Tag Archives: media

Back It Up, Folks!

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If you’re not backing up your important data, you’re just waiting to lose it.

I was chatting with a fellow pilot the other day about archiving all the videos we accumulate with our GoPro cameras.

“I went to the store and bought a 5 TB hard drive for under $100,” he told me. “Every single photo or movie I ever recorded is on that disk.”

“How often do you back it up?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly. The truth is, he didn’t have a backup for it. He had every photo on one hard disk drive and it wasn’t backed up.

Hard Disk Crashes Happen

I’ve lived through more hard disk crashes than the average person. I’ve even lost a manuscript to a hard disk crash. I think it was that loss that taught me how important it is to back up every file I don’t want to lose.

As I type this, my 5 year old iMac is copying files from its internal hard disk to a backup disk. The iMac has been acting funky for a while and it got to the point where it just wasn’t functioning at all. I booted from the internal recovery disk and ran Disk First Aid on it. It found sectors it couldn’t fix. When I restarted from the normal startup disk, Finder wouldn’t work. For those of you who use Windows and don’t know Mac OS, it’s as if Windows won’t open anything for you. The solution was to go back into Recovery mode, make a new startup disk on an external hard disk, restart the Mac from that, and back up all my important files onto that new hard disk.

You might say, “Maria! Didn’t you already have a backup?”

To that, I say, of course I did. I actually have TWO backups of the entire going bad hard disk. But how can I possibly know if both of them are good when the source is bad? Why take chances? I’ll copy all the files over to make a third backup I know is good. Then I’ll reformat the bad drive and, hopefully, the problems will go away. Then I can reinstall the data files on the newly formatted hard drive. Or, in this case, on the computer I bought to replace it anyway. (I need to get that old iMac running to trade it in for the maximum cash back.)

As for backups of the new computer — a brand new 15″ MacBook Air I got to replace a 2 year old 13″ MacBook Air and the 5 year old 27″ iMac — I’ll periodically back up to an external hard disk, but I’ll also likely back up to the cloud. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s a good and reliable solution and I’m already paying for that cloud space. It would be dumb not to do it.

My Media Storage Solution

Going back to my GoPro and other media situation…

My media file archives and backups work like this: Each year, I buy a pair of 2 TB portable hard disks. I name one for the year and one for the year followed by BU. So this year’s disks are 2023 and 2023 BU. As I travel about, I copy all of my photos and videos from my phone, my Nikon, my GoPro, and my DJI drone to the hard disk for that year, organized by date. So a folder containing the videos from a flight I do today might be named 061923 Wenatchee Flight. When I get home from my travels, I use an app like SuperDuper to synchronize the two hard disks, using the primary one as the source. So if I add or remove files on that primary disk, those changes are automatically reflected on the backup disk.

Understand that the video files I accumulate are huge and take up a ton of storage space. The more I have, the more disk space I need. I’m trying very hard to keep total storage per year under 2 T, but this year I wound up buying 5 T drives because that’s all I could find. I’ll still just put one year’s worth of files on it.

If any of my original or backup disks go bad, I still have the other disk for that year. To lose a whole year’s worth of media, I’d have to lose both disks, which are seldom in the same location for any considerable length of time. To lose all my media, I’d have to lose all of my disks — there are about 6 years’ worth at this point so that’s 12 hard disks.

My friend, in my opinion, is putting all of his eggs in one basket — and that is never a good idea if you don’t want to lose all your eggs.

Murdoch Drags the Wall Street Journal Down to His Level

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Such a sad, sad sight to see.

Defending News Corp against criticism of its illegal phone hacking and police bribing activities, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece that included this classic line:

Do our media brethren really want to invite Congress and prosecutors to regulate how journalists gather the news?

I am deeply offended by this piece on several levels.

  • Murdoch has built a fortune with yellow journalism. By buying up and controlling so many media outlets, he has brought journalism standards down worldwide. Not convinced? Roger Ebert explains the impact Murdoch had on the Chicago Sun-Times during his ownership.
  • Murdoch has insulted the intelligence of half the American public and conned the other half with his so-called “fair and balanced” news network, Fox News. The network not only promotes tasteless and sensationalist news stories, but it clearly promotes Murdoch’s conservative viewpoint, often with misstatements, half truths, and quotes taken out of context.
  • In the opinion piece from which the above quote was taken, Murdoch seems to suggest that his company’s news gathering techniques are protected under the First Amendment. In other words free speech allows journalists to collect news by whatever means are available to them. The legality of their actions simply doesn’t matter. Of course, Murdoch is also free to define “news” any way he sees fit.

In my opinion, there is no single news organization that has done more harm to America than Fox News. It oozes hate and mistrust, it pits Americans against each other and their elected political leaders. It makes news out of scandal — except this one, of course — and ignores or misrepresents the real issues that Americans need to know about.

Murdoch is responsible for this.

Fortunately, those Americans who haven’t been sucked into the half-truths spewed by FOX News have other sources of information: NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. Well, scratch that last one.

The above-referenced opinion piece is the first example — at least the first I’ve seen — of where the Wall Street Journal is being used as a Murdoch disinformation tool. Not only has the Journal’s business reporting suffered, but it’s now becoming Fox-ified.

In the Journal piece, the unnamed author says this about its competing media outlets:

The Schadenfreude is so thick you can’t cut it with a chainsaw.

Why shouldn’t it be? News Corp has done more damage to the news industry than any other organization. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m enjoying the schadenfreude, too.

Want another point of view on this Journal opinion piece? Read what Felix Salmon says on Reuters.

On “Air Vortexes”

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The media stumbles over a basic aerodynamic aspect of helicopter flight.

I was on Twitter Thursday evening when manp, one of my Twitter friends, tweeted:

So, what is this ‘vortex’ condition with ‘higher than expected temperatures’??? @mlanger any idea?

To be honest, I had no clue what he was talking about. But I Googled “vortex condition with higher than expected temperatures” (don’t you love Google?) and saw an article about the helicopter that went down during the Bin Laden assault in Pakistan. Moments later, manp sent me a link to a Bloomberg article titled “Helicopter Carrying SEALs Downed by Vortex, Not Mechanical Flaw or Gunfire.” The first paragraph read as follows:

A United Technologies Corp. (UTX) Black Hawk helicopter carrying U.S. Navy SEALs to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout was downed by an air vortex caused by unexpectedly warm air and the effect of a high wall surrounding the compound, not mechanical failure or gunfire, according to U.S. officials and a lawmaker.

Whoa. What a mishmash of information. You have to read further into the article where the phenomena they’re trying to explain — vortex ring state — is explained at least two more times by people who actually have a clue what it is. But that first paragraph sure is misleading. It makes it seem as if there was come kind of weird warm air vortex in the compound that brought the helicopter down.

Any vortexes, however, were caused by the helicopter itself. My educated guess of what happened, based on this article and knowledge of helicopter aerodynamics, is this:

As the helicopter was descending inside the 18-foot walls — a descent that was likely nearly vertical — it encountered a setting with power — or vortex ring state — condition. This occurs when the helicopter settles into its own downwash. This may have been made worse by the change in the flow of air due to those 18-foot walls — as suggested in the article. It may also have been made worse by the outside air temperature being warm.

This image from the FAA’s Rotorcraft Flying Handbook helps illustrated what the vortexes are and how they manifest themselves in a hover far above the ground and close to the ground:

Hover Vortexes

As the Rotorcraft Flying Handbook explains:

Vortex ring state describes an aerodynamic condition where a helicopter may be in a vertical descent with up to maximum power applied, and little or no cyclic authority. The term “settling with power” comes from the fact that helicopter keeps settling even though full engine power is applied.

In a normal out-of-ground-effect hover, the helicopter is able to remain stationary by propelling a large mass of air down through the main rotor. Some of the air is recirculated near the tips of the blades, curling up from the bottom of the rotor system and rejoining the air entering the rotor from the top. This phenomenon is common to all airfoils and is known as tip vortices. Tip vortices consume engine power but produce no useful lift. As long as the tip vortices are small, their only effect is a small loss in rotor efficiency. However, when the helicopter begins to descend vertically, it settles into its own downwash, which greatly enlarges the tip vortices. In this vortex ring state, most of the power developed by the engine is wasted in accelerating the air in a doughnut pattern around the rotor.

Vortex Ring StateIn addition, the helicopter may descend at a rate that exceeds the normal downward induced-flow rate of the inner blade sections. As a result, the airflow of the inner blade sections is upward relative to the disc. This produces a secondary vortex ring in addition to the normal tip-vortices. The secondary vortex ring is generated about the point on the blade where the airflow changes from up to down. The result is an unsteady turbulent flow over a large area of the disc. Rotor efficiency is lost even though power is still being supplied from the engine.

There are three ways to recover from settling with power once you’re in it:

  • Cut power – you can’t settle with power if you don’t have power. This is usually not a good option when you’re very close to the ground.
  • Lower the collective – this reduces the blade pitch. This is also not a good idea close to the ground, since it will result in a descent.
  • Get some lateral airspeed – this breaks you out of the vortex ring state so you’re not settling in your own downwash. This is not possible when you’re surrounded by an 18-foot wall.

(They train us to recover from settling with power using a combination of the second two methods, but we always practice at altitude, since you can get a good descent rate going if you’re really into it. Indeed, settling with power is a serious danger during aerial photo missions requiring hovering at high density altitudes or heavy weights.)

So the pilot did the only thing he could: land hard. Fortunately, although his hard landing damaged the helicopter, it didn’t cause injuries to to men on board. They were able to complete their mission and come home safely. And they left a souvenir lawn ornament in Bin Laden’s yard.

I realize that this is a pretty complex topic and it’s probably not reasonable to expect the press to get it right. But I personally believe that all technical content published in the media should be reviewed by an expert — or at least someone knowledgeable — to make sure it’s not misleading or unclear to the layperson who will read it.

manp is a pilot — although not a helicopter pilot — and he couldn’t figure out what they were talking about. I can only imagine how much that opening paragraph confused the average reader.