I just upgraded my Apple TV with the new “Take Two” update. Everything works as promised, and I noticed one extra goodie in the video settings dialog. The Apple TV now natively supports 1080p video output!
Attached photographic proof!
The future of American politics, what do Ron Paul supporters do after he loses?
I won’t be able to caucus for Dr. Paul today because I am a registered Libertarian. I would have had to change my voter registration way back in December to Republican in order to participate. That doesn’t stop me from supporting him. I’ve donated significant money to his campaign and I have advocated him at every opportunity within my social group. I know, just like every other Ron Paul supporter, that he has no chance of winning today. His campaign is not about winning, as great as that would be. Nobody comes out and says it like it is, but it is true. His campaign is about spreading a message, a message of liberty and the constitution. I sincerely hope that the Paul campaign comes up with some way to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states, either as an independent or a Libertarian. If that doesn’t happen I hope that Dr. Paul, as well as his supporters, can rally around whomever the Libertarian party selects as their nominee.
The Ron Paul movement has been amazing to watch as a long time Libertarian. In example, during the 2004 presidential campaign candidate Michael Badnarik received only $1,000,000 in campaign donations. This includes donations prior to the party nomination all the way up to Election Day. Ron Paul has amassed a hefty sum of $30 million+ and it is only February. The message Dr. Paul is sharing is not new, it is that of the constitution, but clearly he has struck a chord with the American people that up until now no Libertarian has. I suspect that this can be credited to two factors. The first is the coming of age of a new generation of voters. The Libertarian message is something that hits home with young voters who are tired of the status quo. Second, I think that Dr. Paul’s affiliation with the Republican party and his existing seat as a Congressman has lent a much needed credibility boost to his ideals, as well as allowed him to participate in the debates and gather some national media attention.
Given the incredible amount of momentum that this movement has, it will be a shame if it all goes to waste. When Dr. Paul finally pulls out of the race come Republican National Convention time, where will that leave us, the unwavering Paul supporters? I sincerely hope that the Libertarian party can seize this opportunity to bring the masses of Paul supporters into the folds. One of the challenges the Libertarians have often had is finding common ground. Libertarians by their very nature are independently minded. If you have an entire political party of folks like this, it becomes a little bit like herding cats. I strongly believe that the lack of adoption of Libertarian ideals thus far is very closely related to this core issue within the party.
Dr. Paul has an amazing power to unite us to a common goal. While I don’t agree 100% with everything Dr. Paul says, and I doubt you will find any Libertarian that does, I agree with 99% of it. Dr. Paul moves us in the right direction, and as a party, the Libertarians need his influence.
We need to do everything we can to keep the spirit of what Dr. Paul is trying to accomplish alive. We can make a difference, while maybe not yet at the national level, we can influence local politics today. I encourage you to run for your local City Council where you live on the Libertarian Platform. Join the Libertarian Party. Attend your Libertarian state convention. Vote for Libertarian candidates. Maybe even run for a state level position?
Links:
Just stay active, and keep the momentum alive.
Automatically backup your Mac to Amazon S3
With the new version of OS X (Leopard) Apple has included some great functionality in Time Machine. Your Mac will automatically backup to an external drive every hour. It includes the ability to recover deleted files in a timeline. The one downside to the Time Machine approach is that the data isn’t remotely stored. A couple years ago my wife and I had a house fire where most of our things were destroyed. Fortunately the fire was extinguished before it spread to where our computers were so we didn’t lose any data. If it had been elsewhere in the house it could have been a serious situation for us if we lost all of our digital files.
After the fire I have followed a manual process of backing up our files on an external drive that I store in our fire safe. The problem with this is it requires me to actually do the work, which I often put-off. When Amazon S3 was introduced I immediately saw the potential to use it as an automatic remote backup source. I hadn’t invested much time in it up until now, but I just got a new computer (MacBook Air!!) and while setting it up I thought it would be a good opportunity to get my backup situation in order.
There are some great tools already in existence that can do most of the heavy lifting for you. The primary tool for doing remote directory syncs is called s3sync which is a script written in Ruby. Lucky for us OS X comes with Ruby pre-installed so there isn’t much work to get it working.
Here is my step-by-step guide to getting your machine setup to do automatic daily backups to Amazon. I developed these steps on my MacBook Air running Leopard however they should work for previous versions of OS X as well.
Step 1) First off, your going to need and Amazon Web Services account. Head over to http://aws.amazon.com/ and sign-up for an account to use S3. The prices are very cheap ($0.15/GB/Month). Once you have your account setup you will need two things to use Amazon S3. Your Amazon access key and your secret key. These are what s3sync will use to authenticate you to Amazon.
Step 2) I’ve packaged together a zip file with all the files you are going to need to get this setup along with SSL. Download the file at http://images.vallery.net/s3backup.zip. You can go to http://s3sync.net/ to see if a newer version if you like but you’ll need to figure some of this out on your own.
Step 3) You need to create a “bucket” in amazon to store your files. A bucket is similar to a folder, however it is globally uniquely named across all Amazon S3 users. In order to create the bucket you are going to need one of the S3 GUI applications that exist. I have included in the zip file the one I have used called “S3 Browser”. You can find the latest version at http://people.no-distance.net/ol/software/s3/. Once you launch S3 browser click on “connection” then “new connection”. You’ll need to provide the access details you got from Amazon in step 1. Once you have connected click the “Add” button which will allow you to create a new bucket. Because the name has to be globally unique I used “vallery-macbookair-backup” where vallery is my last name. Keep track of this bucket name because you need it in the next step.
Step 4) Once you have the zip file I created downloaded it should automatically extract itself into your downloads folder creating a new folder called “s3backup”. Within the s3backup folder are all the files and scripts you will need in order to get this working. There is one key file that needs to be edited in order to make this all work which is called “backup.sh”. Open the file “backup.sh” and replace the place holder access key, secret key, bucket name with the ones you obtained form Amazon and step 3.
Step 5) Now that you have all the files ready to go you need to select a place to store them. The application will run as root at the system level in order to prevent file access issues, therefore I recommend storing the entire s3backup folder in your /Library folder. You should copy the entire folder using finder to /Library. There are a few other paths in “backup.sh” that will need to be updated if you choose to store the file elsewhere.
Step 6) You need to setup your Mac to automatically run the backup shell script on a regular interval. There are a couple ways to do this. Since I am Unix guy I immediately started looking at cron. I discovered however that Apple recommends you use launchd for scheduled tasks. It is fairly complex to setup a scheduled task using launchd but thankfully someone has already created a simple GUI that will let you do it. The application Lingon can be used for this. I’ve included the latest version at the time of writing this in the s3backup directory but you can always obtain the latest version from http://lingon.sourceforge.net/. Once you have launched Lingon you need provide some information. Click the “New” button to start a new agent. Choose “Users Daemons” so that the script will run as root and have access to all of the users on your Mac. Once you have created your new daemon you need to give it a name. I recommend something like com.vallery.s3backup where vallery is your name. You need to give the command line action for what to execute. Again, this assumes that you have stored the s3backup folder in /Library. Enter: “/bin/bash /Library/s3backup/backup.sh > /dev/null”. Lastly you need to give it a schedule as to when to run. I have mine setup to “At a specific date” with “Every day” selected and the time set to 4:00am. This is great if your leave your Mac on all the time. You might select a different option so that you can make sure your Mac isn’t in use when it is doing the backup. Click the “Save” button. It will require you to type in your admin password and then restart your computer.
That is it, your system should run the first backup as schedule. It will take a long time initially as the upload speed is limited to your internet connection. Once the initial upload has taken place it will only upload files that are new or have changed going forward. The script is setup to backup everything in the /Users folder. If you would like to limit what is being backed up you can change this to something else.
In the unfortunate event you actually need to get data out of the s3 store there are a number of applications that you can use to do this. Initially I have been using Panic’s Transmit however it seems to have problems with the way s3sync is storing the data. I found another great free app called “S3 Browser” which has worked well for me. You can also use the Firefox plugin S3 Fox.