Author Archives: aym4t

Unlimited Cloud Backup – $50/year

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It happened. My backup hard drive used for my daily backup died. It was one of those 4TB MyBooks, that is made up of a RAID of 2, 2TB disks. On that SAME day, I had to teach an online class, which often somehow screws up my Time Machine (which takes ages to fix, but is doable, and got done). BUT, I still felt my data was safe in the event of a serious problem because I’d just renewed my subscription (I’d gotten an initial free 3 month trial) for BackBlaze. I figured that having ALL my other work data on the cloud for only $50/year wasn’t a bad idea – and indeed it wasn’t!

BackBlaze doesn’t back up my operating system, applications or parts of my user folder, but I have several other terabytes of data that sits on my startup and other connected drives. I live in earthquake country and my office electrical is… let’s say… overloaded. I was given a gift of a new 4TB multi-interface replacement backup drive so I can have my local backup again (nice gift, right?)- AND I ALWAYS HAVE A SEPARATE LOCAL CLONED BACKUP OF MY STARTUP DRIVE – but for $50 I had peace of mind – and that’s a great thing!

Check them out at www.BackBlaze.com.

BACKUP – automatically to the Cloud

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BACKUP!!!

So, you guys know I’m very neurotic about backing up my files, and I found this service that gives you unlimited space for automatic backups – IN THE CLOUD!

I have dual hard drive backups in my home office, PLUS a separate backup for my startup drive. But living in SoCal, with earthquakes, I’ve always been concerned about earthquake damage hurting my backups, leaving me with nothing.

Recently, I discovered BackBlaze.com. for $50/year, they offer unlimited space for backups, allow the backup of external drives, retain backups for 30 days, and will back up almost everything (system files and Applications won’t get backed up). I have 4 internal drives and several externals. All of my media (photos, videos, and even the files created as temporary files for my video editing), all of my office work files, personal files – and it’s safe and encrypted. All offsite, and all for $50! There isn’t a limit on file size, either – so my largest multi-gig files can be uploaded. It’s not exceptionally speedy, but I can even control the speed of the backups.

I highly recommend checking them out at BackBlaze.com.

Net Safety on Public WiFi

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CNET has published an excellent article on Web Safety when you’re out and about with your laptop or devices and using a public WiFi station. There are some pretty big risks that people might access and steal your data, your private logins and your identity information (including credit card numbers and passwords).

Check out their article at:
http://www.cnet.com/how-to/tips-to-stay-safe-on-public-wi-fi/

Everything Got Hacked

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Hi guys. My entire website got hacked, so I’m recreating everything from the basics (at least, all the stuff that uses WordPress). This is a test of the app that lets my posts go to my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Lesson is – if you use WordPress for anything (I use it for blogs only, right now), UPDATE often! Especially plugins!

Adobe Premiere Pro CC to include MorphCut

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Adobe Premiere Pro CC to include MorphCut – There’s something with the potential for greatness coming to the new Adobe Premiere Pro. In the right hands, this can be used for smoothing edits between different portions of a continuous clip, without having to cut over to a B roll, making (interviews in particular) edits cleaner and fixing a potential slew of problems.
My worry is what it’s going to do in the wrong hands. For example, the hands of politicians, news media, unscrupulous attorneys…
Take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6wPUtKg-Ac

New Adobe Character Animation Application Shown at NAB

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At the NAB Conference from April 11th to April 16th, Adobe announced a new app, coming to Adobe Creative Cloud members.

Adobe Character Animator does just what it says it will do. You can use pre-created characters that appear to come with the app, or you can create your characters using Photoshop or Illustrator and animate them. I believe I’m initially most impressed with the facial recognition and animation activation, which takes prompts directly from your webcam.

Of course, version 1 of anything will have it’s issues – but this looks really promising!!!

http://www.rgbhq.com/nab-2015-adobe-character-animator-preview/

Adobe Releases Acrobat Pro DC – with some important warnings!

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This past week, Adobe announced a new version of Acrobat Pro. It’s called DC (DC stands for “Document Cloud” and the interface is VERY different from what we’ve been used to (the upgrade to X from version 9 was very significant, but this one’s a whole different ballgame!)

With this version, Adobe puts a great deal of effort and emphasis on working with PDFs on computers and IOS and Android devices. It’s fully 64 bit, and it’s system requirements require newer Operating Systems, browsers, and more.

It’s available as a stand-alone subscription, or it’s included in the full Creative Cloud subscription. To see the version differences, please visit:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/pricing/pricing-compare-versions.html

One GIANT CAVEAT! The installation of DC will uninstall your previous versions of Adobe Acrobat Pro, including any customizations and plugins you’ve made. The only way to protect your customizations is to back them up, prior to installing DC. On Windows computers, there is NO way to run both version together (previous installations didn’t support it, but did allow it). On the Mac, several people have managed to successfully install DC and continue to run XI without problem – although those people are few and far between.

The app looks pretty cool – but do beware of the notes above. If you ever want to go back to XI, you’d have to uninstall DC and reinstall XI. From my personal experience so far, this is also the actual case for 99% of Mac users as well.

MANY new Adobe Updates coming SOON!

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Up until today, I was under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) to not reveal what’s coming up to MANY of my student’s favorite Adobe Apps – but today, with the announcement at NAB, all may be revealed. In fact, Adobe themselves revealed what’s to come to Adobe Premiere Pro (oh, my goodness, what they’re doing!), After Effects, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Muse, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Audition!

You can check out the upcoming changes to the Video Editing apps here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/coming-next-to-adobe-pro-video-tools/

I’m sure there’re going to be many more blog posts at Adobe, to tell us the rest…

Turn off Facebook Ad Tracking

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I was getting annoyed that EVERYTHING I looked up was getting tracked by FB. I followed this link: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/facebook-ad-tracking/,
which took me to this site: http://www.aboutads.info/choices/

I’d already had an ad blocker running on my computer, but the cookies this site found were… PROLIFIC! I can’t block all cookies, ’cause some of my sites NEED them (people I teach for and such), but now, about 1/2 hour later – my feed and my ad list is very, VERY different. So much cleaner! Nice!