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Dead Hard Drive
My back-up strategy has still been bothering me. Not because I keep forgetting (it’s all automatic), and I’m not concerned about the copy corrupting either (I have the original and two others), but because all the data is held in one place.
I’ve finally decided to solve this by using an online back-up service. There are plenty of choices, all with numerous good reviews. What I’d not looked at before were the synchronization services. The advantage of these is that not only are my files being saved online but I can also access them from any computer with Flash installed.
After reading some good reviews I decided to try out Syncplicity. An extra selling point of this one is that I get 2gb of free space (up to 5gb if I refer friends) and as I’m a writer and all I need is a bit of space, this works for me.
As with any back-up service, the only way to really know if it works is to wipe out all your other data, and, unsurprisingly I’m not willing to do that. I have checked out various MS Word documents and the synchronization program that runs very quietly in the background appears to have worked.
All in I’m very happy. My data is backed up at home and now it’s also on the net; so if my house burns down I’ve still got it. And all this is being done without me being involved.
The use of Google Mail as an intermediary for my email has been working very successfully for a few
Gmail Snapshot
months now. (If you want the details see here.) There is one thing I’m missing though: a deleted items folder on my phone.
My phone collects everything from Gmail, but as they are also forwarded on to my mail box at home I delete them once they’ve been read. At home (using Outlook) I do the same: read, deal with, delete. When, weeks later, I want to find something I search my deleted items folder. Unfortunately the phone doesn’t have a deleted section so everything either stays in my inbox (filling it up) or is only available when I get home. No use at all when I’m out and about.
I’ve now realised what I could really do with is the enterprise version of phone email, where I get access to all the folders in Outlook. I’m determined it’s not going to happen (it would be a crazy waste of money, electricity and resources), but feel free to shake your head at me in a years time when I’ve given in and set it up.
I hadn’t thought of digital wills until I was listening to a technology podcast last week which touched on the subject. I do have a reasonably large electronic footprint (personal web site, blog, photo’s on Flickr, Facebook, a number of other domains) and it made me wonder what I would want to happen to it when I die.
Will
The most obvious answer is that it all disappears; vanishing into the electronic melee that is the internet. My personal web site would stop being updated, as would my blog. Emails would still be held by my ISP until they found out I’d died. No one would pay Flickr so that account would get closed down. As Facebook and Twitter are free, they would stay, but no one would be able to access them so my status would be whatever it was last set to (“I’m just going to eat this bit of food I’ve found at the back of the fridge” or some such).
I’ve never particularly cared what happens after I’m dead, beyond making sure my nearest and dearest are taken care of, but then unlike a lot of people I’ve never had an urge to leave a legacy behind. With digital things, however, it becomes a lot easier.
One option would be to put the passwords for my accounts in with my physical will (although updating it would be a monthly pain). There are also companies who will look after data and release it up on death. With both of these there are potential risks. A far safer option would be to have a trigger set on my accounts so that should they be notified of my death a set of events are set in action. Facebook and Twitter, for example, could change my status to say that I’ve now left this mortal coil. Private photos on Flickr could be deleted while payment for an account could be made to keep those in the public domain available.
It sounds like it is unlikely to happen, but then I can have my head frozen and preserved for a time when I can have my body rebuilt, so clearly anything is likely in this crazy world.
I need some space!
I commented the other day on the fact that a few friends and I play an online game for a couple of hours each week, and the social interaction is just as important (if not more so) than the game itself. (See here.) Having said that, I still want to enjoy the game I’m playing and four years of City of Heroes has left me feeling that something is lacking. That all important element is space.
EVE Online
Okay, so it’s space ships, lasers, solar systems and, maybe, aliens.
I enjoy science fiction far more than any other genre and I would really like to play an online game set in this arena. My criterion isn’t complicated, but it’s proving difficult to meet. The elements I want are:
- A casual game that can be played for a couple of hours and doesn’t require massive investments in time.
- Spaceships and battles in space.
- A character that gets out of the space ship and walks around (ideally on planets and in space stations).
- Nothing too in depth. Mainly shooting and blowing things up, with some interesting plotlines to back it up.
I tried Star Wars Galaxies a long time ago and while that had a lot of the things I want in a game it was intensely dull. I’ve looked at EVE which has beautiful graphics but is far to time intensive. Now I sit and wait for the next batch of science MMOGs to appear. Out of those the only one which appears to tick my boxes is Bioware’s The Old Republic, but sadly this is years away. Star Trek Online might work as long as it’s got the dark, gritty feel of the latest movie rather than the fluffiness of The Next Generation TV series.
In the meantime I’ll continue flying around a city beating up bad guys and saving the world.
My name’s Leigh and I play a MMOG (massively multiplayer online game).
These days this is nothing special, every man and his son plays Counter Strike, Halo online or World of Warcraft. Gone are the times when it was a past time talked about in hushed tones.
Halo Online Screen Grab
The one I play is a super hero based one called City of Heroes. Don’t worry, I don’t actually want to be a super hero flying around in spandex any more than the majority of people who play Halo want to be space marines. (Well, if I happen to be bitten by a radioactive spider and find out I can climb buildings and shoot web from my wrists I’m not going to complain.) I play this game because some of my friends do.
Each week, for a couple of hours, we all sit down at our computers, fire up the game and arrange a conference call on Skype. We spend our time doing missions in the game while laughing at each, talking about other stuff and generally catching up. If we weren’t doing it while we played this particular game we’d be doing it while playing another. If we didn’t play any online games we’d have the same conversations sat in a bar (except for the fact that we live in different cities).
For some people it’s all about the game they play, and I won’t deny that if the game was particularly boring we’d stop, but, for us, it’s as an excuse to talk without being bothered by child or partners.
A report about how teenagers consume media showed an interesting similarity in use. Games consoles connected to the internet are used by teenagers in favour of mobile phones when they want to talk to their friends. (See the report here.) For these young people it is mainly due to cost, but it led me to wonder how many more people will be using games as a form of social interaction with real life friends now that those games are not restricted to hardcore gamers. After all, sitting on the phone talking to a friend for two hours is not as acceptable as having time set aside to play a game with a friend. I could even be suggested that this type of activity is more acceptable than meeting at a friend’s house for a poker night.
Sending an email to a Facebook user from an external address would be useful.
For a long time not everyone read or replied to emails even if they used the internet. I guess this was mainly because they didn’t see the point in it. What’s changed now is that logging onto Facebook to check what friends have been up to is becoming a habit for many and because there is a direct messaging system on the service they use it.
I don’t have anything against this set-up at all, and if it encourages people to use electronic communications then all the better. The one change I would like to see is for Facebook users to be able to accept emails from (and send them to) addresses outside of Facebook.
Spam, people will cry. I don’t want spam in my Facebook inbox! Well neither do I, but the easy way to avoid this would be to have a verification system. For example, if I want to send an email to a friend’s Facebook inbox, he would first have to type in my email address in his accept list (or even pick it up from my own Facebook profile if I’ve put it on there). If he doesn’t do this then any emails I send to joe.bloggs@facebook.com would just be deleted.
The reverse of this would also work, meaning that, once authorised, my friend could send an email to my external address from inside Facebook. All of this still retains the privacy that users want, but gives a bit more flexibility to those of us who don’t, or can’t, spend all their time logged into the site. Not only that but it would also mean I could email a group of people, some of whom use Facebook and some who won’t go anywhere near it.
This would also put Facebook one step closer to what Google are trying to do with Wave, helping them become the platform they wanted to be rather than the walled garden they are at the moment.
After finding a couple of shortfalls in what Flickr can do (see here), and having had a recommendation from a friend, I thought I’d take a look at Google’s Picasa.
Flickr
I did the normal stuff: created an account, downloaded the software, uploaded some pictures.
From what I could see, most of what Picasa offers is the same as Flickr as far as online albums go. The big extra I got was the software. Whereas Flickr just has a simple uploader, Picasa has software that allows local management of pictures, videos and other similar stuff. Uploading is then synced between the web and the local copy.
This doesn’t interest me as I don’t keep local copies of my pictures, foolish I know, but then the pictures aren’t really for me they’re for everyone else. What I did like was the flexibility of the ways I can publish my pictures on other web sites. With Flickr all I get is a single RSS feed of the most recent uploads. Picasa gives me all sorts of options from showing specific albums to certain pictures. A lot more flexible.
Picasa
The other thing I was interested in was uploading from my mobile phone. Twitter applications have shown how fun and easy this is via sites like TwitPic. With Flickr I can email photos, but can’t create albums for them unless I use the main web site. Sadly Picasa doesn’t do much more than this. In fact uploaded pictures are put in a separate place and I wasn’t sure if this was publicly visible.
So at this point there isn’t much reason for me to swap over to Picasa. I get one of the things I want, but as this (and the uploading) are just niggles rather than real problems, and moving everything over to Picasa would be a Big Job I’ll stay where I am.
I’ve used Flickr for a number of years as an online repository for my photographs. This came about because I very rarely look at any pictures I’ve taken, but other people sometimes want to. As well as this it’s nice to have a visual record of some of the places I’ve been and the things I’ve got up to. (One day I’ll scan a load of my photo’s from previous years, but it’s not high on my priority list.)
Flickr
Flickr has proven very useful. I can create lots of sets (albums) making images easy to categorise, I can download a picture again in its original size, people can comment on them, there’s a little desktop utility that uploads them in batches and I can use an RSS feed to put them on my web site.
There are, however, two things I feel are missing from the service.
With the RSS feed, or photo stream as Flickr calls it, there is no choice which pictures will be shown: the most recent ones are broadcast. According to the site the only way to alter this is to amend the upload dates, putting those you want to be shown as the most recent. It would be much better if the photo stream was just a random selection, or even better if certain sets could be specified.
The other area where Flickr seems to have missed out something useful is with mobile uploading. Pictures can be uploaded via email or using various applications for mobile phones. The problem is that there is no way to add to, or create, a new set. This can only be done by logging into the main web site. A disappointment when you’re on a slow mobile connection.
A friend has recommended Picasa as an alternative and although after using Flickr for so long I’m rather entrenched in it, I’m now off to have a look at Google’s offering. Maybe it’ll have the icing I desire without taking away any of the cake I so enjoy.
Sprout seemed like an excellent idea when I discovered it at the end of last year. Put simply it’s a way to create Flash code that can then easily be copied onto other people’s sites. It is especially good because it works with Facebook, Myspace and various other social networking sites. For someone like me who has very little coding talent, and no skill with graphics at all, it’s easy to use and change.
Everything in the world of Sprout was great until they decided to start charging for using it. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against a web service charging. I would go so far as to say I’d like services to make money, after all until energy becomes free nothing else will be.
So, when I got my first email from Sprout saying they were going to charge I shrugged and didn’t do anything more. As I like the service but don’t make great use of it I figured a few dollars paying would be well worth it. What shocked me was the amount they wanted to charge: $228 as the minimum annual price plan was just crazy. I resigned myself to leaving Sprout and having a hunt around for something to replace it.
Obviously I wasn’t the only person who thought Sprout were asking slightly too much, as a couple of months before the charges were due to be brought in I received another email saying they were making a ‘free’ price plan available as long as usage was low. An ideal answer for me.
I do wonder if the guys in charge at Sprout ever looked at the data from their user’s accounts before deciding to charge. To me it seems to make perfect sense to offer a very basic, but free account. If the free accounts are taking up too much of your resources then it’s little cost to the company. There is then a chance that some of those small users will become big users and be happy to pay, partly because they were supported when they needed it.
Regardless of how this change of heart came about, I’m happy. I’ll carry on using Sprout and should I start attracting lots of traffic I’ll be more than happy to pay the price.
While I like Facebook, and with the use of email alerts and the mobile interface I find it very easy to use, I’m well aware that most people don’t access it in this way. The majority of users log-in to the site with a web browser and are therefore greeted by the stream of pictures and notifications that is their newsfeed.
Status updates are fine to read, they let you know what you’re friends are doing and thinking. Pictures that people have been tagged in are also fun to look at, because who doesn’t want to see what crazy situations people you know have been in. Then, spoiling the party, are all those people who play silly games, send you requests to plant a flower in their garden, or want you to join their vampire clan. These are the things that clutter up your newsfeed and get in the way of seeing what you want to read.
Wouldn’t it be better if Facebook allowed you to filter certain types of updates? With some friends you could leave everything switched on and with others (you know the ones I mean) you could turn all but status updates off.
I can’t imagine Facebook ever implementing this. If nothing else it would reduce the exposure a developer’s application gets making it far less likely to be added by other people, but wouldn’t it be great.
