As I grow older, I find it increasingly challenging to find new music that I enjoy. It’s not so much that the music isn’t out there, but rather that I don’t come across it as often. Radio listening used to be a more significant part of my life. There is no reason why I could still do this, but podcasting has replaced radio as my commuting entertainment, and I have yet to come across a good podcast with new music. When I was in high school, Dave Kendall brought me the latest in alternative music as part of MTV’s weekly program, 120 Minutes. Despite the MTV assocation, the show was really first-rate and exposed me to some truly great music that I continue to enjoy to this day.

Through college and medical school, friends continued to introduce me to new music, as did occasional radio listening. However, nothing quite lived up to Dave Kendall’s show. Since finishing school, it has only become more difficult. Ironically, despite the increased access to music through the Internet, it has only become harder to find new material. The Internet makes it easy to find what you are looking for, but with music you sometimes need to find things you are not looking for. Much of what a listen to ends up being new albums by old bands.

Fortunately, there are still a few gems I have come across. My brother introduced me to The Notwist a few years back. Even though it is a fraction of what it once was, occasional listens to WFNX have introduced me to The Information, whose “I Lose Control” and “A Simple Plan” have become regular items on my iPod playlists.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a band who I had not heard of for several years, Nada Surf. Like many people, I had first heard of Nada Surf about 11 years ago with their first single, appropriately titled “Popular”. I didn’t particularly like it, but it got enough airplay that the band’s unusual name stuck in my head. It wasn’t until last year that I heard “Always Love” on the radio. I liked it enough to buy their album, The Weight Is a Gift, which is quite good. What was even better was that it led me to Let Go, a truly outstanding piece of work.

While some of my friends have switched to individual song purchases in the age of MP3s, I cling to albums because it’s one of the few ways I have to hear songs that I might like but haven’t yet heard. The Nada Surf albums will hold me for a while, then my search continues.

The 5th generation Apple iPod(a.k.a the video iPod) is an excellent audio player, with either 30 or 80 GB of storage in its current form. For many people, including myself, the real draw of this player was the video capabilities that seperated it from prior models. There are now many portable devices that can play video, but no other device can tap into the wide range of TV shows and movies available on the iTunes Store. Additionally, there is a wide range of free video programming available as video podcasts (the Diggnation podcast is a personal favorite).

Watching certainly adds another dimension to the iPod, but it brings with it new challenges. In order to maintiain the iPod’s slim profile, Apple had to make some sacrifices, and the most noticable in this series is the battery life. Watching video can quickly turn your iPod from a capable portable multimedia device into a useless paperweight.

I typically watch video on the iPod while riding the subway. Upon reaching home, my typical strategy was to “switch off” the iPod by turning on the hold switch on the top of the device. This proved to be a mistake, and a common one made by iPod users.

Bottom line: to save battery life, turn off your iPod by holding down the “play” button when you are done using it. The screen will switch off and you will stop burning valuable energy.

There are very few things that can make people look more ridiculous than playing the Nintendo Wii. It’s almost as fun to watch people play the games as it is to play them yourself. It’s particularly amusing if you can’t see the screen and instead watch your friends make wild gesticulations into the air.

A few weeks ago I acquired the Nintendo Wii and allowed some of my friends to show off their skills. The results were largely humerous. Even my 6 week old son was amused.

So far, the Wii definitely seems like a party system – I only occasionally play single player games, largely because Owen takes most of my free time. Perhaps he soon will be old enough to take hold of the Wii-mote.

Bottom Line: If you are comfortable learning a few of the tools built in to Mac OS X, you can ensure your data remains protected.

While there is a great deal of excitement about the recent release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista, many of the features touted by this operating system have been present in Apple’s Mac OS Tiger (10.4) for over a year. One particularly convenient feature is the encryption built in to the the operating system.

The security control panel allows you to turn on File Vault, which encrypts your home directory and protects your files from prying eyes. This won’t help if you leave yourself logged in without a password-protected screen saver, but it will prevent someone from getting access to your data by hooking it up to another computer as a hard drive (Apple’s FireWire Target Disk Mode) or by manually extracting the hard drive. This is particularly important for laptop users with sensitive data, since laptops are generally more predisposed to theft than desktop computers.

File Vault is great, but backups are essential, and Apple’s Backup software (as well as many that can be purchased seperately) don’t allow for encrypted backups. Fortunately, all the tools you need to keep your data encryped are built-in. Taking advantage of them, however, will require some comfort using some of the Unix software that powers the Mac interface.

I will presume that you are backing up to an external hard drive, which I think is the easiest and most effective solution. The first step is to ensure the data on your laptop is secure. This is done simply by going to the Security control panel on the Mac and switching on File Vault. This will take some time when you first activate it, and each user who wants their home directory encrypted will have to activate this seperately. I recommend you also check the box to require a password when waking from sleep or screen saver, and have the screen saver turn on after a predeterimined amount of time. This will ensure that your data isn’t compromised if someone comes across your computer after you’ve finished using it.

The next step is to create a secure place to store the backups of your home directory. Run the Disk Utility (located in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder). Click “New Image” and change the location to your external hard disk. Change the size to the size of your hard disk (you will likely have to choose “Custom”). Encryption should be set to AES-128, and the format should be sparse disk image. You can call this image anything you like, but I would recommend something you will recognize, like Backup.

What does this all mean? A disk image is a “virtual” disk that leads a double life. In its standard state (unmounted), it appears like a file on your hard disk. When you “mount” the disk image, it turns into a virtual hard disk that appears alongside any others you may have – you can copy files to and fro with ease. Why use a disk image intead of just a hard disk? Unlike hard disks, you can encrypt and password-protect an entire disk image; any files copied onto the disk image are automatically protected. When you selected AES-128 (above), you told the computer to make sure this disk image automatically encrypts anything that is copied onto it. There are two types of disk images on the Mac: regular disk images and “sparse” disk images. Regular disk images are a fixed size, like the hard disk in your Mac. If you create a 40 GB conventional disk image, it will take up 40 GB even if there are no files on it. A sparse disk image, on the other hand, starts off small and grows only as needed. When you create a 40 GB sparse disk image, it has a maximum size of 40 GB, but will start out much smaller. As you add more files to the disk image it will grow. It is important to choose a size that’s bigger than you will ever want from this disk image, since it can never grow beyond the maximum you set when you create it. That is why I recommended setting the size of your backup image to be the same as the size of your internal hard disk – you’re home directory will never get bigger than this unless you upgrade your hard disk.

After you’ve followed these directions, you will be prompted for a password – make sure you remember this password, since you’ll need it to access your backup in the future. This does not need to be the same as the password for your account. I recommend selecting the option to add the password to your keychian. This will allow you to load your backup while you are logged in without needing to enter the password every time.

Once you are done, you will see an icon in the Finder that represents your newly-created disk image mounted alongside your other hard disk. Since you will want to automate the mounting and unmounting of this disk image, you should unmount the disk image by clicking the eject icon next to the disk image’s name.

Now you have protected your home directory with File Vault and created a secure disk image to store your backup. Now it is time to actually make the backup. Load up TextEdit and copy and past the code below:

#!/bin/sh

echo "Mounting backup"
hdiutil mount /Volumes/External/Backup.sparseimage
echo "Running backup"
rsync -aE --delete --delete-after ~ /Volumes/Backup
echo "Unmounting backup"
hdiutil detach /Volumes/Backup

This is set to back up to an external drive called “External” with a disk image called “Backup”. If you used different names, before to change the names above. If you used a space in the name of either your image or your external hard disk, you will need to put a backslash (\) before the space so the computer doens’t get confused.

For example, if your external disk was named “External Disk”, the third line of code would read:

hdiutil mount /Volumes/External\ Disk/Backup.sparseimage

You will need to make sure this file is in plain text format, go to the format menu and choose “make plain text”. Now save the file as backup.command (make sure there is no .txt at the end). Save it in your home directory.

You have now created a “shell script” that will automatically mount your backup disk image, backup your home directory, and unmount the disk image, all for free! In order to activate this script so it can be run, you have to make some changes via the Terminal. Load up the Terminal (it’s in your Utilities folder) and type:

chmod u+x backup.command

Then hit return. This tells your Mac that you want to be able to run the script you just created. Quit the terminal and go to your home directory. You should see a file called backup.command. Make sure your external hard disk is connected and double click on the the file. The terminal will pop up and your computer will start backing up. It may take a while the first time you run it, but each subsequent time, it will only copy whatever has changed from the last time you backed up.