TooMuchGreen

TooMuchGreen has officially regressed to it’s former blog status, it likes being a blog and we enjoy blogging through it.

The “business” side of things is now fully re-branded as the wonderful MEBBI™ Solutions.

MEBBI™ Solutions provide all the services previously offered by TooMuchGreen plus a few new additions, why not visit our lovely new website and have a look around..

http://mebbi.net

Sector awareness for the benefits of open source adoption is rapidly growing amongst the forward thinking enterprise. An open source solution provides not only a comprehensive replacement but delivers added security and performance boosts to existing systems whilst offering huge reductions in immediate expenditure and long term cost of ownership.  Read more... (estimated reading time 47 secs)

Let’s stop mulling it over, for the technically aware there can be no doubt the future of computing is cloud based (both locally and out across the www), it’s going to happen (it is happening). But what does this new virtual world present to us in terms of the good old desktop operating system?  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:51 mins)

Indeed, it’s all very well and good having all this data flying about, data on your USB key, data in the Drop Box cloud, data on your hard disk, data here, data there….but how secure is it? What if you lose your USB key? It wasn’t password protected was it, no, I didn’t think so, don’t berate yourselves though, I’m invariably slack too sometimes (although only ‘sometimes’ I may add).

If you’re a Mac OSX user there’s a super quick, super efficient and super clean way to keep things in check and secure, it just involves dropping a level, let me explain.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:12 mins)

I know I rattle on about the advantages of using the cloud for application delivery and yes, I do believe it’s the future of computing as we know it (once the interweb catches up with our needs that is) however for complete integration as a storage repository for our larger bits and bobs of data cloud dumping is presently just too slow and too expensive.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:56 mins)

Free cloud storage anyone?

I’ve only being able to find a maximum of 10GB for free up until now, mostly a 50/50 split of synchronised media/other data from the likes of Humyo and had settled on the 2GB allocation from the wonderful people at Dropbox, however a possible alternative seems to have sprung up from a rather controversial source, the monolithic IT giant themselves Microsoft who are offering a free 25GB ‘Skydrive‘ to all and sundry.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:00 mins)

So then, in the continuing quest to sidestep MobileME’s $99 a year using existing free services the previous post gave us cloud based calendar & To Do list integration for Thunderbird and set up syncing with the iPod Touch/iPhone (which by the way is working seamlessly) but what about contacts? Without contacts a comms suite isn’t actually a comms suite, again not a problem, hello Google contacts (standalone) and the Zindus add-on (and as before this is aimed at T-Bird on the Mac).  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:27 mins)

As an alternative to MobileME I thought I’d evaluate a replacement cloud calendar service, preferably with desktop sync, preferably with a To Do or Task list (I’m a staunch list maker) and preferably both viewable and editable on the iPod Touch (or iPhone), in fact never mind *preferable*, I demand all three, not only that I want them for nothing (If I had to support myself as a user I’d hate me).

Although I don’t have a GMail account Google calendar had to be the starting point, as did the superb open source mail client Thunderbird for my IMAP mail as it’s no big deal integrating the Lightning calendar add-on and getting it to talk to Google, here’s how.  Read more... (estimated reading time 3:24 mins)

In todays global financial meltdown we’ve never been as aware of our cashflow, I’m certainly more on the case than I’ve ever been although do suspect moving from a regular job with a regular wage dropping in month in month out to a more *interesting* income stream may have contributed somewhat, in fact yes, most definitely.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:38 mins)

As you know I’m presently a big fan of the mobile lifestyle, partly through need and related ease of transportation but also partly due to the mental clarity and lack of conscious clutter it brings, it’s quick, compact and cathartic being able to pack all my worldly possessions into a Caterpillar travel case and a Crumpler backpack – clothes, toiletries, books and tech, it’s all in there.  Read more... (estimated reading time 3:29 mins)

Check it out, somewhat retro in design now but in 2001 they were the cutting edge. It’s an old G4 unit, this one (well, not THAT one actually but the one this blog is about) is a 466MHZ jobbie, and credit to Apple – we’re still using it (almost daily too as it goes)

Admittedly it doesn’t see much of YouTube or Faceache, nor does it do much video editing or high end design work (although it used to, if you can call a few leaflets and illustrator logos high end), no, it sits and stores, and downloads (and sometimes *burns* – woo hoo….!)…it could *Serve* too if we wanted but to be honest there’s not that much need for Directory services and replication around Johns house and our two laptops.  Read more... (estimated reading time 45 secs)