This week at Mobile Tech Manor #10- my head is in the cloud

Mobile_tech_manor_large_2Wow!  It’s mind-blowing to me that I’m up to week #10 at Mobile Tech Manor, especially when I think back on how much has happened including a couple of hurricanes.  This week was a gorgeous week weather-wise and saw big activity with lots of things coming in at MTM.  The incoming rush of gadgets led me to look at my cloud computing habits and start refining (and defining) them for real.  There is lots of ground to cover so we’d better get started.

Upcoming travel

The end of the year is fast approaching and that season seems to bring lots of travel.  This year is a bit unusual in that regard because in addition to planning the annual CES trip in January there are a couple of trips that I may be taking prior to that.  The CES in Las Vegas is a huge electronics show and the entire city books up early with a few hundred thousand attendees that make the trek to the desert each year.  This means you have to book your arrangements far in advance to make sure you have a place to stay and I’m in the process of doing just that.  It is also complicated by the fact that it takes place immediately after the holiday season which makes the planning even tougher.

Prior to the CES trip we have a delightful trip coming up in November to attend Kevin’s wedding in Pennsylvania.  This will be a real joy and while the trip will be short it will be a wonderful one to take.  I’ll get to see Kevin of course (unless he makes a run for it) and Matt Miller should be there too.  I kid about Kevin a lot but he’s got a great mate in Barb and it will be wonderful to see those two tie the knot and begin their wedded journey together.

I may make a long weekend trip to the Beau Rivage in Biloxi this month as they have thoughtfully invited us on their dime.  This trip will depend on how things work out though as it’s a busy time at home so we may not be able to make it out there.  It will be fun if we can go out there.  As always for trips like these I’ll have to decide what gear to take with me.  It might be a good thing that a new netbook showed up this week as they are nice traveling companions for sure.

This week with software

There wasn’t much that happened on the software front this week as I didn’t try anything new and for the most part my existing toolkit worked well as it is supposed to. On the update front the only software that found an upgrade was the Apple AirPort Extreme router which had the firmware updated to version 7.3.2.  It went without a hitch and I can’t tell any difference which is usually the case with these router upates.  Probably just bug fixes.

I did spend far too much time this week playing with a new (to me) freeware game on the Mac.  Battle for Wesnoth is nothing fancy, an older fantasy turn-based strategy war game.  There is nothing particularly outstanding about BfW but I am having a lot of fun playing it.  It’s a typical orc/ elves/ good/ evil fantasy war game but it’s free and it plays well on the MacBook Pro.

Defining my cloud strategy

I wrote this week about how I am working on my cloud strategy due to all the gear that I evaluate and review.  This strategy refining is ongoing and I am trying new things to make this whole process less time consuming and more secure.  Most folks don’t realize that reviewing gadgets can require a lot of preparation when you do it like we do here.  One of the things we insist on doing for the gear evaluations is using the notebook or phone doing real work because how well a device performs those tasks is what readers need to see.  We have always done reviews this way and always will so at the very least this has always meant loading up the gadget with all of my oft-used programs and data so my real work can commence for the evaluation.  This can take hours and in some cases days and more importantly it all has to be undone prior to returning the gadget to the vendor.  Since I use my own real data in the evaluation I have to clean it all off the gadget before I send it back to the vendor and that’s another whole process.

I have been thinking about defining a more cloud-based strategy to do this which I felt could alleviate a lot of that preparation grunt work. I intend to keep refining a cloud system and will continue to share those findings as they occur.  I suspect that my cloud evolution is how everyone approaches this as the cloud is nebulous to begin with and it’s impossible to define an entire system and just use it.  I suspect I will continue to find things that could be done better or differently and be making adjustments for a while.

I have refined the system of using Firefox as my main base in the clouds that I referenced in the above post.  It is working well for most of my work but I still need to perfect how I handle my existing documents.  Those are mostly Word and Excel docs and I have been bringing them into Google Docs one or two at a time when I need them.  That is working OK but for those moments when I am away from my office and find I need to get my hands on a document from days gone by I have been using LogMeIn to get it.  I leave the MacBook Pro on all the time back in the office and I use LogMeIn to start a remote access session from any browser.  I can then interact with the Mac as if I am there and both work with the document natively on the Mac while viewing it on the device of the day or I can send the file to Google Docs and work it natively on the remote computer.  It’s working well but I am sure I’ll be refining this over time.

New gadgets

This week saw the arrival of several new gadgets that I am just getting started evaluating so I haven’t reviewed them yet.  First to arrive was the HP 2730p Tablet PC, the new model that is a refresh of my favorite mobile computer the 2710p.  The 2730p looks almost just like the 2710p so it’s almost like using a much faster version of my own Tablet.  The performance of the 2730p is smoking compared to the 2710p and all of the changes HP made to the new model are improvements.  It’s almost as if the 2730p is the result of my making a list of things I’d change on the 2710p if I was able and then improving it myself.  Kudos to HP for that.  I’ll be sharing many thoughts about the 2730p as time marches onward.

Yesterday the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook arrived on my doorstep and I’ve been having a blast with it.  Levnovo sent the white one which looks very Apple-like I must say and the design is very attractive.  It is one of the best-looking netbooks I have seen yet which apparently carries a lot of value for some.  I find the S10 to be as small and light as I could want, in fact any smaller and the keyboard wouldn’t work.  It’s just on the edge of being too small for rapid touch typing but I got used to it quickly.  Performance with the Atom processor is pretty decent although I find that Google Reader gets bogged down if there are a lot of items for me to read.  It does this on other devices too so I don’t blame the S10 for that, it’s a Google thing.  The touchpad on the S10 is the best I’ve used in a long time and I think Lenovo did a great job with it.  It is a multi-touch capable pad and that is pretty cool to zoom in and out on web pages.  Mostly a gimmick but it has been useful a few times.  I haven’t had it long enough to make definitve judgements yet but I am seeing between 2 and 3 hours of battery life on a single charge of the 3-cell battery.  It definitely needs a 6-cell battery which is not available from Lenovo yet.  So far I am impressed with this netbook.

Yesterday also saw the arrival of the Nokia N96 phone. No, this is not the fancy new 5800 that was announced this week but it’s a pretty snazzy phone in its own right.  I haven’t even opened the box yet so that is something to look forward to.  The N96 is not available in the US yet so this is the European version meaning the 3G won’t work here.  More on this phone as I get it running.

Book of the week

This week I read Tripwire by Lee Child and it was great.  It is from the wonderful Jack Reacher series, in fact it’s a book from early in the series that I somehow had missed.  Reacher is another one of those unusual heroes with a character well fleshed out by Child and I love every one of the books in this series.  Tripwire has the standard psycopathic one-armed, half-faced killer that makes the book a good read.

Wrap-up

That’s it for this week at Mobile Tech Manor.  It’s been a busy week and looks like that will continue for a good while.  I am up to my neck in gear to review so these will start pumping out soon.  There will be lots of cool video too so stay tuned and as always thanks for stopping by my corner of the web.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post