Hello there! I'm Dave, thanks for stopping by.
Christmas Present
This really made me laugh, a Christmas present from my girlfriend. The amount of comedy value you get from a giant ‘@’ sign.
Makes you think about how symbols effect popular culture. I believe Twitter was responsible for making the ‘@’ sign cool again.
Webcam Group Chat
Was looking at some old pictures this evening and found this, my first group chat via Skype earlier this year.
The group video feature is not free we setup a trial. It was awesome, you forget your chatting via webcam and you all live so far apart when you talk in a group like this.
Living Without My Computer
Introduction
Picture this two weeks ago, it’s a cold Saturday morning. I get home after spending the night around my girlfriends, power up my MacBook Pro, went downstairs to make a cup of tea and noticed the screen was completely black? After a bit of troubleshooting it wasn’t just the screen, it seems to have completely failed posting at all I mean it turns on but other than that there is no chime no nothing! Wow this hit me pretty hard I mean my main machine was busted just shy of 4 years old.
It’s been a good few weeks now without my laptop – it’s tough. I don’t think I fully appreciated how much time I invested in my notebook however the way I’d adapted my setup over the last year or so has made this a lot easier to deal with.
Below is a breakdown of how I’ve managed this:
Files and Documents
Ok let’s start at the beginning for general files and documents I use a variety of different tools, firstly part of my backup process included daily time machine backups and fortnightly hard drive clones of my main boot drive. All of this seems pointless after I realised I live and I mean LIVE out of my Dropbox folder, everything thats not music or photos. Other documents can be found in my Evernote or google docs which all work from any web browser.
Music
Music is my life, about a year and a half ago I decided to move to Spotify. A very smart move in hindsight, I still have 80GB of music which I continue to backup, however not easily accessing it made me realise I never use it. Everything I listen to was in Spotify, combined with last.fm which I’ve had since I started my iTunes collection I’ve scrobbeled & loved everything I consider important, which helps me to remember which albums and songs I truly love. All my Spotify playlists are synced and a simple login to another machine brings it all back. I simply cannot recommend Spotify enough.
Photos
I have complete copies of my photo library on hard drive clones and time machine backups, however like the music this isn’t an issue. Although I won’t be organising photos until I get a new computer (I’m well into iPhoto), all my photos sync up to my Flickr account. All my events are sets inside of collections ready for review, simple editing if needed and all online taking up no physical storage of my own. I use an eye-fi sd card to copy all my photos up to Flickr and set them to private, I then make set the best ones to public, this way I have a backup copy of everything.
Code / Design Work
When I purchased my linode vps server a few years ago I went from keeping all my code locally to moving it all to the server and editing via SFTP over an SSH tunnel, I setup port forwarding for an internal only test web virual server and I can fire up a test web service just about anywhere I can run putty or command line ssh. I run nightly backups of all this data, the database files / web services and config via a script I wrote a few years ago these all get copied up to my dropbox for archiving.
Takeaway
One quick thing to point out I only use a free Dropbox account, however I have made a lot of referrals and got my account up to 4GB.
I plan to ether get a new notebook soon or get mine repaired. Either way I wanted to show how easy it is to survive this using web services while some of mine are special use cases it’s important to realise the importance of cloud services and utilise them to our advantage.
I cannot wait to get the notebook thing resolved, all of this has also been made easy also with the use of my iPhone, however I doubt I could use it full time for this length of typing!
December 28th, 2011 • 2 CommentsA New Kind Of Clock
Meet “The Present” a new way to express time.
In their own words, “Have you ever felt like time is moving too fast?, Do you have trouble being ‘in the moment’ for longer than a few seconds?”.
This might be the clock that completely changes your outlook on life and time. Designed by Scott Thrift The Present “tells the story of the seasons using subtle gradients of pure color to mark the Equinoxes & Solstices throughout the years”, I have to put my hand up and say I’d really like one of these. Looking at the kickstarter page you’ll have to pay around $120 which isn’t cheap, but you can tell how much work has gone into this project looking at the video and the description.
I’m hoping maybe the The Present will come down in price once it goes into full production, the first shipments will start Feb 2012.
The Present from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.
November 1st, 2011 • No Comments