I’ve been curious about the Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array and how it might perform on my AirPort Extreme network. if this combination turned out to be practical, I could have 2 Terabytes of hard disk backup storage available to any computer on the 802.11n network. The big question would be speed. How would Drobo’s USB 2.0 connector fare when deluged with the onslaught of RAW photos that I accumulate on a weekly basis?

The good news is that Drobo and AirPort Extreme play nice together. I can easily mount the disk array from both my Tiger and Leopard machines. It is the height of convenience. The bad news is, yes, the read/write times are slow. For my various tests, it took 90 minutes to transfer a 14 GB Aperture archive from a FireWire drive (connected to a MacBook Pro) to the Drobo.

There’s a nice little discussion about this happening on the Inside Aperture site titled, Alas, No Aperture on my Drobo. And I’ve featured the Drobo in this week’s Digital Story podcast.

My bottom line? Despite the lethargic write speed, I’m really happy to have the Drobo on my network. I have a gigantic image library stored on it that I can browse via Microsoft Expression Media. And I’m currently looking at Port Map and basic Leopard tools for remote access to the drives. i must admit, it’s been a fun project.

“Last weekend, I decided to expand Coverflow to work with my entire photo album,” said Erica Sadun in her recent post, Accessing all your onboard photos from your iPhone database. “This involved exploring the MusicLibrary and PhotoLibrary frameworks to find out how I could extract a complete set of albums and their pictures. The PLPhotoLibrary class proved to hold the key. With it, I could request an album list, and then build up a dictionary of photos that linked back from the image identifier to the album it came from.”

She then goes on to post the code on how to accomplish this. Quite nice.

Todd Ogasawara has continued to publish his Mac FFOSS (Freeware/Free and Open Source Software) column on O’Reilly’s Mac Center. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s new (and cheap) in the Mac universe, you might want to hop over there for a peek.

Over on the new O’Reilly Mac site, Gordon Meyer posts his thoughts about the EyeTV Hybrid:

“The EyeTV Hybrid is very portable; it’s not much bigger than a typical USB “thumb drive.” It’s not as portable if you need an antenna, of course, but you might not need one. I live in the city, and can literally see the broadcast towers on nearby skyscrapers, so I was able to receive 10 digital and 12 analog channels just by plugging the unit into a free USB port.”

If you’re thinking about revisiting EyeTV, you might want to take a look at Gordon’s post.

Erica Sadun has posted a raft of excellent iPhone technical shorts on O’Reilly’s Digital Media Mac Blog. Topics include Programmatically Handling iPhone interruptions, Creating an UIImage from a URL, and plenty more.

If you’re an “under the glass” iPhone type, you should definitely check out what Erica has been writing about lately.

“With more than 450 exhibitors at this year’s Macworld Expo, it’s impossible to see it all,” writes Jochen Wolters. “Which is a shame especially because of all those countless small and medium sized companies whose product announcements are often drowned out by the major news from the big players like Apple or Microsoft. Hence, let me point out five products I stumbled over at the 2008 Expo which, in my humblest of opinions, deserve a bit more attention than they have received so far.”

Jochen goes on to list his picks in the post titled, Macworld Expo 2008 Favorites.

Gordon Meyer writes in PhoneValet & iPhone: Instant Landline Voice Mail:

“Parliant’s PhoneValet has been a valuable part of my automated home for a few years now, but the recent addition of built-in iPhone/iPod touch support has pushed it close to a “must have” tool.

PhoneValet has long had the ability to answer the phone, present a simple (or sophisticated, if you’d like) voice mail system, and record messages. It’s also been able to send email notifications of incoming messages and, more recently, offered a web-based interface to view call logs and play voice mail via the PhoneValet Anywhere add-on.

But for me, it took the iPhone to gel all these pieces into a coherent and very useful whole.”

Statz: Modify Your Presence Status on Multiple Systems from Your Mac
Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:28:13

From Google Code comes…

Statz 0.8.5

…for Mac OS X which lets you simultaneously change your status information on services such as: Adium, iChat, Skype, Tumblr, and Twitter.

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Received Our OLPC XO
Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:08:15

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO that I ordered for my daughter under the Give One Get One (G1G1) program finally arrived. We played with it quite a bit this evening. And, after writing a long-ish mini-commentary on it… (see my mobile tech focused blog entry)…

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO Arrived

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Zoho Creator: Amazing Web Database
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:35:02

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BlogTalkRadio: Net Talk Radio Does Not Need Client Software, Just a Phone
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:32:09

Just read about this before heading out to my office. But, it looked interesting, so I wanted to mention…

BlogTalkRadio

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Happy New Year! Have a Great 2008!
Tue, 01 Jan 2008 08:07:25

Happy New Year! More freeware, Open Source, and free web services will be noted here soon.

Annals of Improbable Research Articles Now Free
Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:53:46

The Annals of Improbable Research magazine’s articles are now freely available on the web as well as a low-resolution PDF download. The high resolution PDF version as well as the paper version are available for a fee (seems reasonable to me :-). The magazine also sponsors the annual (and usually hilarious) Ig Nobel Prizes. A video of the 2007 event is available for viewing on their website.

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Chimoosoft Capture Me: Mac Screen Capture Utility
Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:49:38

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Happy Holidays!
Mon, 24 Dec 2007 22:14:21

A combination of holiday busy work and being a bit under the weather (wheeze, sniffle) has me a bit behind checking out items on my list of freeware and Open Source apps for Mac OS X and Windows.

In the meantime, I hope everyone who reads this blog (all three of you :-) has a safe and happy holiday season.

Here’s wishing for more great freeware and Open Source apps in 2008.

Jooce: Another Web Desktop
Fri, 21 Dec 2007 22:14:39

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Microsoft and Samba Working Together at Last
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:21:44

Samba is an Open Source suite/protocol that provides file sharing, printer sharing, and authentication that is built on reverse engineering the NetBIOS network protcol used by Microsoft Windows. It essentially allows a server other than Windows (like Linux) appear to be a Windows server.

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Ulteo Beta: Web Based OpenOffice.org
Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:20:28

Ulteo (beta) lets you run OpenOffice.org without installing it. It provides a Java powered web-based version with 1GB free storage. Note that you need to a Java runtime 1.4 or newer running to use Ulteo OOo.

Microsoft Office Workspace Live Cannot Display PowerPoint 2007 Slide Deck
Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:47:42

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Microsoft Office Live Workspace: A Definite Sleeper Hit
Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:25:41

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Jaxtr: Post and Route an Alternate Phone Number
Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:47:29

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TubeTV 0.9.2: YouTube Video Converter
Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:27:18

It figures. Right after I said I only found one YouTube downloader/converter for Mac OS X in a Mashable list, I found a second freeware option while thumbing through the current issue of Mac Life (Dec. 2008, p. 18). It is…

TubeTV 0.9.2

FYI: I’m going to try to release this Mac OS X freeware, Open Source, and free web services summary list on Wednesday from now on.

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Ruby on Rails 2.0
Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:58:32

Ruby on Rails 2.0 is out. This web development framework written in the Ruby dynamic programming language was the hot web dev topic for the past year or two (is it still a hot topic?).

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UnRarX 2.2: Mac RAR Extraction Utility
Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:35:00

UnRarX 2.2 is utility for Mac OS X to unpack files stored in the Rar archive format. I don’t use Rar. If you do and have tried UnRarX, please let us know here how it works for you.

The UnRarX website says that source code will be released on SourceForge. However, there isn’t any source code on there. So, although UnRarX lists its license as GPL, I’m going to call it Freeware for now.

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Flickr Integrated Picnik Web Photo Editor
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:52:53

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DLO OpenFM: Find Open FM Frequencies
Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:53:40

DLO is an iPod peripherals retailer. However, they do provide one very handy web application on their website…

DLO OpenFM

…finds open FM frequencies in your area (US only) by ZIP code or City/State. If you use a DLO (or any other) FM transmitter with your iPod or MP3 player, this can help find an unused frequency in your area to use.

Track Santa Using Google Earth on Christmas Eve
Sat, 01 Dec 2007 21:26:49

If your child (or you for that matter) want to track Santa’s progress in style on Christmas Eve head over to read the Official Google Blog item…

Tracking Santa, then and now

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HubbleSite Gallery: Put the Universe on Your Desktop
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:34:56

It doesn’t get much more amazing that this… Images from the Hubble Telescope…

HubbleSite Gallery

Be sure to check out the Wallpaper section of the site for free downloads of truly amazing images.

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My Cool Button: Create Web 2.0 Candy Buttons
Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:46:56

Although I believe in all the Web 2.0 hype, on bad days I may respond to the “what is Web 2.0″ question with: It’s all about candy colored buttons! If you want quickly build some of your own Web 2.0 candy colored buttons, head over to…

My cool button

Its single page menu driven service is so simple even I could build a button :-)

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Google Maps Terrain View
Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:51:20

Google Maps’ new Terrain View kind of looks like a blueprint to me (maybe it’s the colors). You can see buildings in a 3/4 3D-ish relief view with hills looking like a big smudge (see that thing between the Street View and Traffic buttons above?). Terrain View also doesn’t let you zoom in as close as the Map or Satellite views do. BTW, the pure Satellite view with no street labels is gone. Satellite gives you what used to be called Hybrid.

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Firefox 2.0.0.10
Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:51:50
NOTE: 2.0.0.11 was released after this blog item was originally posted

Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.10. According to the release notes, it provides three security related fixes. I will say this about Firefox though. Although it has been mostly stable on Mac OS X, the Windows versions have had a lot of big memory leaks in previous versions. The memory leaks seem less severe starting with, hmm, maybe 2.0.0.8. It still seems a lot slower to me that Firefox 1.5 on both Mac OS X and Windows to me though. I haven’t tried the Firefox 3 betas yet.

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Get Tube: Convert YouTube Video on a Mac
Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:41:07

After reading about Ares Tube for Windows, Basketball Jones (check references to Cheech and Chong if you don’t know about that character :-) asked if there is some app for Mac OS X that can convert YouTube videos. Here’s one that claims to do the job for Mac users…

Get Tube

It was the only Mac OS X based application in a YouTube converter article over on Mashable.

Caring.com
Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:19:17

This one falls a bit out of my usual categories list (freeware, Open Source, free downloadable content, or interactive web service). However, I’ve been thinking and speaking a lot about Enterprise Knowledge Capture as it relates to an aging workforce in my day job. And, like many other people I have parents that are aging (doing well so far!). And, of course, me and my fellow Baby Boomers are aging too. So, I figured some fellow baby boomers might find this site interesting/useful…

Caring.com

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Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:45:26

Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant comes from values of n. This is the group led by former O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest. They previously launched stikkit which used a similar natural language interpreter to schedule events.

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Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:43:32

The long holiday season the U.S. starts with Thanksgiving weekend (and the Black Friday store sales). Here’s something to let you you legally load up videos for your travels whether short or long…

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive

…contains thousands of free movies, films, and videos.

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Mapdaze: Maps for Facebook Photos
Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:07:46

Hmm, should I create a separate category for Facebook applications? In any case, here’s an interesting looking Facebook application: Mapdaze Photo Map. It is a mashup that lets you use Google Maps to display the locations of photos in your Facebook account. You need a Facebook account to read more about this and use it.

Top European developers have banded together to offer a Mac software feast under the headline “Give Good Food to Your Mac” to holiday shoppers over the next ten days. In contrast to other deals in the past, this one offers a steeper discount the more products you choose. A kind of ad hoc bundle deal.

This is another experiment at gaining attention for the products of innovative Mac developers. Apple sells more than 2 million Macs in a Quarter, but for independent Mac software developers it remains a challenge to reach a larger audience.