I vividly remember throwing the 40MB hard drive for my Mac Plus out the window of my college dorm room when it died. Although I checked that the coast was clear, I still managed to scare someone who yelled at me for a long time before I was able to calm her down… Yesterday, nearly two decades after I bought that hard drive, I bought two 2TB drives and a RAID enclosure to make a 4TB media storage drive for Shashwati. We need that much to make an high resolution output of our film for festivals which will look much better than what we've been showing people. (For more about our film see dontbeatmesir.com.) I've also had to adjust how I store media on my own computer, since the internal hard drive has no space for all the RAW photos I'm taking with my Cannon 500D. I easily shoot 16GB in a weekend and I only have about 20GB of space left on the drive. Add to that the fact that I need to back up everything and you quickly see how overwhelming media management has become in the days of high definition photos and videos. So what to do without breaking the bank? Below is the solution I've come up with. It might not work for everyone, but something like this should cover most people's needs.

Early on in the summer blockbuster Inception the main character, Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is looking to hire a dream "architect" and he gives Ariadne (Ellen Page) a test: Can she create, in less than 60 seconds, a two-dimensional maze which takes more than 60 seconds to solve? I feel this scene perfectly captures the spirit of the screenplay which Christopher Nolan has supposedly been working on since he was 16 years old. The film is basically a thriller, an action film, albiet one with a few more plot twists than spoon-fed modern audiences are used to. What makes it special is that, for most viewers (including myself) sorting out all the twists and turns of the plot takes a little longer than the 148 minutes it takes to watch the film. It is a film that keeps you thinking after you leave the theater, but not for much longer than that. By the time you've finished your after-movie dinner all the pieces have fallen into place and you can forget the film much as you would forget any summer blockbuster.

Eyeless in Gaza | The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/eyeless-gaza/

There is another critical facet to the shift that has taken place. Under conditions of escalating nationalist hysteria, Israeli dissent is harshly dealt with. Ezra Nawi, one of the heroes of Israeli nonviolent resistance to the occupation, is now in jail. (He was convicted of assaulting a policeman while protesting the demolition of houses in South Hebron, although there is excellent evidence, including video footage, showing Ezra acting in the classic mode of Gandhian-style nonviolent resistance on that day.) The determined protestors against the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, are constantly being arrested and rearrested (meanwhile, another two large Palestinian families there have received eviction notices); leaders of the Israeli Arab community, such as Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, have received death threats and are routinely harassed by the security forces.

The villages of Bil’in and Na’alin, where nonviolent protest against the route of the security fence was pioneered and has continued without interruption for over four years, are now a closed military zone, off limits to Israeli peace activists. More important still is the attempt to break the back of nonviolent grassroots protest in Palestine by arresting and sometimes prosecuting, on trumped-up charges, the leading activists in the villages to the south and west of Jerusalem; someone has clearly identified this mode of resistance as a serious threat to the occupation. At least some of the items on this list may be explained by the fact that internal security is now in the hands of the ultra-right party Yisrael Beitenu, which has given us Foreign Minister Lieberman (he also, of course, voted to attack the flotilla).

(via Instapaper)

“What are those?” “Leech marks,” he said. “From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while you’re hiking through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they’re stuck there, fat with blood. You sprinkle salt on them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife.”

I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been singed. I asked Lolo if it had hurt. 

“Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”  

We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts. A queer notion suddenly sprang into my head.

“Have you ever seen a man killed?” I asked him.He glanced down, surprised by the question. “Have you?” I asked again. “Yes,” he said. “Was it bloody?” 

“Y es.” I thought for a moment. “Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” “Because he was weak.” “That’s all?” Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. “That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?”  

I didn’t answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. “Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

It wasn't too long ago that I was writing posts comparing Firefox vs. Safari. When Chrome came along I thought it would solve the problem, combining the best of both worlds and adding some nice new features as well. However, since Safari 5 came out I've noticed that my iMac functions much faster. This is strange, because I run apps to measure memory and CPU usage and Chrome was very good on both counts. It is true that memory usage is slightly better in Safari, but Chrome wasn't so much of a memory hog that this can explain the difference. And Chrome seems to actually use less processor power than Safari! I suspect that OS X simply doesn't like having too many processes running at the same time, and Chrome would spawn multiple new processes for each new tab. But that is just a guess. Another possibility is that Safari is even better at reducing its memory usage when it is running in the background? Whatever the cause, I hope a future update to Chrome will solve the problem…

The main advantages Chrome has over Safari are the "omnibar," which I've come to prefer over having search and URL separated, extensions, which can now be enabled in Safari (and for which there are already a bunch of decent options, including AdBlock), and keyword search. Only in switching to Safari do I realize how much I've come to depend on Chrome's keyword search feature. Without it I feel like I'm web browsing with one hand tied behind my back. There is an application, keywurl, which adds this feature to Safari, but so far it isn't working with Safari 5. I tried the work-around on this page, but I found it just caused Safari to crash... There are some other apps which provide similar functionality, but they don't seem as good. I guess I'll just wait and hope that the keywurl developer comes out with a fix soon...