envato

“We started in 2006 with a simple idea – make awesome websites”. I think Envato is living up to their ideals. Every single one of their sites is well designed and usually has great content. I had no idea a single company made Tuts+ (a series of websites which does tutorials and how-tos for things like Photoshop, Illustrator, 3d design, Flash, etc) and Freelance Switch (a site about being a freelancer).

What makes me point them out today is that I came across AppStorm.net which is comprised for 3 sites focusing on web, iphone, and mac apps. Again, the content on each site is top notch. I just spent the last hour reading reviews for all sorts of slick looking apps that I’ve never even heard of.

It’s great to see a company doing such a wide variety of content based sites (and even charging for their premium content on Tuts+). I highly recommend you check them out (if you’re a nerd or a designer).

YouTube – The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations. i’ve heard some of those lines. none of them became clients. via pete.

superduper indeed

I’m one of those people who never ever backed-up their computer. Never. Didn’t even consider it. I only started because back-ups with Time Machine on Mac OSX was so damn easy that I would have been foolish not to. I’m not someone with an ungodly amount of music or photos or ripped TV shows so I bought a portable USB-powered Western Digital hard drive (WD even has this model up to 750G in size). This thing has been a total gem. I’ve had no problems with it, it doesn’t need external power so it just sits attached to my monitor, and it’s the size of an iPod so if I ever need to share enormous files with someone I just bring it with me.

Then, a few months ago, I started thinking about Time Machine and how I use it: never. I had never actually put Time Machine to use. Every important document I have is on Google Docs, all of my code is stored (with complete history) on github, and my music and photos were archived on my iPod. I really had no need for historical snapshots of my data.

What I did worry about was my computer breaking and needing to work on a loaner for several days or having it completely die, needing to buy a new machine, and spending a full day setting up the machine (In my mind, this event always occurs in the middle of a deadline or while pushing something into production).

Going from a salaried employee to a bill-by-the-hour contractor does a lot of things to you, one of them is always putting a clear dollar value on your time. Losing the ability to bill clients for several days is something I consider “very expensive”. Luckily, there’s a very cheap solution to my problem. It’s called SuperDuper.

The app is simple and phenomenal and well worth it’s $28USD price tag. Every day at noon it starts making an exact bootable duplicate of my hard drive. The first backup took about 90 minutes and daily ones take about 15 minutes. This means that if my hard drive or computer died right now I could plug my external drive into another computer and it would boot up and function exactly the same. It wouldn’t be as fast as my internal drive but it would definitely suffice until I got a replacement drive or computer. Hell, if I was traveling somewhere and I knew whomever I was visiting had a Mac, I could bring my whole computer just by bringing my external drive.

Anyways, I’ve really enjoyed using SuperDuper and thought I’d point it out.

entp – web incubator and consultancy. nice redesign.

KOLOR | Commmunication Design. congrats lukas on the new site. i like the horizontal sliding case studies.

[Fly on the Wall] Xerox logo, long receipts, Argentina, and Cook’s Illustrated – (37signals). read the “Argentina vs. US” part.

ideasonideas » Spiekermann gives us the business “Q: What do you feel stands in the way of your firm doing even better work? A: Young, know-all MBAs who avoid risk because they don’t want to endanger their career prospects.”