First thoughts on my new phone

This Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy phone running Android. I’ve never had a phone that could do much more than make phone calls and send text messages before, and my new phone feels a lot more like a small computer than anything I’ve owned before.

My initial impression is very positive. It will deal with most of my email and internet needs, and because most of what I use is Google based, everything is integrated perfectly. I can see this phone being used for about half of what I use my netbook for, and I might even be tempted to leave the house with just the phone on occasion.

I’ve also set up an app called talkmyphone, which allows me to optionally forward all my phone’s alerts to my IM client on my computer. So if my phone is downstairs and I’m upstairs then I can still read and reply to texts and know I’ve been called. I may have to experiment with this further at a later date.

As far as other things go, I’ve got dropbox set up, and can take photos and make videos which sync straight to my dropbox account (and thus to all my computers). I’ve also copied a few Gb of music over, and was pleasantly surprised that it will sync with Rhythmbox, although I think I’ll be managing music manually as I have a lot of music and only 14Gb of space on the phone.

As far as phone calls and texts goes, it works fine, and does what I need it to, which was actually my main fear about getting a smart phone. I was a little worried that something that can do everything would do the core tasks less well, but this doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

Oh, and I discovered Angry Birds. It ate an hour of my life and about 20% of my battery. I may have to explore it again soon.

Backing up and syncing data

I was having a conversation recently about backups, and how Dropbox is great for ensuring that you don’t lose valuable files. However, the free version of Dropbox can only handle a maximum of 8Gb, and once you start looking at music and photographs then I think most of us would probably need a paid Dropbox account to make this method worthwhile.

Alas, the paid Dropbox accounts only come in 50 or 100Gb denominations, and can come across as quite pricey. I think there’s certainly a market for smaller and cheaper paid options, and I think that a 20Gb account at a reasonable price would get a lot of interest.

But yes, I digress. I though what would be useful (for me at least) would be to detail how I back up my data, and also how I sync it between the various machines I use (which is part of the same process for me).

I’m a great fan of Dropbox, and I use it to sync data between my machines and to collaborate with people on all sorts of work and non-work projects. What I keep in Dropbox is anything that might change, or that I will need to access on all my computers. This largely boils down to:

  • Work related documents that I need to share or collaborate on with my co-worker
  • Anything else I’m collaborating on
  • Anything that is an editable file (generally anything created with OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office)
  • Documents I’m currently writing (usually as plain text files, unless they are collaborations)
  • PDFs of books/documents I’m currently reading
  • Useful phone numbers, next of kin details etc.

I also sync my browsing history and bookmarks through Firefox Sync, meaning that on a new/reinstalled computer I just need to install two applications and I can have a fair approximation of my most useful data within a few minutes, regardless of what operating system I’m using.

For actual backups I have a 2Tb NAS (Network attached storage) that backs up my Ubuntu laptop via DejaDup, and my Mac via Time Machine. All my other computers just reply on Dropbox and Firefox sync. I also maintain a few directories available to either just myself or to everyone on our home network. These are things I might want access to occasionally on multiple machines, but that are too weighty for Dropbox:

  • Photographs
  • Books
  • Music
  • Videos
  • Linux disc images
  • My .virtualbox file containing my virtual web server and a few other things

These total about 200 Gb, and I can access them from anywhere on our network (and further afield if I wished to configure the NAS to do so, which I don’t). Each of these items exists on one of my other computers already, but the NAS represents a repository of everything, and would be the one thing I’d save in a fire to ensure I had at least one copy of everything that was important.

I also have a 500Gb portable hard drive that I manually back up things to sometimes, but that I largely use when I’m away from home and want access to more movies and music that I can sensibly fit on my netbook.

I used to have a very complicated email backup system, but since I switched to Google Apps then I tend to let Google do most of the work and just back up my mailbox as part of my DejaDup/Time Machine backups. I also dump a copy of all my useful documents into Google Docs occasionally, and use it largely for real-time collaboration (which Dropbox can’t really handle).

So yes, that’s about it I think. I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone, but it certainly seems to be working for me at the moment.

Writing about writing

Over the last few days I’ve been writing two assignments for the management course I am currently undertaking, and it’s surprised me how easily I’ve slipped back into being able to write a large amount of fairly literate text in a short amount of time. I genuinely enjoy writing, and at various points in the past have spent a fair amount of time on all sorts of writing projects, but I’ve not really written anything more involved than a blog post for a few years now.

I was chatting to my co-worker about this, and about how I can still pretty much sit there with a blank page and know that something meaningful will eventually appear. She suggested I thought about trying to write something other than what I had to write, and I must admit the idea appeals to me. Of course, this involves having something to say and having an audience that want to read it, but I thought I’d articulate the idea if only to keep it on my radar.

Of course, I need to finish these assignments before I start working on anything else, and writing to order was never one of my strong points.

CVs, and why I don’t currently have one

I’m on a course on Thursday and Friday of next week, and one of the things I’ve been asked to bring is an up to date CV. Now, I’ve worked for the same employer for 10 years now, and we have an in-house application process which involves filling in a web (previously paper) application form. This means it’s been at least 10 years since I’ve really needed a CV (and subsequently at least 10 years since I’ve tried to write one).

So yes, tomorrow I will be writing my CV from scratch, which is something that actually fills me with a great deal of trepidation. Largely because I can remember the last 10 years with a decent degree of clarity, but everything prior to that is a bit hazy and is likely to be full of gaps and vagueness. But at the same time I think it will highlight exactly how far I’ve come in the last 10 years, which might be an interesting exercise if nothing else.

It’s purely academic of course. I have no intention of applying for anything new at present, especially as I only signed my new contract last week.  But I’d also hate to turn up on Thursday without one, because I hate being unprepared and I do actually see the value of having a document that summarises all my achievements to date.

Hopefully by Thursday I will have a CV, and also a vague action plan to update it before 2020.

Hotels, and what makes them good

I’m currently in York, staying in a very nice hotel for three days. I like this hotel because it provides free wifi and enough tea and coffee to get me through an average week. These things are important, and I think I probably judge hotels quite a lot on their ability to provide me with the facilities I actually need, as opposed to ironing boards and hair dryers and things I generally just don’t use.

So yes, this hotel seems to tick all the boxes. I’ve often said I could easily live in a hotel room if there was a decent net connection and easy access to food. This is the sort of place I mean.

The Chokehold of Calendars

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Chokehold of Calendars.

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.

I largely agree with this. For a while I’ve been booking out huge blocks of time to ensure that I actually do what I need to do and to match the tasks I have to complete with the time of the day I’ll be at my most productive.

It makes me wonder why more people don’t do this, because from where I’m standing it really works.

New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS

New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS at BlackBerry.com.

Visually this looks really good, although I think it would be much more useful to someone who actually uses a Blackberry.

In other news, I’ve been taking the iPad to every meeting I’ve been to over the last few weeks, and have actually found I’m getting a lot of use out of it. Somehow it seems rude to pull out a laptop to demonstrate something quickly, but the iPad seems totally permissible in these circumstances. Yes, there are things I’d change, but it is certainly an enjoyable mobile computing experience.

Instapaper

Instapaper is something I think I’d use a lot if I had an ebook reader. Basically, it takes web pages and turns then into ebooks for offline reading. At present it’s not a great deal of use to me, but for anyone with an ebook reader or an iPad it might prove very handy.