Makes you think about how symbols effect popular culture. I believe Twitter was responsible for making the ‘@’ sign cool again.

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.

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!

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.

There is a command you can use in the terminal to stop this from happening:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

This will completely stop Time Machine from using your local disk and return  your drive usage back to normal. Running this command gave me 2GB of space back after a restart. It looks like this only happens on Apple portable computers.

After some research on Google I didn’t find any services which provide anything like what I wanted. Amazon provide a music widget thing which let’s you build a little bit of java script that follows a playlist but not really what I had in mind.

I was surprised that this would be so difficult to find, in my head I imagined being able to provide something like the 30 second previews Apple give you on their iTunes Store. Amazon provides similar previews which is purely a MP3 file however I don’t think it’s an easy thing to go in a pull out without a bit of hacking away.

Maybe the key here is not waste time building  service which provides music previews but instead build a service which offers music previews!

Am I missing something here?

UPDATE:

Turns out I completely missed Apple and their iTunes Search API, this will return JSON formatted results and allows you to use it for pictures, video/music previews and whole lot more, their documentation is pretty good very easy to understand and implement.

For example – search iTunes store of all content by “The XX” would be:

http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=the+xx

You may then use extra terms in the url to specific media type, limit etc.

It tells the story of Heather Poole, a flight attendant and how she manages to live out of her carry-on luggage for 10 days at a time! Every time I go on holiday I do try to take less and less, try to make it to the end of the gallery it’s amazing how she manages to get all that stuff with a few simple techniques.

10 Days In A Carry-On

You might have to be a real geek to understand this, but stay with me. If your running or have access to an Ubuntu Linux machine try running an “apt-get moo” from the terminal. Always makes me laugh!

If you can’t get to a Ubuntu terminal, here’s what you’re missing.

Awesome ASCII humour for small minded geeks.

Yesterday I’d had enough so I decided to do a little investigating, while searching the Apple forums and a few blog posts I found a lot of people who were experiencing slowdowns in iTunes managed to resolve this by simply disabling Genius, Apple’s built in music recommendation service.

So I had a look at my iTunes advanced panel and looked, yes Genius was running! I don’t really use Genius playlists at all so disabling this option was a no brainer, one click later and it was like a whole weight has been lifted from my notebook. It’s not an old system (currently running an Early 2008 MacBook Pro as my main machine) but it was certainly enough for it too completely bog down music searching experience. Try turning Genius off if you can live without it, this tip seems to work with Windows systems as well. If you do use Genius turn it off anyway and use Last.fm instead.

Happy New Year!