SoapBoxRants.net Speaking on all things.

Like most people, I have a lot of data that I don’t want to lose. I also need that data in a lot of different places that aren’t always on my normal daily computers. With today’s intarwebs, this is a fairly easy problem to solve. One just has to snag an online service for storing data. But which services do what jobs well? Nobody can give you a definitive answer because everyone has different aspects that will be important to them. However, I can offer my opinions on some free services that do several jobs really nicely…and free is good.

Email/Calendar - No surprises here. Gmail and Google Calendar are really nice. Gmail offers powerful search and tagging on emails and has a pretty good spam filter. But you already knew that, right? Google Calendar can do pretty much anything an Outlook calendar can do and it doesn’t require a really expensive and bloated program on your computer. To make things even better if you use Firefox to get to Gmail and Google Calendar, I suggest grabbing Lifehacker’s Better extensions (here and here). Lifehacker has Better extensions for a myriad of web services so you may want to look around and see if any of the others can help you out.

Files/Folders - There are several places you can do this. If you have a Live ID or Hotmail/MSN account, you have a Skydrive with 5GB of free storage. So far there aren’t any desktop clients out there so you’re stuck with the web client and you can only upload a few 5 files at a time. Not the greatest choice but it is free and functional. You’d be better off, for ease of use, with Dropbox. During the beta you get 2GB of free storage, choice of many clients that offer really nice automatic sync, and web based access to the folders. You can share folders or keep them private at your discretion. I use this on my iMac and it’s great. Just drop the files into the Dropbox folder and it autmatically syncs in the background. Now if I lose my system, I just have to reinstall the app and sync my important stuff back down.

Mobile Features - So you have a Windows Mobile phone like the AT&T Tilt and you don’t want to move away from that Exchange system because you need that calendar sync? No problem. You can just get an account with GooSync to keep your WM calendar and Google Calendar on the same page. The free version of the service only does calendar sync and is manual only. There is a premium account for £19.95/yr. This version gives you automatic sync, Google Contacts sync, multiple calendar support, and a lot more. Still, even the free service works really nicely and only takes a couple of button presses to do.

Note Taking - There are a lot of places out there like Remember the Milk to help you keep track of GTD lists. Personally I like Jott. Why? Because I’m always on the go and Jott lets me call a toll-free number, speak my note, and their service translates it to text and posts it to GCal, Twitter, my Jott list, whatever for me. Talk about convenient. Best of all…it’s free. As for taking notes that aren’t GTD related, I like Evernote. Their service is fairly unique in that you can put any type of media in a note and if it is an image, they use OCR to find any and all text in the image and make it searchable. They have desktop clients for Windows and Mac which can even take a snapshot of a section of the desktop (i.e. webclip) to add to a note. Yes, it’s free as well.

There really isn’t a single application out there that does everything. But then, if there was it would probably be terrible. A thoughtful combination of applications each designed to be very effective at a specific task usually works the best. It may take a little while to find the combination that works best for you, but when you do you will probably see a huge change in how quickly you can Get Things Done.

Posted under General

I was at Best Buy today and noticed that SimpleTech has apparently reworked their external drive offerings. As a result, the old model of the 1TB external USB drive that was $259.99 is now on clearance for…get this…$92.99! The online store still lists the full price so I suggest that if you are in the market for a huge external drive for pocket change, stop into the store and see if they’ve got it marked down. It’ll be the silver drive with the sloped front (the enclosure, not the box it’s in).

Also remember that if you use a Mac then you will have to format it because it comes as NTFS which will only give you read access. If you aren’t sure how that works, just fire up Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder) and select the drive. From there select the Partition tab and click on Options. You have to make it a GUID partition table or else the format will fail. After doing that you can format the drive using Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Give it whatever name you want and click Apply. In moments you will have a fresh drive ready for mass quantities of digital goodness. (Important note: There is a backup utility on the drive that you will need to copy off first if you plan on using it. I prefer to just use Time Machine so I didn’t bother.)

Personally I made two partitions so I can have one for Time Machine (200GB) and one for my movies (731GB, you lose some in formatting). I’m still waiting on Time Machine to finish the initial backup and then I’m going to copy the movies I’ve already ripped via Handbrake over and see how it works with the Xbox. When I get it all up and going I will update the Mac Media Center page with the details. Oh, and if you are worried that USB 2.0 won’t be fast enough, let’s just say I’m getting better than 1GB/min transfer and since the movies are about 1GB per hour…there should be nothing to worry about.

Edit: I fixed the reduced price. I incorrectly reported it as $96.99.

Posted under General

Comcast gets a lot of press and most of it is bad. I still, despite my glowing praises for the Digital Media Outreach, agree with most of what’s said. The service is flaky. The content is mediocre. The price is outrageous. The hardware just plain sucks. But there are even more frustrating problems. Finally, though, I can take one of them off my list.

It seems they have decided to stick a toe into the kiddie pool of the intarweebs. You can at last get an email notification that your bill is ready. I am amazed that one of the largest communication providers in these United States has had the audacity to buck the trend of convenience by not doing what even little mom and pop shops have been doing since 1996. Any third grader with a keyboard can hammer out a quick and dirty script to send a little SMTP message to a specified email address on a specific day of the month.

I won’t get into it too deeply this time since I ranted about this in an earlier post. The long and short of it is this: Comcast has finally started coming out from under its rock and is beginning to offer some of the basic convenience services to its customers that other web enabled companies have offered for no less than 10 years. So if you have Comcast cable or internet service, you can now log into the website and sign up for email notifications for billing.

Sheesh guys, I know corporations move like slugs, but this is downright embarrasing.

Posted under TV/Movies, Technology