I have always wanted to brew beer and have a number of friends that do. The results are almost always delicious and always interesting.

Having helped with the bottling process, I decided long ago that if I were to ever brew beer, I would not use bottles. Instead, I would rack into a keg and dispense from there.

Obviously, I needed a kegerator!

To force the issue, I brewed my first batch of beer a few months ago knowing that i would have to figure out a means of serving said beer from a corny keg before I could enjoy the fruits of my brewing labors. A 5 gallon “corny keg” is the standard vessel used in soda fountains and it has two “ball locks” on the top, one for the gas line and one for the liquid out line.

I actually looked into simply purchasing a kegerator outright, but they were expensive, generally inefficient, and often designed very poorly.

Thus, I decided to build my own.
In particular, I started with a 5 cubic foot GE chest freezer
($170 at Home Depot). Chest freezers are super efficient and a 5 cubic foot freezer can handle two kegs at once with room left over for more than a case of bottles and cans.

Obviously, a freezer is designed for freezing things and the thermostat can’t be set for the ideal keg temperature of 38 degrees. Thus, I added an external temperature controller.

The freezer plugs into the controller and the controller plugs into the wall. The controller has a probe at the end of a thin tube that goes inside the freezer. As seen at the left, I attached the probe to the freezer’s wall with a bit of gorilla tape. It is spaced off of the wall by styrofoam so that the probe is measuring the internal air temperature.

The tank is a 5 pound CO2 tank with a dual gauge pressure regulator and — very important — a shut-off valve with backflow prevention device. The backflow prevention device prevents liquid from entering, and ruining, the regulator.

An angle bracket supports the weight of the tank while the tiny bungie cords anchor the tank to the kegerator. It is critical that the tank remain upright or else you’ll end up with liquid CO2 in your regulator and gas lines, thus ruining the regulator and quite likely the gas lines, too!

A new tank runs around $60 and the regulator is typically less than $50. The CO2 tank will cost around $12-$20 to refill and it will last approximately forever before it needs refilling. I might need to refill it once a year. Maybe.

Ben Holt suggested a neat hack; stick a scale on the tank holder such that you know, by weight, when that 5# of CO2 is about gone. The high pressure gauge is close to useless in that it’ll read about 750-850PSI until almost all of the liquid CO2 is gone, then the pressure drops rather rapidly.

In the picture, you can see that there is a clear hose connected to the tank and then a red hose connected to that. The output port on the tank had a fairly small barbed connector so I needed a step-up adaptor to go from the 3/16″ interior diameter clear hose to the 5/16″ ID red gas hose.

The plumbing inside is pretty straightforward. The gas line comes in, is split and goes to the two kegs. The output of each keg is attached to one of the taps. As I go, I’ll be adding quick disconnects to the various lines such that I can swap different kinds of kegs with different couplers without having to re-plumb anything.

The wooden surround around the top serves a couple of purposes.

First, I can drill holes in it and mount stuff to it. While I could drill holes in the freezer door or walls, there is the risk of damaging the cooling mechanism and, in any case, drilling through the freezer would be a big pain to do cleanly. As well, by doing it this way, I can easily take off the wood and revert the freezer to a plain old chest freezer.

Secondly, the stacked two-by-fours add a considerable amount of height to the freezer. This makes it easier to plumb inside and allows me to use a wider range of kegs and couplers (the adaptor that goes between the keg and the rest of the system), including higher profile mechanisms.

The wooden surround is grossly overbuilt, as is typical of any project I take on. Not only are those solid 2×4s, but they are glued together and have dowels tying them together and have metal plates screwed to them.

Between fridge and surround is about an inch of insulation tape that is normally used to insulate the interface between a camper shell and pickup truck.

To attach the wooden surround to the top of the kegerator, I cut aluminum angle strips down to size and bolted them to the back of the freezer where the hinges originally attached. Since those bolts originally held the lid and were designed to withstand the leveraged forces of opening the lid, they are really strong and, again, I avoid drilling holes in the freezer itself.

The lid’s hinges are then screwed to the surround.

The weight of the lid, surround, and tank hanger is enough to press down the surround on the insulation material and provides a very good, airtight, seal.

Oh, and did I mention that the surround is way overbuit? Yeah. The bolts at the corner are actually about 4″ long.

I initially used the screw style hose clamps. They suck. I have since moved to nylon clamps, as seen on either side of the quick disconnect on the gas line.

The coupler in the picture is a Sankey, the most common keg coupler used. Note that Anchorsteam’s full sized kegs actually use a different coupler. It seems that most brewers use the more common Sankey — D system coupler, as it is otherwise known — for their 5 gallon kegs specifically because said kegs are often used in home kegerators of which most come with that particular coupler!

The 5 gallon kegs run around $50-$100, depending on the beer within. That is about 40 16 ounce pours or slightly more than 2 cases of beer. Thus, really, buying the 5 gallon kegs isn’t really much cheaper than buying a a couple of cases of bottles. However, the quality is much better and, obviously, returning an empty keg is a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly than recycling 2 cases of empty bottles!

At the moment, my taps have undecorated plain black levers. I’ll have to get some stylish handles at some point but this will do for now!

When tuned properly, the kegerator delivers beautiful pours of ice cold beer. Nothing like having fresh beer on tap in your garage! And, yes, beer on tap really does taste better than anything from a bottle!

The system isn’t quite perfect yet; like any good hack, it’ll be refined over time.

• I need to insulate the inside of the wood surround. While the wood doesn’t conduct that much heat, there is a noticeable temperature gradient within the unit and I both want to maximize efficiency and I might actually add a small fan to stir the air to ensure a universally even temperature. As well, the first pour tends to be foamy because the beer in the tube is actually warmed a bit!

• Need a bottle cap catcher.

• Need something better than towels on the floor to catch drips off the taps.

All in all, though, the kegerator works quite well and a number of my friend’s spouses are mad at me because they know such a hack will soon be taking up space in their house!

Not bad for about $400!

I picked up all the beer-specific parts from Micro Matic. They have a wonderful catalog. If I didn’t already have the tank from my forced carbonation adventures, I would have started with a two-tap kegerator conversion kit, though that does come with 2 D system (Sankey) couplers which may be overkill if you plan on keeping a keg of homebrew on tap most of the time.

If you are lucky enough to have a gas range, you already know the joys of a dead even heat source that can range from medium-low to blowtorch. None of that cyclic all-on/all-off nonsense of the typical electric range, for example.

However, “low heat” is not something in the typical gas range’s vocabulary. On our Viking, the lowest setting on the smallest burner will keep a small pot of water at a rolling boil and will consistently cause a cup of rice to boil over. And it is a really low flame!

Enter the heat diffuser. A heat diffuser sits between burner and your pan or pot. It effectively acts as a heat buffer and, as the name implies, diffuser.

On a gas range like mine, it allows one to achieve the lowest simmer/heat you might want. On an electric range, a cast iron heat diffuser — you want thermal mass — will nicely even on the all-on/all-off behavior of most ranges.

At ~$20, it is a worthy tool to add to your cooking arsenal!

Our laundry / utility room isn’t large, but we consider it to be a gem given that most bay area homes seem to have their laundry in the garage!

Thus, space is a premium and that makes dealing with the handful of items that need to be air dried on a flat surface a challenge. A drying rack that sits around on the floor unused 90% of the time is guaranteed to be in the way 90% of the time!

Thus, a solution that can easily get out of the way was sorely needed!

Having scored a cheap bicycle ceiling lift off of Amazon, I added a couple of metro-cart shelves ($20/each at most hardware stores) held together by four 12″ bolts. the bolts hold the bottom shelf tightly sandwiched between two washers and two nuts on each bolt. The bolts hang from the holes in the top shelf (more washers!) and the top shelf hangs from the bicycle hoist.

Conceptually, it works really really well. Perfectly, in fact. And the metro-cart shelves allow for stuff to be hung from below, too.

The only complaint is that the bicycle lift works exactly as you might expect for $10-$15. Expect to have to keep the shelf level as it goes up/down. No big deal, but I will be replacing the rope in the near future.

In particular, the Places feature allows you to import GPS data from iPhone photos or from GPS data captured by pretty much any device that can spew a standard GPX format data file.

Tagging from the iPhone is straightforward. With the iPhone connected to your computer, go to Places in Aperture and then select Import from iPhone Photos…. Aperture will then display all the photos on your iPhone that have GPS metadata and you can pick the photos from which the GPS data is to be imported. Once picked, Aperture will apply the GPS data to photos taken near the same time as the imported data.

However, one issue with the iPhone is that it really isn’t a terribly good GPS logging device. Using it as one eats the battery and the data generated often has holes. And, because the iPhone uses A-GPS (GPS assisted by cellular signal), it doesn’t work at all when hiking in areas without cell signal. Apparently, I’m mistaken about A-GPS — it should fall back to regular GPS behavior. My experience, though, is that the iPhone just isn’t a terribly good GPS device when it doesn’t have a cell signal and has often been off by miles when in the hinterlands. It works great when on the road or near cities, though.

Dragging a photo onto a track. Note that my camera’s clock was set correctly.

Importing a raw GPS Track is a slightly more involved process and, at first blush, doesn’t entirely seem as easy as it could be. But there is a good reason for the way it works; clocks on cameras generally suck and, thus, there is a need to effectively timeshift imported photos vs. the GPS data.

When you import a GPS track, the Tracks and Waypoints submenu will be populated with the various segments of GPS track data imported from the log. Once you select a GPS track that includes a location for a photo that you want to geotag, drag the photo to the exact location on the track where the photo was taken. Aperture will display the offset in time between the photo’s timestamp and the GPS data. When you drop the photo, Aperture will ask if you want to assign GPS metadata to all photos taken during the (potentially offset) duration of the GPS track.

Done. Photos geotagged. And, if you haven’t happened to reset your camera’s clock recently, you’ll probably be chagrined and amazed to know exactly how poorly your camera keeps time!

Of course, you need a source of GPS metadata. And this is where your fuzzy happy generally intuitive and “just works” experience ends. Frankly, the state of GPS support on the Mac just flat out sucks outside of a handful of navigation oriented devices.

After purchasing and returning two different devices, I finally settled on the Qstarz BT-Q1300S.

First, the good: the Q1300S has about a 15 hour battery life, recharges conveniently off of USB, and is conveniently small in size. Once you deal with the shenanigans that I’ll describe below, the unit “just works”. The LED indicators on the front are pretty straightforward. Overall, the passive industrial design — the case, the indicators, the static elements — are quite solid and attractive.

Now, reality:

Physically, the device is small and conveniently sized. The strap is too tight and, thus, doesn’t really swivel much. I can easily replace that.

There are two additional flaws that can’t be fixed. First, the unit uses a single button for power and other functions. It is of poor quality and, after only a few uses, is starting to stick. A co-worker with the same device has the same problem.

Second, the mini-USB connector is covered by a rubber shield (good!), but that shield flips open to cover the power button (which you need to get to) and actually gets in the way of sticking in the USB cable! Dumb.

From a User Experience perspective, the device is a train wreck. To turn on, hold the power button for 4 seconds. It boots and then it starts logging (the LEDs on the front do a pretty good job of giving status, though “solid” vs. “blinking” for “looking for GPS” vs. “GPS signal good” is non-obvious). To turn off logging (convenient for downloading or for just using as a BlueTooth data source), hold down the button two seconds. To turn off, hold down the button for four seconds. There is very little visual feedback during this process.

Horrible. Combined with a button that sticks and it is close to unusable. I would much rather have two buttons — power and mode — without the need to hold either down for any length of time.

To download data, requires that the device be on. Plugging in the device causes the Battery light to come on — almost looking like a power indicator. Of course, if you turn on the device, it’ll default to logging data. Expect to always have a dozen or so data points from wherever you happened to be when you downloaded the data. Remember that rubber gasket thingy from the USB port I mentioned earlier? The one that covers the power button? Yes, it is in the way if you need to turn on the device after plugging it in.

Why the damned thing doesn’t simply turn on when USB power is applied is beyond me. Better yet, why not let the device mount as a flash drive (some units do, but they had other flaws that made them even worse than the QStarz).

Since it doesn’t mount as a drive, that means you need some software to retrieve data from the device. Thankfully, HoudahGPS to the rescue. Once configured, it works quite well. Plug in the unit, make sure it is powered up, and then click the Acquire button. Done.

Configuring the device from a Mac is… unfortunate.

The QStarz device is based on the MTK chipset. This is a fairly standard chipset and, thus, there exists open source software for interacting with it. In particular, you’ll want BT747. It is a Java application that can configure, download, and otherwise manage an MTK based device (amongst other). Via the BT747 software, you can configure the sampling rate of the device. It defaults to once-a-second, but 2 or 3 times a second is useful for tracking relatively fast moving motion that changes directions quickly; biking or driving, for example.

If you want to communicate with the QStarz via BlueTooth (and maybe via USB — I didn’t try), go to the Finder and check the Open in 32-bit mode option.

Bottom line; with geotagging of photos becoming pretty much ubiquitous across both photo organization tools and the various websites (flickr, etc), it is only a matter of time — 12 to 18 months, I would guess — until pretty much every camera has GPS built in. Until then, the QStarz 1300S fills the gap. Not nicely, but it does work.

Heck, not only can I take can take a photo of Roger and one of the very few phone booths left in the state, but I can even show you exactly where it is (turn on “Hybrid” mode to see more than a green blob on the map)!

I am concerned about build quality. The company does monitor twitter, is aware of my power button issue, and is responding extremely proactively (so far). I’m impressed and, frankly, if QStarz comes through with their promise to replace my device, it will go far to assuage my disdain for the device.

Now, if QStarz would produce a useful — simple — Mac client, that would make me even happier.

My red stapler — like the one pictured at left — has broken due to the classic industrial design mistake of using a plastic part as the connector between two mechanical parts in a leverage or geared based mechanical system.

Swingline has a customer feedback form and, thus, I sent the below feedback. We shall see if anything comes of it.

Hi!

I could make a classic Office Space style joke about my Red Stapler and Burning Down the building, but I won’t. I’m sure you’ve heard ‘em all before.

I have a classic red Swingline stapler. It is a work of art.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a classic industrial design mistake. The red metal halves are held together by a plastic clip. Said plastic clip broke and what should be a single mechanical unit is now two dysfunctional, yet attractive, pieces of red metal.

As much as I would like a replacement part (it is the u-shaped bit that holds the stapler halves together), I’m far more interested in seeing Swingline fix the faulty design.

Thank you,
b.bum

Roger has always excelled in math and sciences — no surprise given lineage — and is of the age (9) where the science education is moving into bigger and smaller areas of study.

So far, he has gotten by with a QX-5 Digital Microscope
and mixScope. While the QX-5 is great for looking at money, the veins in leaves, bits of mushroom and tiny critters, high magnification is pretty much useless because the construction makes focus impossible.

Thus, the desire to get something more like a real microscope. In particular, I really wanted a microscope that allows for live viewing on a computer screen (like the QX-5). While, there were some good ones for less than $500 — 3MP digital camera model microscopes that included simultaneous use binocular eyepieces, even — their software is pile of Windows only crapware.

No, thank you. Next!

Close-up of cross section of spinal column.

Enter the Celestron 44340 LCD Digital LDM Biological Microscope. It replaces the normal eyepiece with a 2.1MP digital camera and a color LCD screen. More importantly, the build quality is actually quite decent such that focusing at, even, the 400x maximum optical zoom is quite smooth!

Unlike the QX-5, the Celestron 44340 is really only for use with proper microscope slides (The QX-5 still has a purpose!). blank microscope slides and slide covers are cheap, so I picked up a bunch of those, too.

The slide table includes a very nice set of caliper style adjusters for moving the slide around in a highly controlled fashion. Slides are held in place by an easy to use spring loaded caliper.

The microscope can illuminate the subject from either the top or bottom and the bottom illumination includes a variety of color filters that can be quite useful. Intensity of illumination can be adjusted.

The top illumination is nearly useless at all but the lowest magnification (otherwise there isn’t enough distance between lens and subject).

The digital controls include an EV adjustment, a digital zoom, and the ability to take snapshots. Digital zoom only works when the snapshot resolution is configured for less than 1600×1200. Digital zoom works by interpolating data across the sensor into a lower-than-sensor resolution image that provides a higher-than-optical zoom factor. It actually works fairly well (unlike most digital zooms).

Pollen. Evil, evil, pollen.

The unit also comes with a really nice hard sided carrying case, a dust cover, and power adaptors for global use. A surprisingly complete kit — I was completely blown away by the quality of the case for a device this relatively inexpensive.

My only real complaint is that the LCD is effectively physically attached to the camera & lenses. That, combined with the relative stiffness of the buttons means it is hard to take an image that isn’t blurry. However, it seems that the unit has a slight delay between button push and recording such that is isn’t as big of a problem as it could be. But, still… stupid design — just move the damned shutter button to the base. I’ll probably hack the unit to add an external shutter button.

All in all, I’m thoroughly impressed by the build quality and feature set of this microscope. I would still have been impressed if my $180 had purchased a microscope with this optical performance, sans awesome case and really nice slide table.

All of the images in this blog post were taken with the microscope, no surprise. It is a boxed set of prepared slides that I also picked up from Amazon.

However, it is music that should only be in the rotation starting December 1st, heavy rotation by about the 15th-20th and then no more from December 26th to the next December 1st.

Of course, iTunes is agnostic and, thus, does not follow my holiday music filtration wishes.

Easy to fix.

1. On all Christmas/Holiday music, add a grouping of “Holiday” or “Christmas” (or whatever you want).
2. Create a smart playlist that finds all music in said grouping. Make sure the smart playlist matches unchecked items.
3. On December 26th, select all, ctrl-click, and select uncheck selection
4. On Decmber 1st of the next year, select the smart playlist, select all, ctrl-clik, and select check selection

Done. iTunes will not select unchecked songs when constructing genius playlists or when playing through the library on shuffle play. Smart playlists can optionally include checked songs.

I have long wanted a really good toaster oven. One that had decent capacity, was versatile, and insulated such that it doesn’t lose a ton of heat when sticking food into it. As well, I can’t deal with poorly designed products and will often choose dead simple over a full featured item simply because simple is harder to screw up.

After 8 months of research and comparisons, I finally settled on the Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven. It isn’t simple and it certainly isn’t cheap, but the Breville is really quite an excellent piece of technology.

The Breville’s controls are straightforward. You select the mode first, then there are two additional dials that configure, effectively, temperature and time. For toasting, the two additional buttons select slices and darkness; seemingly silly, but it actually works quite well!

As well, the toaster oven has a convection setting and a “frozen” setting that automatically adjusts the cooking times to account for cooking frozen foods. The “frozen” button is the one feature that borders on frivolous gadgetry. Then again, cooking random frozen foods really isn’t a part of our diet. If it was, the adjustment it makes actually does make sense.

The interior capacity is large enough to bake a 13″ pizza or roast a whole chicken (though you might have to cut it into two halves). Combining decent insulation with high wattage, the Breville both heats relatively quickly, holds heat well, and the outside does get warm, but not terribly hot.

When the internal rack is in toasting position, opening the door magnetically slides the rack out a few inches. Very convenient.

All in all, the Breville is a well engineered kitchen tool. It can easily replace your toaster and can often fill in for your full sized oven while both pre-heating more quickly and using less electricity overall. And, of course, the Breville can act as a secondary oven for those times when you need two ovens.

Since the addition of the Breville to our cooking toolset, it sees daily use.

In particular, we use the Breville for:

Toast & Hot Sandwiches

Well, it is a toaster oven after all! And toast it does!

One advantage over a regular toaster is that you can toast bread of any thickness, including bagels, muffins, and the like.

Better yet, it is possible to make a delicious hot sandwich in the toaster oven without frying in a pan in butter or oil. It is just a matter of layering the meat on top of one piece of bread and the cheese on the other. Mayo, mustard, and the like can go between bread and meat/cheese, shielding it from direct heat.

Once done, slap the two halves together and your delicious sandwich is done.

Pizza

It is quite easy to throw together a quick dough, slather on some sauce, spread on some cheese and bake up a delicious pizza in the Breville. Or most grocery stores have a pre-made dough that is pretty cheap.

One of the joys of making your own pizza is that you can put whatever toppings you want on it. You would be surprised at just how delicious, say, a pear, duck breast salami, and cabernet goat cheese pizza is!

Roasting

Whether it be fingerling potatoes drizzled in olive oil and rosemary or a lemon-honey game hen, the Breville does a great job of roasting foods. It pre-heats more quickly than a regular oven and, with the insulation, holds heat well and is fairly efficient.

The Breville also does a fantastic job of cooking fish. Sole drizzled with balsamic, olive oil, and truffle salt is just wonderful.

One of the advantages of a toaster oven with a decent seal is that it holds more moisture in as there is simply less volume for the humidity to spread across. Roasted foods turn out quite deliciously juicy!

Dinner Biscuits or Bread

Often, a touch of fresh baked bread or biscuits makes a meal. The Breville does a fine job baking up a quick batch of biscuits or a freeform loaf of bread. It will do so faster than a regular oven and if you are using your oven for other purposes, the Breville can backfill to bake bread, biscuits or — even — a pie.

All in all, a great tool. I’m sure I’ll continue to use it regularly and I’m sure I’ll discover more uses over time!

Ow ow ow ow.

Do not buy this fan.

It can shock you.

Specifically, the metal toggle switch’s handle is spring loaded such that if you push on it like a push button, it will short out internally. Not only does it send a pretty spray of sparks out of the switch, it will also shock the crap out of you.

As suggested, I have reported the fan to the Consumer Product Safety Comission and will write-up whatever the followup experience may be.

But, hey, let’s make the vitriol useful– if there were a means that I could report bugs, I would. If there were a way to capture the state of my machine for validation, I’d do it. If there is some way that my crap user experience could be used to prevent future user abuse, that’d be awesome.


To be completely blunt: The team responsible for the PS3 non-gaming user experience — the menus, data management, user interface, and everything else that doesn’t happen in game — are either incompetent buffoons or have a management chain and/or product marketing/design/definition demands that are ridiculous, stupid, and an insult to the customer. (Personally, I’m betting it is the latter — the PS3 is an impressive piece of engineering, both software and hardware).

It is unfortunate that the PS3 is the only vehicle via which one can enjoy such great titles as Ratchet&Clank, WipeOut HD/Fury, and Uncharted. It is insult to their greatness to require the user to have to experience but a moment of the steaming pile of crap that is the Playstation 3 user experience.

I did something incredibly stupid this evening.

I assumed that Sony remotely cares about user experience, that Sony understands that their users care about saved game data, and that Sony — after more than a decade in the game console business — might have a clue about how to implement a system.

Boy, that was a stupid assumption.

I wanted to move the PS3 from TV A to TV B. No video; TV B doesn’t do 1080p. No problem; a google search or two later reveals that holding down the power button will reset the video and give you a menu where you can reset the video.

Nope — the closest is restore default settings. An internet search indicated this was the right thing to do. Wrong. The internet was wrong. Very very wrong. Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that. If you want to switch the resolution of a PS3 without losing data, do so on a TV that works with the PS3 in the current display mode first. If you don’t have one, you are screwed. Sony? Why do you hate your users?

In fact, what it does is worse than restoring the system to factory default. The first sign of trouble is when the PS3 says something like “Hey, I discovered there was user data I didn’t know about, I restored it”.

It lies.

It actually creates disconnected, unsigned, unblessed, shell accounts that have your data in an unusable form. They will have an asterisk in front; bbum became *bbum.

Uh oh.

Upon logging into the faux-*bbum account, many things are now broken. The worst — the single biggest insult — is that the original save game data is still there, but many games can’t use it.

Assasin Creeds II? Apparently, that saved game data will still work. Peggle? Nope, not so much. Oooh.. joy… looks like all data related to games purchased from the playstation network is trashed. WipeOut HD? Won’t even launch — key file missing, redownload dumbass user! But, Sony, All I wanted to do was make it work again? Why are you throwing rocks at me?

Better yet! When you redownload, the PS3 downloads all the bytes and then says “Hey, man, you already got the same crap installed. Do you really want to install it again?” The stupid. It burns!

Now, logging back into the Playstation Network let me sync my trophies. But there was also some warning that said that I might not be able to earn any more trophies, implying that online play was broken in some fashion. Of course, there isn’t anything that I can find to verify current status.

Wait. I played Peggle once and the challenge modes were locked. Now they aren’t. Huh… what? It appears that I didn’t lose Peggle data, but that something magically triggered the reconnection of the data. I’ll have to assume that it was the WipeOut HD “key” download as that seems to be the only “user authing data event” to have happened.

At this point, I renamed the account and have restored Playstation Network connectivity. I may or may not have a mostly working account. I have lost data — all Peggle data gone and deities knows what else. Even getting back to this point was a bunch of effort that I wouldn’t wish upon a non-admin user any day.

Of course, that I failed to maintain a backup was definitely a fault of mine. Then again, I didn’t actually lose any data, Sony just went to great lengths to make my data unusable without actually modifying it.

Or not. It might be that my data is now fully restored and usable. Or it might not be. There is no way to tell. Who knows? I might decide to fire up Uncharted One later this year only to discover that I can’t load the game save and have to start over.

Sadly, this abusive user experience is not unique to the PS3. I had a similar experience with the Wii, though — to be fair — Nintendo has apparently addressed that exact issue in the interim couple of years.