Shirt Pocket Watch

Those who know me know that I’m relatively obsessed with coffee… a harmless vice. I always grind my own beans, but over many years I hadn’t found a really great grinder that wasn’t dedicated purely to espresso. Good ones, sure, but nothing great.

I have to admit, when I first saw the Kitchen Aid Pro Line grinder, I didn’t take it seriously. The overly stylized design, combined with the total lack of any historical “corporate” experience with coffee from Kitchen Aid, basically screamed “keep far, far away”! I mean, come on—these guys make stand mixers, and they’re echoing that design in the grinder!

Then I kept seeing it mentioned positively in a lot of different places, including the utterly obsessed Coffee Geek site. I mean, they liked it? Hmm…

I tend to brew “regular coffee” using various “direct infusion” methods: French Press ("Push Pot"), an Eva Solo Cafe Solo (great pot, actually), and a number of different Vacuum pots. All of these have one common element: they need a coarse grind, or the cup ends up muddy.

It’s harder than you might think to get a consistent coarse grind. Many grinders, including my previous Solis Maestro, can be set coarsely, but the coffee they produce isn’t uniform: fine particles are mixed with coarse ones. So, when the Solis decided that it wasn’t going to feed beans without constant prodding from a chopstick even after extensive cleaning (resulting in a delightful “woody” mix of bean and stick), I decided to give the Kitchen Aid a shot.

And I’m glad I did. I still think the design is over the top, but the grinder itself works great. The coffee particles are remarkably consistent, and there’s very little residue left in the cup. The unit is quiet, and the bean hopper/auger setup delivers a consistent flow of beans to the vertical burrs. And the whole thing is relatively static free, too.

Overall, a big thumbs up. If you grind your own coffee, you’ll love this thing. (And it’s $25 off at Amazon right now if you use the coupon code VALENTIN at checkout.)

Khoi Vinh, late of Behavior (now the Design Director for the New York Times) and the genius of grid-based designs (I wish my own site looked one-one-millionth as good as stuff he tosses into the trash), recently had a catastrophic hard drive failure (all too common, believe me):

I feel very fortunate, though; immediately after the first signs of trouble, I quit my procrastination and scheduled full backups of the hard drive on alternating nights to two different external FireWire drives — aided in no small part by the sheer awesomeness of Shirt Pocket Software’s invaluable SuperDuper! product. As a result, I lossed less than a day’s worth of work; not perfect, but it could have been loads worse.

SuperDuper! made it exceedingly easy for me to create a complete, bootable mirror of my hard drive, which actually allows me to continue to use the same system — with all of my files, preferences and software tweaks intact — with another Macintosh. I pulled my old Aluminum 15-inch PowerBook G4 out of retirement and booted it from one of the backup FireWire drives.

via Subtraction, Khoi’s blog. Exactly the idea—glad SuperDuper! could be of service!

Our “production” iMac hit the Shirt Pocket loading dock (aka my front step) yesterday, and I’ve been busily working on updates to netTunes and launchTunes while Bruce works on completing the next update to SuperDuper!, which looks like it will be Universal as well.†

It’s been nice to get back to Xcode after some time off (my design/marketing/documentation/support/etc duties keep me away from it more than I’d like), and it didn’t take more than a few hours to do the netTunes conversion—it’s up and running as I type, and works great.

The big challenge with netTunes was the screen “scraping”—the code has some byte-order dependencies because of pixels, and I wasn’t looking forward to re-writing the “inner loop” to handle all the various cases with Thousands and Millions of colors using both MMX and Altivec. Blegh.

Fortunately, there was an elegant solution. Since the Intel Mac is Tiger-only, I was able to make use of some the new Accelerate framework APIs to eliminate byte order dependencies and—at least under Tiger—about two pages of nasty code. Since the Intel Macs can’t run Panther, I didn’t have to change the already-working parts. The result? Both the Intel and PPC versions benefit, at least under 10.4.

It’s always a good feeling when you can delete code and leave the hardware-specific optimization up to the guys who live and breathe vector processing units, let me tell you.

Anyway, we’re working hard to get the Universal binaries out the door. Obviously, it’s important to do extensive testing using real, production hardware—and we’re doing just that.

† - Updated for the exclamation point haters. You know who you are.

You can boot off USB drives on Intel-based Macs. This opens the world of USB 2.0-only drives to Macs users as bootable backup devices. That sound? It’s David Nanian drooling.

from Tales from the Red Shed & Jonathan Rentzsch

Egad, was I that loud? >wipes chin<

Looks like the fine folks at Bare Bones Software have released Yojimbo, an great new take on the organizer-cum-database that many have tried, and failed, to do well…

The Yojimbo team has done a great job, addressing many of the classic missteps directly, with:

• A good first cut at a smart “Quick Input” panel that analyzes what’s on the clipboard and pre-fills as much as possible
• Rapid, global search capabilities that make it easy to locate things—including Spotlight support
• A useful set of built-in datatypes
• Easy “sub” organization using groups and tags
• Full support for “archived” web pages, PDFs and the like
• Item-by-item encryption
• And, best of all, transparent, multi-machine synchronization through SyncServices and .mac

They’ve leveraged the great new features of Tiger like CoreData, SyncServices and—hey!—it’s even a Cocoa app!

The price is a very reasonable $39 for a single user on any number of (automatically synchronized) computers, with family pack and educational pricing, too.

To top it off, there’s a free, 30-day demo. There’s no excuse not to check it out—go to it!

Although I haven’t yet seen the full review, some UK Macworld readers have written in to tell me that there’s a full page review of SuperDuper in the latest issue. 4.5 stars, and this great quote:

There are just three groups of people who should be using this excellent utility. Lunatic frontiersmen with a penchant for early beta software, paranoid data hoarders who think that the next crash is just a restart away, and everybody else.

from Richard Dyce’s review in Macworld UK‘s February 2006 issue. Thanks, Richard & Macworld UK!

Hey, cool! It looks like SuperDuper! received a Gold MaxFixIt Toolbox Award this year!

A good backup strategy should be the base of any troubleshooting plan. This versatile disk copying program can make a straight copy, or “clone”—useful when you want to move all your data from one machine to another, or do a simple backup. The real power, however, lies in its ability “checkpoint” your system, preserving your computer’s critical applications and files while you run on a working, bootable copy.

Thanks, MacFixIt!

It’s hard to believe another year is gone, but belief has nothing to do with it. A few hours and *poof*—goodbye, 2005.

It’s been a big year for Shirt Pocket, with a number of product releases, none bigger than v2.0 of SuperDuper!—something Bruce and I had been working on since the year before. And our customers seem to love it, which is gratifying indeed.

We were honored to receive another Eddy, this year for SuperDuper! 1.5—our second in a row, after 2004’s Eddy for netTunes. Incredibly cool to get that kind of recognition.

On a more personal level, I started blogging this year, about 5 years late to the party, but at least I’m here and enjoying it.

Zabeth is deep into her third year of Veterinary School, and transitioning to clinical studies early in 2006, which might mean I need to call her “Dr.” soon.

And Ketzl is still with us: happy, healthy (apart from the progressing DM), and the source of much joy and sadness.

No doubt next year will bring more changes, more releases, more joy, more sorrow.

Thanks to all of you for your support, encouragement, criticism and for spreading the word about Shirt Pocket and our products. Without you, the year would have been a lesser one: I’m sure I’ll be talking to more of you on the forums, through the support lines, and on the blog.

I’m looking forward to it. A toast: to the end of 2005, and to you!

I know it’s more of a Thanksgiving kind of post, but the best gift we got this year—even though most of it happened before Christmas—was another year with Ketzl.

A year ago, we were well post-DM-diagnosis. Ketzl had already lost the use of one leg, and was weakening on the other. We’d started her Physical Therapy, and she was doing her water treadmill, and a few months later, as she lost use of the other leg, we got her a dog wheelchair.

The time since has been challenging but rewarding. Ketzl has done well, and while the progression to her inevitable demise continues—as it does for all of us—she’s done better than we ever expected. Working with her is time consuming, exhausting but very rewarding.

And while we don’t know how much more time we’ll have together, or whether she’ll get to her 9th birthday in March, we’re thankful for this past year… an unexpected, and priceless, gift.

Thanks, Ketzl.

Let’s talk, for a moment, about acquiring music.

As you might guess from netTunes, I’m a bit of a music fanatic. I’ve bought a lot of music in my day, and expect to buy a lot more. But, I rarely listen to “music radio”, and rely on friends, happenstance, and sometimes NPR to point me to new stuff.

But it’s not always easy to tell from brief exposure whether a new album is worth buying. Sometimes you need ten, fifteen, twenty plays to decide whether it’s something to add to the “owned” pile. 30 second snippets just won’t do it.

Now, sure, I could follow The Path of the Torrent, but I really don’t like doing that, regardless of whether or not I agree with the RIAA and their positions. And I hate shelling out $15 for something that I end up never playing.

So, what to do?

What I do is pretty simple: I use Rhapsody. Yes, it costs me $10 a month, and is extremely tied to the computer. (And I do want to own the music I love, and do whatever I want with it, especially with regard to device shifting.) But that doesn’t matter, because I use it to sample things. If I find it’s music I want to keep, I buy the CD and pop it into the library. And, if not, it saved me more than the cost of the CD, and the storage for the physical media, too. So I’m finding more music I like, and buying less music I don’t.

And now they’ve got a version for the Mac that—while not full featured—works well for exactly this purpose. You might want to check it out—I’m glad I did.