Review: Eye-Fi Explore X2

My 3 year old son loves playing with our digital camera which is fine, but I'm afraid that he's going to accidentally delete pictures. I've tried giving him an old camera, but he wants to use the camera that mommy and daddy use. There are really only a few ways to prevent accidental erasure of the pictures. First, download all pictures immediately after taking them. This is a bit impractical. Second, put in a second memory card that he can use. A bit impractical and he likes to see the pictures we take. The last option is the Eye-Fi series of SD cards.

In decided to purchase the Eye-Fi Explore X2 and give it a go. It isn't a cheap solution, but my hope was that it would be a fool proof way to keep all our digital memories.

Out of the box, the card was pretty easy to setup. However, I went to the Eye-Fi Web site and downloaded the software first which may have been a mistake. They offered 2 options; newer software and older software. I chose the older software as it looked like it would be a pure Mac application. I installed the software and basically it checked for an update and downloaded the newer software. After that, setup was pretty easy. I configured it to use my WiFi access point and also to use my MiFi in case we were out and about.

I snapped a few pictures and then fired up iPhoto. iPhoto imported the pictures and wow, that was cool. After some poking, I determined that the Eye-Fi software uses an undocumented feature of iPhoto to import the pictures (it drops them in an Auto Import folder in the iPhoto Library). I changed the settings to import to a folder as it would be more reliable (I think I lost a photo in the transfer process because of the Auto Import hack). My wife and son have been taking pictures and almost instantly I see a preview on my machine and the pictures get downloaded; very cool.

I haven't had a chance to take pictures outside and then come home to see what happens, but that should happen this week.

The software on the Mac, frankly, is awful. Luckily it is only needed for setup. Instead of doing a web interface or even a full Mac application, they chose to do the background part as a Mac application and the foreground application as an Adobe Air application.

Pros

• Easy to use and setup.
• Automatic operation to upload locally or to sharing sites.
• Automatic rollover of the card deletes old photos when card fills up.
• Ability to control what goes to photo sharing site via camera's "protect" feature.

Cons

• Unable to work with Gallery 3 (OK, Gallery 3 isn't done, yet, but I wanted to use it for sharing).
• Uses a hack to integrate with iPhoto which could cause data loss if Apple removes the feature and/or iPhoto is open.
• Expensive (about $100 for 8 GB vs. about $15 for a regular 8 GB card).
• Geotagging may not always work especially if you're not near WiFi access points.
• Geotagging may present privacy concerns if you upload to a photo sharing site.
• If you use a photo sharing site, the Eye-Fi uses their servers as a proxy. Paranoid people may not want their photos going through their servers.
• If the company shuts down in the future, the online sharing feature will stop working.

Summary

While the Eye-Fi cards are not cheap, they are an excellent way to easily transfer photos from your camera to your computer or a photo sharing site. This will help prevent data loss and make it more convenient than plugging in a card. If you have some extra cash or are very concerned about losing the data on your camera, I'd definitely recommend getting one. However, just transferring the photos to your computer only partially solves the problem about preventing data loss. If you don't backup your photos, you could still experience loss. On one podcast I heard recently, they recommend 3-2-1; 3 copies of important data, 2 different media, and 1 offsite backup. I do 3 and 1 as 2 different types of media is getting harder and harder with the amount of photos I have. Data backup is a topic for another post.

A stab at another VPS

Several weeks ago, the VPS (virtual private server) that I use to host my blog and Web site went down for more than 6 hours. The service, like most VPS services, has a 99%+ uptime guarantee. Well, the uptime guarantee is kind of useless as the site is still down and the few bucks credit I got aren't really worth much. Their support folks didn't get back to me until the end of the outage and then gave some excuse that they were short staffed. By the time the site had come back up, I had already signed up with another VPS and restored my site (I have scripts on the VPS that backup nightly and then everyday, my Mac syncs down the backups). The whole setup process takes me about 2 hours as my VPS isn't all that complicated.

So, now I'm trying out 123Systems Solutions on their second level VPS (25 GB disk space, 1 TB traffic, 512 MB RAM burstable to 1 GB). I found a discount code and brought the price to just over $10/month. Like the last one, they offer an uptime guarantee. This one has only been around for a few months, so we'll see. Worst case is I move my VPS again; a little time consuming, but definitely not the end of the world. They have been quite responsive when I submitted a ticket and have communicated when they'd be short staffed. I'm also impressed with their control panel to manage it. However, their reverse DNS doesn't seem to work properly. Oh well, not the end of the world.

My new office

Yesterday, my wife asked if I wanted to come with her to pick up our son that was spending the day at my parents. I asked her what time and she said that she'd leave around 4pm. Hmmm, I had a 4 pm meeting. I said "sure", but she'd have to drive. 4 pm came around, I got on my phone call, turned on my Sprint MiFi, switched my Mac over to the MiFi's network and was all set.

I hopped in the car, put the MiFi on the dash and my wife drove. The hard part was seeing my screen, so I had to put a jacket over the screen.

No one was the wiser about my mobile office! We didn't encounter any dead cell spots, so the call went flawlessly and I was connected for the entire 30 minute or so ride.

I've had a MiFi for about a year, but for some reason I didn't use it much. Now that I'm paying for my own service, I feel compelled to use it to its fullest.

Leaving logging statements in production code

I've written in the past about how I think that leaving logging code in production or release builds is bad practice. While I have no objections to being able to turn debug logging on or off to help troubleshoot problems in the field, it shouldn't be on by default. Recently I've read conflicting views about leaving NSLog statements in code. One really good solution is:


#ifdef DEBUG_MODE
#define DebugLog( s, ... ) NSLog( @"%s %@:(%d) %@", __PRETTY_FUNCTION__,\
[[NSString stringWithUTF8String:__FILE__] lastPathComponent], __LINE__,\
[NSString stringWithFormat:(s), ##__VA_ARGS__] )
#else
#define DebugLog( s, ... )
#endif

(I've modified the solution a little.)

Then in Xcode's build settings, add a preprocessor macro for DEBUG_MODE. Presto, NSLog statements never make it into shipping code. If you need to turn the logging on and off, I like to write the statements out to a file so that they don't pollute Console and it makes it easier for users to send me logs. Furthermore, I've seen NSLog cause crashes because the developer passed the wrong arguments or did something like NSLog(@"test: %d, self). This type of bug should be fixed, but using the above logging would prevent the crash in production code.