TooMuchGreen

My good friend and fellow tech head Adrian has been upgrading his home network (substantially) and dropped an open inquiry from his blogsite the other day for user comments about their own setups, as I’m what you may call globally mobile at the moment I thought it might be fun to give a quick breakdown of my travelling tech.

Two years ago I gave up the corporate shirt and tie, sold my house, eBayed all my possessions and now operate online from a suitcase and “carry on bag” from whatever Craigslist apartment I’ve rented in whichever country I happen to be in at the time, and it all works remarkably well (the tech travels in the carry on bag).  Read more... (estimated reading time 3:19 mins)

Email – the enabler of the electronic age? Our very own technological spokesperson, Apple fan-boy extraordinaire, Ubuntu advocate and undisputed King of Twitter, the man Stephen Fry, nailed it with his recent blog-post “Office Slavery” in which he laments the loss of the office secretary and highlights the resultant time sapping vacuum we drop into each day trawling through our digitised messages, as ever he’s right on the button and I’m not going to further drag out the scourge of lost hours spent replying, forwarding and CC-ing, we’re all more than aware how much our lives are ruled by the keyboard and the inbox. No, in this post I just wanted to drop behind the scenes of actual content for a moment to highlight a few of the technical hurdles mainstream users may not be aware of, you may think with email being the prevalent and integrated norm it is there might be some degree of stability around the majority of services offered to us, however you’d be surprised.  Read more... (estimated reading time 4:10 mins)

In the absence of any more imminent Ubuntu releases for a while today I’ve moved back to my other source  of amusement, the iPod Touch, and in particular mobile ‘Document Management’.

Today I’ve discovered the Mobile Studio app from the guys at PixioTech, but what is it, why is it so useful, how does it work, what can you use it for, and how come I’ve only just discovered it?

What is it? Well, it’s an iPhone/iPod Touch app (obviously) and although it’s not free at £1.19 I don’t think it’ll break the bank.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:57 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)