Episode 47 / July 4, 2007
Scott Bourne starts off the picks with Shiira, the eye-candy heavy alternative to Safari. Scott likes it because it’s a fast and lightweight. This browser is free and based on Webkit.
For his pick Alex Lindsay plugs the Sony 17-in-1 Memory Card Reader. The appeal of this little device is that it plugs into your laptop’s USB and reads many different kinds of cards, including several flavors of Memory Stick, SD Memory Card, miniSD Card, MultiMedia Card, RS-MMC, CompactFlash, Microdrive, SmartMedia, and xD-Picture Card. If you travel a lot it can help you avoid carrying around many separate readers. Alex likes it because it works with the Mac seamlessly and lets you mount several cards at a time.
Leo Laporte plugs Plaxo, the online contact list manager. The way Plaxo works is that you sign up for an account and import your contact list. Your list is then updated with the contact info of any friends that might already be on the Plaxo network, and your friends’ contact info for you is updated with your up-to-date info. The application is a bit spammy because it entices you to send a message to everyone on your contact list not already on Plaxo to get them to join and enter their info. That said, the new version 3 of Plaxo is especially cool because it syncs iCal and Address Book with your contact list and calendar on many online services such as Yahoo, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, etc. This is a great free alternative to the very good, but ridiculously priced, Spanning Sync. It will also sync up with Outlook, so it can help with your cross-platform needs.
Finally, Merlin Mann tells us about Mozy, a great online backup service. Basically, you can backup your data to an external drive all you want, but if there’s a fire or other calamity in your office, you can say goodbye to both copies of your data. What you need is a remote copy of your data, and that’s where Mozy comes in. After installing Mozy you tell it what folders or types of files on your Mac you want it to back up. Mozy encrypts the data locally and then sends it to a secure remote server (in Minnesota, I believe). Depending on how much data you back up, the initial sync can take days, but once it’s done it runs continuously or at specific times. You can get up to 2 GB of storage for free or you can sign up for unlimited storage for just $4.95 a month.
I use this service and the feature that sold me is that if you ever need to restore your data, you won’t have to spend days downloading it back to your computer. You can instead have Mozy FedEx you a DVD. Brilliant.
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