Disaster-proofing your digital life

My CBC Radio tech column this week is all about disaster-proofing your digital life. There’s a copy up at cbc.ca/tech, and one below, for posterity.

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Over the past week, Canadians watched as thousands were evacuated from their homes during floods in Manitoba and wildfires in Slave Lake, Alta. On Monday, I listened to one Manitoba man on The Current explain how he spent a day and a half packing up his belongings before leaving his home, uncertain what he’d return to.

And like a lot of Canadians, I quietly wondered, “What would I do? What if I had to get out of my home in a hurry?”

My mind immediately turned to a Saturday morning last April, when my next-door neighbour’s apartment caught fire.

As smoke seeped into our hallway, and firefighters banged on our front door, my immediate concern was life and limb — specifically, the lives and limbs of me, my wife and my sister, who was visiting from out of town.

But after the personal safety of my family, my most pressing concern was the safety of my data — the thousands of photos, videos, documents and music files I have stored across a handful of hard drives.

A few years earlier, my priorities might have been different. I might have grabbed a photo album or a family heirloom on my way out the door.

But today, some of my most precious possessions are digital artifacts: wedding photos, holiday videos, music I’ve recorded with friends. This stuff can’t be easily replaced. But in a situation where the fire department advises: “Get out fast. Don’t try to take possessions or pets,” the last thing you should do is start backing up your desktop.

Luckily, no one was hurt in my neighbour’s apartment fire, and thankfully, my digital memories suffered no damage. But that close call lit a fire under my rear end to start disaster-proofing my digital life.

Off-site backups

The risk here isn’t just fires or floods. There are lots of ways to lose the things you care about. A few weeks ago, a friend’s laptop was burgled from her office. A few years ago, I knew a couple whose hard drive failed just a few months after their twin boys were born. They lost everything. Photos from the hospital, video of the boys meeting their grandparents for the first time — all gone.

Regardless of your computer’s make, mode or operating system, there are a few fundamentals to a successful backup plan. These are what writer Merlin Mann calls The Holy Trinity of backup. He says backups need to be automatic, redundant and off-site.

I’d argue that the off-site part is particularly important, because a backup hard drive sitting next to your main hard drive isn’t much good if a burglar steals both or you come home from vacation to discover both drives have gone up in flames.

Luckily, there are several good ways to get your backups off-site. There are several cloud-based backup services, including Mozy and Carbonite. Both are paid subscription services that allow you to schedule automatic, encrypted backups to off-site servers.

Though I’ve tried both Mozy and Carbonite, my favourite internet-based backup service is CrashPlan (Mac/Windows/Linux), which comes with a twist. In addition to its paid, cloud-backup service, CrashPlan offers a free option that lets you back up files to a friend’s computer. So if you have a trusted friend with extra hard drive space, it’s simple to set up reciprocal, free backups.

If you’re not keen on the cloud (or your internet connection isn’t up to transferring large amounts of data on a regular basis), you can still keep a backup copy of your important digital memories off-site.

2 copies of everything

Simply make two copies of everything you don’t want to lose (on external hard drives, USB keys, DVDs, etc.). Keep one on-site, and leave another with a friend, family member or in your safety deposit box. Rotate them regularly and update the backups frequently.

Personally, I use a combination of these techniques. Each night, my computer backs itself up to a friend’s computer across town. I also have a pair of external hard drives in a backup rotation.

I keep one at home, and one at work. Every few weeks, I swap them out. Overkill? Perhaps. But I have thousands of photos and videos, and documents that just can’t be replaced.

A small amount of backup obsession is worth knowing that my apartment could burn down tomorrow and all my data would be safe.

So then, if the things you care about aren’t backed up automatically, redundantly and off-site, here’s a piece of homework.

Identify the digital memories that you would really, really hate to lose. The baby pictures, the wedding videos, the family tree. Then, get those files somewhere safe. Burn those photos to a DVD and send it to your relatives for safekeeping. Stick your most important documents on a USB key and drop it in your safety deposit box at the bank.

Then, start working on a full, proper backup plan to disaster-proof your digital life. Because you really never know, and a little work now can save a huge amount of heartache later.

The Elusive Brompton B Pod

Jenna and I are planning some travel to far-off distant lands, and I’m really keen to take my Brompton folding bicycle along.

But how to transport the Brompton without damaging it? The Brompton catalog lists something that I’ve had my eye on for a while: the “B Pod, a semi-rigid flight case; comes with castors and handle.” And after reading this Flying with a Brompton forum thread, a hard case sounds like a good idea.

However, actually finding a B Pod proves difficult. No stores carry them.

Alas, when I asked Brompton about B Pod availability, this was the response:

Thanks for your enquiry, it is with great regret that I let you know the B Pod will not be available this year.

Having first offered this product in 2010 (albeit as a mid-year launch), we have unfortunately been let down by an unreliable supplier which has lead us to the difficult decision to cancel production.

We continue to have great faith in the B Pod, which we know was set to be a very popular product addition, and will be looking for a solution in the coming months.

Eric from Curbside says that though the B Pod isn’t available, the Brompton soft case works just fine:

I’ve travelled tons with a Brompton before that (including the Brompton World Championships!). Never had a problem. The bike protects itself, the case just keeps the frame scratch free (and extra protected).

In the meantime, I’m curious about this third-party Brompton hard case from B&W. Looks nice, but $350 is a little crazy for a single-purpose piece of luggage.

Wanted: Better ways to search online video

This week’s CBC tech column is all about the current state of video search. There’s a version up at cbc.ca/tech, and one below, for posterity. You can also download an MP3. [audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Dmisener-MisenerTechColumn20110510708.mp3]

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When I need to tie a bow tie, I watch a how-to video. When I need to poach an egg, I watch a how-to video. When I need to swap out the hard drive on my laptop, I watch a how-to video.

When I do these things, I sometimes wonder — as Michael Ridley did in his 2008 talk “Beyond Literacy: Are Reading and Writing Doomed?” — how far we are from a truly post-literate society.

According to recent numbers from internet measurement firm comScore, Canadians are voracious online video watchers. Collectively, 22.5 million Canadian users watched 388 million hours of online video in March. That’s 17.2 hours apiece — higher than any other country in the world.

But while our appetite for online video seems to be growing, our ability to search deeply within those videos isn’t keeping pace.

We already have pretty good tools for searching through text on the web. I can get quick, easy and accurate results when I search for for encyclopedia articles, news stories and long-lost friends from junior high school. Computers “get” text. Beyond basic keyword searches, computers can now be programmed to understand the relationships between words, the syntactical structures of language, and they can even analyze the sentiments behind the things we type.

But video? Not so much. Computers have a much harder time with moving pictures.

Basically, video search has all the challenges of static image recognition (a classically difficult task for computers), multiplied by 30 frames per second. Sure, computers can process and analyze video with increasing sophistication, but they stop short of truly understanding the content of moving images.

As both online video production and consumption increases, the issue grows.

Human help

“Now Dan,” you might be thinking, “doesn’t video search work just fine already? If I want to see a video of a funny cat, I can type in ‘funny cat video’ and spend all afternoon on YouTube.”

Yes, you can. But there’s an important distinction here. The reason you can find those funny cat videos is because someone somewhere named a video “funny cat” or included the tags “funny” or “cat.” Or maybe they linked to the video and the link text said, “funny cat video.” Or they added the video to their “Top 10 Funny Cat Videos of all time” playlist.

The reason you can find that funny cat video is because a human being labeled it as such. It’s not because the computer understands the content of the video, or even has the slightest clue what a “cat” is or a how a cat could be “funny.”

The real challenge in video search has to do with searching inside videos — helping computers better catalogue the depth of their content.

This is particularly relevant to the eduction sector. Many universities, colleges, and in some cases, high schools, post video lectures online. For certain courses, it’s not uncommon to have access to hours and hours of online lecture material. At that scale, the challenge becomes searching deeply for relevant content, not skimming across a shalow layer of metadata.

Last week, I talked to Larry Rowe, president of the multimedia research lab FXPAL (Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory). His team is working on exactly this problem, and recently launched TalkMiner, a video search tool.

Here’s how it works. TalkMiner analyzes online lecture videos, searching for PowerPoint-style presentation slides. When it finds a slide, it scans the relevant text, notes the video’s timestamp, and adds this information to a searchable database. This allows users to search for text that might not be in the lecture’s title or description, but might be buried 45 minutes in.

One of my test searches on TalkMiner took me back to Grade 10 biology: “meiosis and mitosis.” Though many of the results had these words in their titles, the first result was a lecture from Berkeley that didn’t mention meiosis until a presentation slide almost five minutes in.

Transcription

Of course, scanning presentation slides from existing lecture videos is just one technique, most effective for a particular style of online video. But the central idea is there: let’s design technology that helps a computer make long video more searchable, and more useful.

There are other techniques. In late in 2009, YouTube announced an experimental feature called automatic captions. Basically, it takes the audio part of a video, runs it through speech recognition software and generates a transcript. Since the transcription is text, it can be added to a searchable database to make that video easier to find. The feature is now available on all English-language YouTube videos.

Several years before automatic captions made its debut, an early version of Google’s Video Search product scanned existing closed-caption information from television shows to generate a searchable database.

Outside of the academic and consumer space, the U.S. Department of Defense is working on video search, too. It is developing a system that could be used to analyze footage to identify people, vehicles, and certain types of action in a scene.

So why is this important? For me, it’s the scale that makes this such and interesting and relevant problem. According to YouTube, 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute. That’s staggering. And sure, many of those videos are funny cats. But there’s also an enormous amount of knowledge contained in some of these online videos. Just look at the TED Talks series, for instance.

But right now, video search is clunky. It doesn’t always work as well as we’d like. And in most cases, searching deep inside videos is impossible. Reliable direct video search is still the stuff of science fiction.

Online video production is growing. Online video consumption is growing. Without decent search tools, we risk getting lost in a sea of abundance: knowing that what we want is out there, but being unable to find it.

How effective was social media in the Canadian election?

This week’s CBC tech column was a look at how tricky it is to measure the direct impact of social media on elections. There’s a version up at cbc.ca/tech, and one below, for posterity. You can also listen to an MP3. [audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Dmisener-MisenerTechColumn20110503389.MP3]

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Some called it Canada’s first “social media election.” But now that it’s all over, I have to wonder: did any of the tweets, Facebook groups, or YouTube videos actually make a measurable difference?

Certainly, many of the candidates had active social media accounts, and the #elxn41 Twitter hashtag was on fire during the election. But online activity is very difficult to link with the offline behavior of marking a ballot with a golf pencil. Ultimately, once you’re behind that cardboard partition, voting is a private action. A secret ballot is, after all, secret.

In many ways, this stands in stark contrast to how things work on the web. Social media marketing and advertising isvery measurable. Hyperlinks can easily be tracked to generate a myriad of stats and reports on our collective online behaviour. For example, this Bit.ly link to the Elections Canada site displays all kinds of information about itself. Recently, on Spark, we explored the profiling potential of personalized email coupons. This sort of trackability is widespread online, but doesn’t follow to the ballot box.

So if it’s not measurably effective in getting politicians elected, why all the social media hubbub? According to researcher Daniel Kreiss, it’s because social media can be useful in tracking “other forms of electoral influence” that are very measurable. For instance, campaign donations. All of the national parties have online donation pages. Traffic to these pages is easily measurable. Another metric campaigns can track is the number of voters who sign up for email newsletters, which can easily be targeted and customized, riding by riding. Or, mobilization statistics – how many people signed up online to volunteer. This is all trackable, measurable and useful, even if it’s not directly linked to actual votes. Of course, parties generally keep this kind of information pretty close to their chests, so we don’t necessarily hear much about it.

There are other, less quantifiable benefits of social media, too. Towards the beginning of the campaign, I spoke to digital strategist Mark Blevis, who talked about using Twitter as a focus group: “In fact, it might even be what I would argue to be the best focus group, largely because it’s happening in real-time. It’s happening quickly.”

Another factor that’s not directly measurable — but is definitely worth looking at — is the use of social media to encourage voter turnout. I saw a lot of this on Twitter during election day. Politicians saying, “Where is your voting station? Do you need a ride to the polls? Call us!” As of early Tuesday, Elections Canada reported 61.4 percent voter turnout, an improvement over the 2008 numbers, but still the third lowest in Canadian history.

Could a tweet change your mind about who to vote for? Probably not. But could a tweet encourage you to get off your duff to cast a ballot? Maybe.

I think it’s important to remember that compared to traditional media channels (like TV advertising, for example), most new media election budgets are relatively small. The focus is still on old media, with its large reach. But according to Daniel Kreiss, “There has been, by leaps and bounds, an increasing recognition that new media can deliver major returns on investment in particular areas, namely fundraising and volunteering.” Success in those areas is much easier to measure in a quantifiable way.

So then, could we make the impact of social media on election results more measurable? Of course. For the past several elections, there’s been debate surrounding the idea of online voting, in which voters would log into a website instead of a marking a paper ballot.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which Canadians can vote electronically during a federal election. A candidate could post a trackable “Click here to vote” link on their Facebook page or their Twitter account. Those links could easily be tracked, and the link between a candidate’s social media strategy and the act of voting could be made much clearer. Now, I’m not saying that scenario should happen. In fact, I’m seriously creeped out by the thought of it. But again, it’s technically possible, and not much different than existing online marketing campaigns and conversion metrics.

So, we may never be able to truly measure the direct impact a tweet, Facebook post or YouTube video has on an election’s outcome. But I’m fine with that. So is Daniel Kreiss.

“That’s sort of one of the beauties of politics. That it can’t be totally rationalized in that way, of knowing exactly what is going to influence the electorate,” he says. “You know, it’s not quite a science. But it’s not quite as messy as an art. It’s somewhere in between, I think.”

A beginner’s guide to multitrack audio recording

Recently, ukulele pals Tony and David asked if I might be interested in putting together a little workshop, aimed at singer-songwriters, explaining the basics of multitrack recording, editing, and mixing. “The goal,” Tony said, “would be that someone who had never recorded before would be able to leave with enough confidence to make a simple multi-track recording on their own.”

As someone with a hard drive full of half-finished song ideas and various music recordings that’ll never see the light of day, of course, I was interested. So, we’re doing it.

It’s going to be a Roots Music Canada-branded workshop, called “Home Recording 101.” Details below and at the RMC website.

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**Home Recording 101 with Dan Misener

** A beginner’s guide to multitrack audio recording

Saturday, May 14, 11 AM

The Fox and Fiddle

27 Wellesley Street East

Toronto (at Wellesley Subway)

Cost: $25

Aimed at songwriters with little or no home recording experience, this 3-hour workshop will introduce you to the skills and techniques you’ll need to capture your songs and turn them into polished tracks.

Through demos and hands-on experience, you’ll learn:

• the fundamentals of multitrack software: recording, editing, and mixing
• basic microphone choice and technique, for voice and instruments
• the sonic value of your closet (or, how to make the most of a small recording budget)

The tool we’ll use is Audacity, a free and open-source multitrack editor. However, the focus is on principles and techniques, not tools. The concepts presented will be easily transferable to many other multitrack editing programs, like Garageband, Audition, Logic, Pro Tools, etc.

No recording experience or expertise required. This is a workshop for novices. You’re welcome to bring a laptop with you, but it’s not necessary.

We will use an overhead projector and portable recording device to present basic concepts you can learn and take home with you.

The pub is providing us our own room and server for the event. There will be lunch break and you’ll have the option to purchase food from their menu.

Please EMAIL to book your spot. Registration is on a first-paid, first-booked basis.