Tag Archives: computers

I’ve Got My Head in the Cloud

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It used to be that pretty much my entire life was on my computer. If my house/apartment/dorm burned down, I could lose everything — bookmarks, web development files, documents, graphics, software, photos, music. I invested heavily in storage, starting with endless stacks of floppies, then zip discs, burned CDs, and finally burned DVDs and external hard drives. Data loss was absurdly common, even so. I can remember several times losing entire hard drives’ worth of data when a computer crashed (or I formatted the wrong drive when reinstalling Windows).

So it’s funny to realize that I don’t think about that at all anymore. Losing a computer would be an annoyance (an admittedly expensive one), but I wouldn’t suffer any real data loss. My bookmarks are synced online. My photos are on flickr. My websites automatically send a database dump to gmail on a weekly basis. My email and documents are in google. My feed reader is online. My web development files are all stored in a Dropbox account or in a version control system like Github. In fact, just about the only files that I don’t already store online are my MP3s, but even they are distributed across various computers, iPods and iPhones, so losing a single computer wouldn’t really cause any serious losses. If I lost my home computer, I would lose about three months of photos, but only because I’m lazy and keep forgetting to upload the latest ones to Flickr.

10 years

The whole thing reminds me of this illustration comparing a 2000 iMac to a 2010 iPhone. In ten years, we’ve gone from my entirely livelihood being physically attached to a single computer to nearly everything being stored online, and any given computer is just the local copies of those files.

Dad's Got Them Trained

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Those of you who serve as tech support for your families will appreciate this. Every now and then someone in the extended family will send an email to everyone with the latest urgent virus warning. Since these are almost always total bunk, my Dad (Ted) has gotten in the habit of replying with a polite email explaining that it’s a hoax trying to trick you into spamming everyone you know. He usually backs this up by linking to the relevant page on snopes.com.

This morning, I received the following email from a family member (formatting left intact):

THIS JUST CAME IN AND SINCE NORM CHECKED IT WITH SNOPES IT MUST BE AUTHENTIC. FOR ONCE I AM SENDING IT ON AND MAYBE YOU SHOULD, TOO. IF OUR RESIDENT GURU,TED, DISAGREES LET HIM SPEAK NOW

Unfortunately, the email was referring to the out-of-date “Osama Virus” from a few years back, so Dad still had to step in and explain why this wasn’t the ticking time bomb the email made it out to be – but it cracked me up that Dad’s got the family trained to check with Snopes before forwarding any dire warnings.

How to Make VirtualPC and Synergy Get Along

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Virtual PCRecently, I installed VirtualPC on my XP box so that I could still test IE6 after installing IE7. However, I immediately ran into a problem. There is some sort of conflict between the mouse emulation being done in the VirtualPC window, and the mouse emulation being done on my PC to let me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse via Synergy. Lucky for me, there’s an incredibly easy solution to this problem: Install the Virtual Machine Additions.

When you get your VirtualPC up and running, there’s an option in the Action menu called “Install or Update Virtual Machine Additions.” This will mount a virtual CD-ROM in your VirtualPC. From there, you can launch the installer like a normal program (or wait for the auto-run). Once you install the program, things should just work. I believe this is because the additions integrate the mouse input between the host machine and the guest machine, instead of forcing the guest to “capture” the mouse. As a result, Synergy can keep control of the mouse without conflicting with VirtualPC.