Using Editorial to streamline posting to this site as well as my other writing is just so satisfying. As always, check out what’s going on at Macdrifter and MacStories for the true state of the art (because, dang, Gabe and Federico have it going on), but I thought I’d briefly note a couple of things that have made me happy lately.

I’m using Koken more and more for serving images, because it has such a great integration with Lightroom. Combined with Lightview it makes a nice system for flexible display of images here. Koken can serve cropped images, as in the Rt66 post below, that are blown up to full-size pop ups easily by Lightview. (I do need to tinker with the display size, and of course it’s not responsive, and so but.)

So, for posting using the iPad, I built a small Editorial workflow to help place the combination Koken/Lightview calls. Koken has an easy to use embed option, but it produces an HTML snippet that I usually want to convert to markdown and wrap in a Lightview class; with a Koken image embed link on the clipboard, I can call this workflow, tap the selection for the type of link I want, and it removes the unwanted code, adds my specific parameters and then pastes into the document the properly-formatted markdown image tag and link. Nothing too complicated or sophisticated, but like I said, it’s just very satisfying to be able to so quickly build something Iike that.

Some photos from a jaunt around this year’s Route 66 Days car show. We picked a good time to explore it; our monsoon weather returned early in the afternoon and kept us bottled up inside for most of the rest of the day.

This is a fun conversation on The Incomparable about Saga, hitting almost all the things that I really like about it. There’s an ease to the dialogue that is almost always at odds with the apparent otherworldliness of the scene, which cuts through the mostly-calamitous, everybody-is-in-peril story, and reminds me of Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon. And almost invariably those scenes close with something beautiful or poignant. It’s good.

People love pencils. They love them. It’s partly childhood nostalgia, partly how a craftsman comes to care for her tools, and partly the tactile experience. It’s also a blend of appreciation for both their aesthetic and functional qualities, and (especially these days, but not only these days), a soupçon of the disruptive passion that comes from willfully embracing what poses as the technologically obsolete.

Great set of notes and links about pencils, from Tim Carmody filling in at Kottke this week.

We’re in the middle of a long weekend and I’m out and about with the camera quite a bit, including on a very rainy — strike that, absolutely soaking wet — adventure to the county fair.

As a big user of Day One (and a tinkerer of some plugins for it), I really enjoyed this conversation.

One thing I like about Gabe’s list is that it’s not entirely tech stuff. Nice wheelbarrow!

I haven’t really remarked here, or anywhere for that matter, on my transition from academia. Maybe one of these days, but for now Peter Levin pretty aptly describes the why:

Some years ago, for the Columbia pro-seminar, I produced a year-by-year ‘getting through graduate school’ handout. In my little pitch to 1st years, I told them that each year, including your terminal, job-hunting year, you should take stock of your sunk costs, and ask yourself if you still want to be an academic. For me, the answer became no. And for me, like many of graduate students, as well as tenured and untenured faculty, the biggest question was, if not academia, then what else?

Peter has landed what sounds like a fantastic gig with Intel, as a “sociologist in the wild,” and I’m looking forward to hearing about his acclimatization to Portland’s environs. Happy trails!

Okay, it’s my second workflow, but the first (which rebuilds this site) is not really publish-ready.

Grab the current URL from the Editorial browser and insert as a markdown link in the current document. Opens a prompt for the link text with the default set to the current editor selection.

This week’s episode of Accidental Tech Podcast continues discussion that I have really appreciated, motivated in part by Bradley Chambers’ post on the state of photo management in iOS. The followup conversation this week begins with John Siracuasa’s good-so-far experience with Everpix, and focuses mostly on the dilemma of reliable and accessible backups of one’s photo collection.

Over the years I have accumulated a series of increasingly-large external hard drives that perform both backup of my active data as well as offline storage and its backup (offline storage being for the stuff, almost exclusively photos, that I moved from primary storage to free up more space). I have had an array of backup regimes including wirelessly mounting these external drives for incremental backup using a terribly fiddly launchd+ unison and later rsync script, which turned out to be fiddly enough and require enough babysitting that I stopped doing it altogether and now rely on somewhat randomly scheduled cabled backups. In addition to these, I have backups from various points in time to cloud destinations like Strongspace and Box.net and utterly gobs of pictures at Flickr and Facebook. (Also Trovebox where I spent some time last year. You get the point.)

I have and will continue to pay good money for the desk- and cloud-based boxes that hold my stuff. Problem is, perhaps in contrast to the ATP conversation, the boxes might be too easy. I’m not suggesting that making Time Machine/Capsule work flawlessly is easy, or that most upload bandwidth allows for efficient creation of comprehensive cloud backups; but what’s easy is filling up platter after platter with data. To be sure, as a general area of computing, not having backups, or not having backups that work are substantial problems (how many of us have tested our backups or could actually perform a restore from them to rebuild a working boot disk?).

But as space gets cheaper and services proliferate, the boxes of disks become for me a minority concern and even exacerbates the problem of retrievability. More important is knowing what I have, and perhaps this is the difference between backup and archiving. I think the real problem in twenty years probably won’t be having my stuff around but using it well, by which I mean:

• that serendipitous rediscovery of a memory
• my son could use pictures of mom and dad for a surprise anniversary party
• not sorting through dozens or hundreds of photos from the same event to find a good one
• the video I shoot is discoverable
• it’s possible to find a photo of a person from a location even though I don’t exactly remember when I took it
• browsing photos is pleasant despite there being gigabytes and gigabytes and gigabytes of them, from different catalogs and sources

Some of this is a problem of discipline: and if I were just more diligent about keywording and filing taxonomy then perhaps this would be easier. But it’s also a problem of scale: Files not only keep getting bigger but we are making massively more of them every year. And unlike the storage element, the problem of scale isn’t getting easier, and won’t get easier without next-gen advances in tools that help with navigating and understanding the content of our photos.

In short, finding what I’ve stored is hard, and it’s made harder by the passage of time, the shifting of things offline as new content gets bigger than always-on capacity, and the arrival of new platforms and devices.

Going back to the beginning, I’m considering Everpix myself not for backup purposes but because they seem to take this quite seriously

It has become easier and easier to take pictures of everything, but technology to manage them has not progressed much. Photographs capture precious memories and emotions, yet a computer stores them as files and bits. Effectively, we, the users, are the only ones for whom these images still have a meaning. Maybe not for long: as photos accumulate by the hundreds, or thousands, on our phones, memory cards, hard drives or social networks, the cost of collecting, organizing, and managing them becomes so high that we also lose touch with these captured memories. Our memories could, ultimately, end up forgotten on some computer memory.

So why am I holding back? My primary reservation is about having Yet Another Service holding my stuff. Everpix would be an easy, no-brainer buy for me if it could do what they offer on my desktop — or my own storage, wherever it is — without requiring me to send them all my stuff. But at the moment maybe that’s the price for (part of) what I ultimately really want.