The idea was, given the tiny little hard drive on my MacBook Air, I'd use the Thunderbolt for external storage for everything I'm doing.

Initial Impressions

The Thunderbolt drive is fast. It's surprisingly fast, even under heavy CPU load.

I tried a variety of benchmarks and settled on two. The first is the AJA System Test and the second is my own HD Speed Test (which accurately measures real video going through the CPU, GPU and OS X libraries).

In the case of the AJA System Test, I benchmarked three drives:

Western Digital 1TB USB 2

As expected, this drive is slow. Unfortunately, as I've gone on and on about for years on podcasts, in person and on my blog, the USB standard is one of the stupidest data transfer systems ever created by anyone. It is serial, but requires heavy processing power to encode and decode the serial information.

So, a theoretically 480 Mb/s (or 60 MB/s) drive ends up being 320 Mb/s (approximately 40 MB/s) and eats up 30% or more of your system processor just moving data around. Read speeds are slightly higher, for a variety of reasons, but still way under the expected speed of the advertised speed of the transport.

Anyway...

Internal, MacBook Air SSD

You can't edit video on a MacBook Air!

How many times have I heard this phrase since the original Air came out and I was editing video on that too. Remember, much of Star Wars: Episode 1 used computers which are so much less powerful than the MacBook Air. Anyway, I digress.

The internal SSD on the MacBook Air is fast. AJA Speed Test kind of flakes out on it, but it's obviously more than the pathetic 29 MB/s writes and 36 MB/s reads from the USB 2 drive above.

Some of my testing has shown more than 100 MB/s during some short-burst operations.

LaCie 1TB Thunderbolt

Here's where the inclusion of a controller chip in the cable the the offloading of data transfer from the processor really starts to pay off. The LaCie just flies through data and the MacBook Air's processor doesn't even break a sweat during even the largest of operations.

AJA says ~180 MB/s reads and ~150 MB/s writes, but it also shows a wildly inconsistent burst during reads and writes and I am suspicious of their "average speed" during this process.

I load up my own program, HD Speed Test, and benchmark the drive using real video processing to see what's up.

Not as pretty, but the same inconsistent read and write speeds, with the same strange trailing off toward the end of the reads/writes and a spattering of peaks and valleys as the data transfer completes.

Sustained Speed: 93.8 MB/s

Not bad! 2+ simultaneous streams of 1080p HD video and realtime capture on RED 4k video!

The not-so-good

The LaCie 1TB drive is pretty expensive. It clocks in at $450 with the Thunderbolt cable.

The drive itself is quite small, but it is heavy, weighing as much as an Apple iPad.

The Thunderbolt cable is super long. Like 2 meters long. It coils like a giant snake next to my laptop. I wish there were a shorter version.

As mentioned in other places, the small connections on either end of the Thunderbolt cable (attached to the computer and attached to the drive) get hot. We are talking bottom-of-the-MacBook-hot, after sustained data copies -- even from USB to Thunderbolt.

My overall impression

Someone reviewed this drive in the Online Apple Store and said:

My WD and Seagate regular USB 2.0 are barely audible with the exception of a few "clicks," while this sounds like an old PC's fan, ready for takeoff.

This is completely false. The LaCie Little Big Disk is super quiet, even under heavy load. I have it next to my laptop, on my desk, and -- as sensitive as I am to noise -- I have never heard the LaCie make any fan-related sound.

I'm guessing the $999.00 (or higher) Promise Pegasus RAID is significantly faster. I've seen the benchmarks from Victor Cajiao of Typical Mac User (who was also on an episode of Scruffy Thinking and from Macworld and they are impressive, but the system is not portable, so...

I think the price is still a bit high.

Photo taken with a Canon SD780 IS

An unfocused, long and winding entry about things I love

It is hard to stay focused. Many things capture our attention. Too many interruptions prevent us from realizing our full potential.

I am the Kwisatz Haderach of distraction. I tend to find something I am interested in, follow it to the ends of the earth, then -- eventually -- decide whether I want to pursue it further and do anything with the months (possibly years) of knowledge I've accumulated on the trail of said interesting thing.

This can be both a blessing and a curse. It can cause others to look into my life and believe me to be unfocused and it causes immediate family to consider the possibility of ADHD.

The thing is, I'm not unfocused nor am I incapable of finishing something I've started. I just get interested in way too many things, which causes me to always be searching.

That Pesky OS X Dock

I have tried, and mostly failed, to keep my dock under control. The dock is a strange and wonderful place, where applications go to live or they go to die a horrible death, seen but completely ignored forever.

My Dock represents applications in roughly the order of importance or their order of use on my system. In my case, the Finder takes top spot and cannot change position, and is then followed by:

• Google Chrome
• The Sparrow Mail Client, which has completely replaced the dumb-as-dirt Apple Mail
• Twitter
• AdiumX, which integrates into Facebook, AIM and Skype for chat
• Skype, which I have to use for work & calls
• Reeder App which is the best RSS reader ever made
• iA Writer and ByWord, because I haven't decided on the One True Editor yet (see below)
• TextMate for writing code
• Lightroom, which recently replaced iPhoto+Others
• Terminal, always open
• Acorn, the Image Editor for Humans
• GarageBand for podcasting (see below)
• Final Cut Pro X
• iTunes, always open
• App Store
• And, VLC, which is open, but normally not in the dock, and plays all my media files

Pens and paper

As much as everyone loves the idea of getting away from pen and paper, the reality is that pen and paper are a necessity. Sure, I'd love to pull out my fancy, lightweight, digital writing tool and just whip through some quick notes. But that is not a reality.

The iPad goes a long way toward making this easier, but the iPad is 1.5 lbs (.6 kg) and not easily put in your pocket along with a small writing device. By the time the iPad has been pulled out of a bag, turned on, navigated to the proper application and then used to jot down a quick note, the person has lost interest in sharing the information -- or worse -- the information has already passed you by and you no longer remember the details.

As such, a small notebook and pen or pencil are difficult to replace.

An aside about the iPhone:

Likely, you believe you can just grab the iPhone, write something quickly, then be done with it. That is mostly true for phone numbers, names and text-based information. But, when something even slightly more complicated happens, the iPhone fails where a $1 notepad and 25 cent pen succeed.

Loving on Paper

I have tried probably three dozen different types of pens and paper. I have done my best to find the one that works in almost every situation. So far, only three stand out as "You must own one" from the 30+ I've used over the last decade.

• Doane Paper grid + lines
• Field Notes Brand
• Kikkerland WritersBlok

I also love WritersBlok Small Grid notebooks.

The Actual Writing

Over the last year, at the advice of a few smart people, I've moved all my creative writing into text-based formats. I believe Markdown support is pretty much the lingua franca of the modern writing world and could not imagine writing HTML or Rich Text Format documents at all anymore.

Text files sync easily and quickly. The changes can be seen, without a huge amount of effort. They can be put into a versioning system and you can see the diff between several versions easily.

The fact that more people are not writing in Markdown is surprising to me. Heck, even SquareSpace supports Markdown as one of their default formatting options.

iPad vs. Mac

For almost a year, I used only the iPad as my primary computer. Then, I started doing heavy development and needed something with a terminal prompt, local storage and a keyboard attached. I used a Netbook for a while, running Linux.

Now, I use the MacBook Air 11" almost exclusively for everything I do, uncluding video editing and podcasting. I cannot imagine going back to anything else.

I intend to move to a 13" MacBook Air, once Thunderbolt has been added to the system and OS X Lion has been officially released.

Text Editor

I have spent years trying to find the one true text editor (on the Mac and/or iPad).

It has to support Markdown, as I use Markdown for everything these days, including my web site and blog posts (even SquareSpace now supports Markdown).

Also cool to note, iTunes supports Markdown if you add it to your podcast description. It translates Markdown to HTML for your podcast item in iTunes.

I've stared at and used:

• TextMate
• ByWord
• iA Writer
• Omm Writer Dana II

Of these tools, my go to app for writing code is TextMate. Although it is a bit long in the tooth and needs an update, the Bundles and the color themes make it the best code editor on the Mac, in my opinion.

Some people use TextMate for writing blogs and text-based documents, but I like to create a separation of creative writing and writing code, so I am always interested in finding a pure text editor for my creative writing efforts.

I've tried BBEdit, TextWrangler and others, but the three which have stuck with me are ByWord, iA Writer and Omm Writer Dana II.

Of these three tools, all of which I love dearly, the two I keep going back to are iA Writer and ByWord.

About iA Writer

iA Writer is beautiful. It works well, the default (and only) font is pretty great, if a bit larger than I'd like and the whole thing seems to be a perfect fit for writing Markdown.

In fact, iA Writer formats Markdown so well, it makes writing Markdown seem more like a standard way of writing text than anything else you'd use as a formatting option.

iA Writer has no preferences, so you get what you get.

The one major complaint about the software is the default window size for a new text document, which seems geared toward a Netbook screen because it is wide, but not very tall.

iA Writer is $17.99 US in the App Store

About ByWord

My new, and with a few changes, favorite text editor has to be ByWord. It has come on strong, features a full-screen mode (just like iA Writer) and has all the features of iA Writer, except for one: inline Markdown syntax.

However, ByWord features three things that make it potentially better than iA Writer:

1. The ability to write in Rich Text Format.
2. The ability to change the default font.
3. The ability to change the background from white to black.

Luckily, you can preview Markdown and export to HTML with a few clicks or a single hot-key, which gives it a similar feel as iA Writer, at almost half the price.

My major complaint about ByWord is the seemingly unecessary space at the top and bottom of the interface when writing, so I lose screen space. This annoys me enough to push me back into iA Writer at least once during any writing session.

Otherwise, it is only $9.99 in the App Store and is very fast and functional.

Podcasts

I have killed the Life Zero podcast in favor of Scruffy Thinking which is coming soon.

I have restarted the That Post Show podcast available in iTunes after a two-year hiatus.

As part of this process, and the process of simplification of applications on my system, I decided to edit in GarageBand instead of Pro Tools or Logic Pro.

After all, GarageBand comes with the Mac, supports Podcasting by default and even allows you to add a photo for your podcast and "liner notes" to anything you export.

Pro Tools, which I love, is too expensive for just podcasting, has a steep learning curve and is yet-another-application to be installed.

Logic Pro seems all but abandoned by Apple and requires over 30 Gigabytes of Hard Drive to install, so it was a kind of no-go for my podcasting efforts.

While I like, but not love, GarageBand. I can tell you with certainty that -- so far -- the audio output is vastly inferior to that of Pro Tools or Logic Pro. This is something I am working on for future podcasts.

Development

I already talked about TextMate a bit. I write C and Lisp code (almost every day) and I'll talk more about those topics in the future.

Errata

I had planned to discuss reading, social networks and a few more issues, but I just ran into the soft limit of article length I've given myself, so I'll save those for another day.