Have you heard about the Drobo ? I’ve thought it was a wonderful idea for a long time: A little box in which you place however many hard drives you have, in whatever capacity they may be, and Drobo treats them like a RAID 1 & 5 simultaneously.

If anyone out there isn’t geeky enough to know a RAID allows you to store data in multiple places in case of drive failure. The group of disks acts as if it’s one simple drive on your computer.

However, RAIDs have their drawbacks. The main one being maintenance. Set up is a bear and recovery from a disk failure is tough. Your disks need to be matched in capacity. Drobo claims to have fixed all this. Drive fail? All your data is still available. Two disks may even be able to fail and you could still be up and running. Drobo filled up? Eject your smallest disk and insert a larger one. Drobo will rearrange. Ejecting is super easy. An array of lights tell you disk status and capacity status.

Very cool. And until today, I wouldn’t want one because it was USB 2.0 only. I’m no fan of USB.

Today, Drobo heard me and released a new version with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Nice. Wish granted.

Except I don’t have $500 for an empty one. Maybe some day soon.

Patton Oswalt is a funny guy. His latest CD (mp3) is proof of that. Especially if you’re a geeky sort of fellow. Apparently he also has the ability to provide wisdom. Which he did, peppered with humor, to the graduating class of his alma mater. The entire speech is worth a read.

So, 1987. That’s when I got my diploma. But I want to tell you something that happened the week before I graduated. It was life-changing, it was profound, and it was deeper than I realized at the time.

The week before graduation I strangled a hobo. Oh wait, that’s a different story. That was college. I’m speaking at my college later this month. I’ve got both speeches here. Let me sum up the college speech – always have a gallon of bleach in your trunk.

Discovered at The Best Week Ever

I haven’t posted about Twitter in a while. I think Twitter posts make, like, half of my content on this blog over the last calendar year. Clearly, I can only post consistently if I talk about Twitter.

That’s why I’m pleased to show you WTFisTwitter.com

The problem: try explaining Twitter to a non-geek family member. OK, now try to do that in a sentence or two! Did they understand after either take?

WTFisTwitter is short videos of people trying to explain what Twitter is.

BTW, none of these explanations will remotely help you explain to someone what Twitter is. But they’re entertaining.

(via Whitney)

Penguin Books hosts yearly contests in which design students design covers for famous Penguin Books. A great contest, with some absolutely beautiful work.

So why does the web site fail so miserably?

While the overall layout is pleasing, the light grey text is nearly unreadable on the white background.

Click on a piece to view it. The large detail view is what most people would consider a thumbnail. These are embarrassingly small. These students work so hard, but those of us who are interested in viewing their work can, who seek it out can, at best, only get the drift.

Most computer monitors are as tall as your average paperback book. So why can’t we view these at near-100% scale? It’s an art website! Yes, we’ll wait for the images to load at high quality. We’re there for fidelity!

Instead we’re fed a spoonful of fail.

It’s not too difficult to configure the basics of Subversion (Leopard includes it). But it’s not a huge leap to want the server component running perpetually in the background. That’s not as straight forward. Instructions exist but a few snags with launchctl means you cannot automate svnserve’s launch. It didn’t work on the first try for me.

But after that hurdle an issue arose where my machine starts the service, and then restarts it, again and again. A little digging reveals the console reporting “Exited with exit code: 1” and if you look at the launchctl list the status is also set to 1. Google isn’t much help so it’s time for trial and error. After pulling a few commands from the .plist file there’s still a successful launch and the restart problem goes away.

The following are the superfluous properties (it’s possible there are more you can remove).

<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>

Happy editing!

I was holding off until I had a few posts in the system to announce my latest blog project, but then I simply forgot that I hadn’t ever noted its launch here! I had to read through our archives back till August of 2007 to make sure I hadn’t posted about it (when I first installed the software for the new blog.) Alas, I’ve buried the lead!

I’d love for you to check out my new blog, Evolve.

At Evolve I’ll be examining where education meets technology and design. I think so many people are focused on EdTech, but so few are focused on getting the user interaction right. Many think technology will make education better, but it can’t do that by itself. Like raw steel, it must be hammered and formed and bent into submission by skilled and passionate craftsmen, so that technology serves its masters. Much of that forming is experience and interaction and visual design. If books were as poorly designed as most educational web sites, no one would read.

Join me in fighting the good fight at Evolve.

I can’t remember the last time I was excited for a Monday, especially when I first started thinking about Monday on Friday!

I’m more excited for this WWDC that those before for a couple of reasons.

1) Leo Laporte and Andy Ihnatko coverage at TwitLive.tv – instead of refreshing three different blogs who may or may not actually have someone inside the Steve Jobs keynote in Moscone West, I’ll be watching/listening to two experts, who are refreshing three different blogs who may or may not actually have someone inside the Steve Jobs keynote in Moscone West. Perhaps there will be guest appearances from Merlin Mann or other MacBreak Weekliers.

2) The great unknown. I think this year’s keynote is as wide open any in recent memory. Basically, all the major rumors of the past ten years in the Apple world have been laid to rest.

Hopefully, that means positive surprises. I think that the announcement of a 3G iPhone (or phones), .Mac makeover and a preview of where both the mobile, “Touch” OS and Mac OS are heading are likely. However, that leaves the floor open for “one more thing” that we didn’t see coming.

I would love, given my involvement in education, to see some announcement there. I think a cheaper version of a MacBook Air would be a perfect general-use student machine, one that could go with you pretty much everywhere. Adding Firewire would make it a better match for doing student-level video (read: iMovie, video podcast complexity only—more would require a beefier machine) and the last problem would be upping the storage and dropping the price. Not education specific, but adding optional 3G connectivity would really knock it out of the ballpark. (It would be a shame to lose your one USB port to an external modem)

I’m not holding my breath.

What are you looking for at this year’s WWDC?

Many foreign countries you travel to have paper currency in a multitude of sizes and colors. While the US Treasury has been peppering our bills with color in recent years they have ignored the benefits of size. Different sizes for different denominations helps you find the right bills. Whether you have the gift of sight or not.

Finally it looks like the courts are going to fix that. The American Council of the Blind has been fighting in court to force a redesign of paper currency. It’s about time.

There are many pieces of entertainment that can be construed as guilty pleasures. MacGyver was a popular tv show in the late eighties and the latter seasons have not aged well. This has caused some pop culture negativity. When you say MacGyver in public you can receive two basic responses. Some point out his pseudo mullet and laugh. Others get silly grins and reference Swiss Army Knives and Duct Tape.

Starting on my birthday I began acquiring the full season DVDs. And as I work my way through season 6 I can stand proud and exclaim the awesomeness of MacGyver. There is no guilt.

Gizmodo recently mentioned that the show’s creator, Lee David Zlotoff, is interested in crating a big budget movie of the property. Hopefully if this is greenlit it will do the classic justice. Yeah, I just called this show a classic.

Also…

• ‘MacGyver’ Coming to Theaters, and Not as an Intentional Comedy?

• Quote: Would a Modern Day MacGyver Still Use a Swiss Army Knife?

As if I didn’t have enough blogs (four, at last count) I post to, I began experimenting with Tumblr a few months back. It started out as a way to entice someone into posting more often. Then it became research on how to integrate that sudden flurry of activity into something importable into her normal blog (which, I hear, is being re-designed). Then it became something to investigate extending for a loved one to start using as she wanted to document an important time in her life.

I got to really appreciate it’s elegance and simplicity, even if I didn’t have a need for it. Well, “need” is rarely a qualification for something I start using, at least when it comes to technology.

Further experiments showed that Tumblr really excelled at video, mobloging, and with it’s stark modern aesthetic, it makes an excellent frame for photos.

So if you want to see some photos I take from my phone, videos I make or just generally entertaining rubbish, have a look at briandigital.tumblr.com