chris nelson dot ca

Content providers still haven’t figured out physical vs digital pricing

iTunes and Amazon MP3 have been dominating music sales for years now, but there is plenty of evidence that providers have wildly different strategies when it comes to pricing. This is made all the more absurd by Amazon’s AutoRip functionality, where the lines between a digital & physical purchase are even more blurry.

Exhibit A is Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City album. As one might expect given the lower productions costs the digital version is dramatically cheaper than the physical CD:

Exhibit B is Daft Punk’s new Random Access Memories album. The incredible thing is this example is that you can get a digital copy of the album cheaper by buying the physical CD – Amazon gives you instant access to the digital versions as well via AutoRip:

Both of these are new albums from popular acts, released a week apart. There are those that argue that the digital instances should be priced at the same or higher than physical, since the user gets the benefit of instant gratification. However, in the case of Amazon purchases this logic no longer applies. One could certainly argue that the Daft Punk offering has much more drive given their advertising blitz, but I find it curious that these two examples are so different.

My backup solution – CrashPlan & Synology

I’ve got a lot of data. I’ve been been shooting RAW photos for a decade (almost 200 GB at this point), have a large (legit!) music collection (74 GB), and have a lot of other files from various projects over the years I want to hang onto. In total, I’ve got about 330 GB I want to keep. This used to be a very expensive proposition – stuffing it all in Amazon S3 or using backup services that charge by file size was tough to swallow. That landscape has changed recently. I’ve been using CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited for my home backups for about a year and couldn’t be happier. Unlimited cloud backups for up to 10 computers for $9-14 per month (depending on subscription length) is an amazing deal.

More than being a good deal I’ve also been very impressed with the CrashPlan software as well. It does the typical things you want to see in backup software – good performance, ability to set transfer rates/time of day, data deduplication, compression, and encryption. However it’s hidden strength is its great flexibility for backup targets while maintaining security. In addition to the unlimited cloud storage you can also have local encrypted backups, encrypted backups to another one of your computers running CrashPlan (p2p using the same account), or even send your encrypted backups to a friend (p2p with different CrashPlan accounts). These options create a perfect backup scenario for me – I know I have a local copy of files which I can get at quickly (compared with downloading them all) but they are also stored in the cloud to protect against catastrophic loss (e.g. a house fire).

Their software is available for multiple platforms, and they support a headless java client on Linux. This means the software can be installed on a lot of different machine types and opens up a lot of different options. The most important one for me is support in Synology. I’ve been using Synology NASs as my file server for many years as they are very customizable and powerful. With some hard work invested, patters was able to get the headless client running on a wide range of newer Synology devices. Using his packages and instructions I’ve got all of the files on my Synology file server backing up locally, as well as to the cloud:

Desktop/laptops

Backup to local Synology NAS Crashplan target (Vol2)
Backup to Crashplan cloud

Synology NAS (Vol1)

Backup Vol1 to local Synology NAS Crashplan target (Vol2)
Backup to Crashplan cloud

Some screen shots of what this looks like:

If you find the post at pcloadletter.co.uk hard to follow, Scott Hanselman has a great guide on his site on how to setup CrashPlan on Synology.

Other than having to restart the Synology CrashPlan package after updates, everything has worked amazingly well together. I was able to customize everything the way I needed to but still feel like I’m well protected. If you aren’t using a backup solution you like, I highly recommend giving CrashPlan a try – the following link will save you 20% off their prices: http://www.crashplan.com/ff20

The Open Road London (1927 in colour)

I came across a video on Vimeo which contained some lovely images of London in 1927 using an early prototype of color video. I was interested to know more and found that the video only covered a small part of the overall series named The Open Road created by Claude Friese-Greene. While the full video on youtube doesn’t have the addition of music, it is double the length and includes other areas not in the vimeo video:

It was particularly interesting to notice the ordinary – the early doubledecker buses, barges on the River Thames, flowers at the war monument, Petticoat Lane, and tourists watching the changing of the guard.

Travel in Scotland

Photos of Scotland

We spent a little less than week in Scotland in the summer of 2012 as an “add-on” from a another trip to London and Scandinavia. I wasn’t terribly well planned but was very enjoyable; funny how that works sometimes. The country is small but the winding roads off main routes mean distances are generally slow to cover. Even so, it worked well that we stayed in Edinburgh as our base and took day trips and tours around the country.

Edinburgh is a lovely mixture of a city – lots new, lots old. The most popular point of the city is arguably the Edinburgh castle, and with good reason as it is well preserved and serves as the focal point of the city. I highly recommend walking through Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat to catch a sunset or sunrise. Not only because the view of Edinburgh castle is incredible, but also because we ran into some entertainment. Two bagpipers had setup on one of the paths and were practicing in the rain and enjoying the acoustics of the rocks. Few things have ever been as special for me than watching the city glow under a pink sunset in the rain while accompanied by a local soundtrack.

It is easy to get around by Edinburgh black cab, bus, or walking. As with most European cities the train station is located in the center of the city and it is easy to travel to major destination points that way (more on that later). To get a full taste of the country though you need to either rent a car or use touring companies. We took several small group tours to explore the highlands while visiting castles, lochs, distilleries, and towns. Though we encountered wet weather most of the trip all of our excursions were very enjoyable.

We also took the commuter train to explore Glasgow by day trip. The trip by train was fast and relatively inexpensive as the cities are not terribly far apart. Anna and I both enjoy Charles Rennie Mackintosh‘s work (Art Nouveau) so it was a must visit for us, including lunch at one of his tearooms. Despite the relatively close distance between Glasgow and Edinburgh they each have very distinct attitude. The cliche adage is that Edinburghers say Glaswegians are rough about the edges, and Glaswegians see the Edinburghers as snobs. I can’t remark too much on that as it was such a relatively short visit but I found that Glasgow felt much more like a vibrant new-world city than Edinburgh, which felt a bit more like a well curated museum piece in places.

It was a short but very packed and enjoyable trip. Scotland very easy and relatively cheap to visit if you are in London already, so consider it if you are already going to be spending any time in the UK.

The shocking increase in federal disability payments

This American Life in coordination with Planet Money created a show which dives deep into structural issues related to employment which have been dogging the US (and frankly other wealthy western nations) for decades. As usual they do an excellent job crafting a riveting story about what can be a very dry subject.

The number of Americans receiving federal disability payments has nearly doubled over the last 15 years. There are towns and counties around the nation where almost 1/4 of adults are on disability. Planet Money’s Chana Joffe-Walt spent 6 months exploring the disability program, and emerges with a story of the U.S. economy quite different than the one we’ve been hearing.