Marian Bantjes is one of those designers whose work I’ve seen often but never put it all together as being from the same artist. Browsing her very deep portfolio you’ll find everything from high school savant ballpoint pen drawings to hyper-maximalist pattern collages. Everything in it is overflowing with passion and Marian’s unwavering reverence for detail is truly something beautiful. Check out her portfolio for more. Also check out Marian’s TED talk (via Leigh)

Via @Nopattern, which is perfect because it’s interesting to note the overlaps between some of their word art.

It’s been almost a year now since I wrote my first post on data backup so I thought I’d do a follow-up and detail the backup scheme I ended up going with.

The original scheme was fundamentally flawed in that the off-site backup was still pretty susceptible to loss, damage, or theft and wasn’t truly off-site in the broad geographical sense. I was simply storing it at a house about three blocks away. Given the spacing (or lack thereof) of buildings in San Francisco, a few blocks means very little considering the ever-present threat of earthquake and/or fire.

So with that in mind, and after reading through the comments of the original post, I took Eydryan’s advice and looked into Backblaze. Backblaze is an online backup service for PC and Mac that allows unlimited data storage for $5/month per machine. This seemed a little too good to be true but I gave it a shot anyways. Much to my surprise, the service not only works, it works flawlessly and is about as dead-simple as anyone could ask for. It’s a little oversimplified for my tastes — being a PC user I’m more accustomed to layers-deep menus with infinite settings and options — but it does its job and does it well.

I’ve been on Backblaze for around three weeks now and I’ve pushed up about 400GB of the 987GB total I have set to backup. Obviously the initial backup is pretty slow and depends a lot on your connection speed (I’m on Comcast), but I just allow it to crank away all day in the background and it hasn’t yet interfered much with any of my day to day activities. The internet has been a little sluggish lately while it’s moving everything up for the first time, but it’s a temporary annoyance and well worth it. I suppose I could just run it at night, but I’ve opted to let it go 24/7 to get the initial backup out of the way as soon as possible. I’ll probably be done backing up around the two month mark at which point Backblaze will begin incrementally updating files I’ve changed on my side. All the backups are encrypted so only I can view or access my files, which is a good feeling when you’re posting your life’s work to someone else’s data center.

As for local backup, I’m running an internal mirror drive which I then backup to an external which is still stored off-site. That’s a total of three physical copies of the data to which I have easy access. Backblaze is great for peace of mind in case of catastrophic loss, but when you just screwed up a 3GB PSB and need to go back a version, you really don’t want deal with the downtime involved in pulling it down from a server.

I’ve never felt this confident in terms of data security, the combination of local and online backup is virtually foolproof and gives me the best of both worlds in terms of ease of access and security. It’s actually sort of scary looking back at that first post and realizing how long I lived with the old system, catastrophe was just a careless neighbor away.

How many of you are now using online backup and what services are you using? Let us know in the comments

UPDATE: eydryan has some more info on the subject in the comments

Tom Croose and Slow Hands make up Worst Friends, both of them have contributed amazing exclusive work for the ISO50 with playlists, mixes, remixes, edits, and covers of artists like Van Morrison, Beirut, Fleetwood Mac and M83. Both of them are great guys, they were my DJ partners when I moved to Brooklyn and now release on Future Classics and Wolf+Lamb and also “Tom” is getting married this summer, congrats guys on this 12″ release.

A new Sun Kil Moon album is out and i’m loving it all the way thru, check out the Mark Kozelek playlist I put together awhile back.

This weekend I watched a Thavius Beck ableton sort of lecture on how he uses his Beat Repeat, it was pretty enjoyavble so I went back to find a track for the blog and found this gem, is this an Outkast song? I don’t know enough about Outkast sadly.

The Books have a new album coming out, i’m huge fan, the guys in that group definitely have influenced many musicians I know, this new one sounds like if you made Lemon Jelly and DJ Shadow work together 8 years ago, which to me is a great thing.

It’s funny how a lot of those things that you thought were boring when growing up, are now actually really fun things to do. I never would have thought I’d spend a sunny Seattle Saturday sifting through tubs and tubs of posters and ads. But its a damn good thing I did because I found these vintage Porsche ads. I was tempted to purchase all of them but instead I wrote down some info and looked them up online. All of these ads I found on eBay and were from the 1980’s. A few of them might be late 70’s, but it’s tough to tell.

The thing I really like about these ads is that they feel authentic. That’s not to say that ads nowadays aren’t authentic but there is certainly more than enough CGI being done to them. It also seems like it’s rare to see such nice large type of this treatment in ads anymore.

Sander from the comments informed us that Helmet Krone was the designer behind these ads—more info here.

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Brent Couchman has some great design/illustration work over at his portfolio. Love the style and his color palette is perfect.

More work over at his Flickr (thanks Matt for the link)

I think this Kisses song is in my top 5 songs of the year, I haven’t stopped listening to it, I keep wanting to learn the lyrics and sing along softly, looking forward to this record, 1:20 and on pssssssssssssssshhhhh unreal. I do wonder though why I love it so much? is it because it sounds like something familiar? help me out here.

When I press play I picture goths dancing in their bedrooms and completely not being goth anymore, it brings a smile to my face, nice one Minks.

The production quality these days of songs seems to not matter much to many but sifting thru some of this muffled pieces of work sometimes a gem comes up and its worth the ear wear. How to Dress Well has that dreamy appeal that might sound amateur to many fans of even something far fetched like Panda Bear meets Janelle Monae but still becomes a wonderful song.

Can a Tom Vek fan get a new Tom Vek album already?

Now that you have the free EP, you need to check out Dusty Brown live. Lucky for you it just so happens they’re playing a show as part of the CD release event for This City is Killing Me this Saturday. After attending countless Dusty Brown shows I can tell you it’s one of the most entertaining live sets around. As good as the recorded stuff is, they really take things to the next level with the live set and I think it’s where the music really shines through. You’ll also be able to snag a limited edition CD version of the EP which won’t be available anywhere else.

I’ll be making the drive down from SF, hope to see some of you out there.

Dusty Brown CD Release Show
Saturday, July 17, 2010 10:00 PM – 1:30 AM PDT
The Townhouse
1517 21st st
Sacramento CA 95814
Gain Directions

More Info

I remember when I first heard Dust Devil by School Of Seven Bells, I wanted to share it with everyone and have it on repeat. The synth line is driving and full like a proper synth pop melody should be these days. The girls sound powerful and untouchable to their surrounding counterparts in the music world. The record is out now and comes with remixes from Mux Mool and The Sight Below for less than $8 on iTunes.

Below is a video that shares some of the highlights of this groundbreaking Matthew Dear album that’s coming together, I can’t put my finger on the sound and that gets me excited. The record touches on a tempo and soundscape that is unlike anything being done right now, check this song that was just leaked the other day.

Oh Willits…you are one of the kings of controlling glitch with guitar making it a beautiful thing, never stop, your sound is perfect for any journey in life.

Noveller has my complete attention when she plays live, she brings an array of pedals for her guitars and slowly entrances you into a stare while you listen.

Matthew Dear – Black City Teaser from Ghostly International on Vimeo.

Houses like this one outside of Rigi-Scheidegg, Switzerland just make my jaw drop. The view is simply stunning. There is nothing like being able to look out above your neighbors’ houses, through a 5-meter long window or in the lawn chairs on the deck and still see a mountain range with snowcapped peaks every morning. You just couldn’t ask for a more beautiful view.

Parts of the house utilize a lower ceiling to help give it that mountain hut vibe. It’s also helped by the cement and wood combination, giving a super raw feel. It’s almost too raw which doesn’t make the house feel all that comforting. A little interior flare would warm it up and make it more welcoming. Perhaps some deer head mounts on the wall or large floor rugs would do the trick.

Found in the archives of Arch daily.

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Stylepark has some beautiful photos (shot by Thomas Wagner) from the Mercedes collection at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. The show goes until Sep. 14 and features some incredible examples of the German auto maker’s inspiring creations.

I love the wall treatments, and the license plate in that second shot is incredible. Now compare that to this, and you start to understand why so many great designers come from Germany. It’s like those stupid faucet commercials (which I hate simply because of how the piano starts playing when she pulls a faucet out of her purse all dramatically and slams it down on the guy’s desk like it’s the most profound thing he’s ever seen when somebody starts throwing plumbing components around his office. What the hell does it even mean. Did you see how confused her husband looked? I felt the same way. She damaged the finish of that desk and I bet it wasn’t cheap considering how pretentious successful architects are.), I could seriously design a car around that license plate. I bet if you told the Mercedes designers they had to design the car for the US style plates they would just quit and throw a wrench or some molding clay or something. Also, if I moved to the states from Germany and had to do this, I would just drive the car of a cliff because the whole thing is ruined. I have a feeling the “California” font only looks like that because the state couldn’t afford to license Papyrus.

Also check out these posts for some more vintage Mercedes action

Stylepark via Simon Smith