2. I was totally digging the drums until about halfway through the medium progression, when I just couldn't deal with the damn foot pedal anymore. It's uncomfortable to use, impossible to position well (for me anyway), and I seem to have a complete inability to control both my feet and my hands at the same time. While Felicity and Loren were rocking out without any problems on the medium vocals and bass, I was being thwarted by that damn foot pedal. If I ignored the foot pedal, then I had no trouble being awesome on the drums, but our score suffered horribly due to all the missed kick drum notes. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have no problem with it, but it was a dealbreaker for me. I want a "no foot pedal" option.
3. For some reason, the first three or four songs end up getting repeated over and over and over and over again, both in new venues and in random setlists. By the end of the night, we were so sick of Weezer (and even Nirvana) that it sucked all the fun out of the game every time we had to slog through those songs yet again in order to progress. There are plenty of great songs, but for some reason it's the mildly annoying ones that get repeated endlessly until you want to stab yourself in the eardrums with your drumsticks. Lame.

Aside from these gripes, the game is huge amounts of fun. I just wish Harmonix had gone a few steps further and made it perfect. Nothing ruins a nearly-perfect game like a few dumb flaws.