Keeping my digital life in-sync (3)
This is the third installment of my quest to keep my digital life in-sync. In the second part about my quest I blogged about the use of Dropbox. In this post I am going a little deeper into some of the advantages I have come across on the internet.
I am using the application 1Password by Agile Web Solutions to keep track of all my username/password combinations used for the many websites I make use of. Up until a few days ago I used the Mac OS X Keychain synchronization of Mobile Me to synchronize the data between my two Macs. On the Agile Web Solutions Wiki I came across a page describing how you can use your Dropbox folder to store and synch the Agile keychain between your machines.
I have been using it for a couple of days now and so far it works very well, and feels a lot faster when data needs to be synchronized.
As soon as I heard of the existence of Things by Cultured code I installed on my Mac and am using it as my main application to track all the things I need to do or have done by a certain time. This worked very well but it became cumbersome when I bought a second Mac (a Mac Book Pro) and started traveling around. There was a way of manually copying certain files to a USB stick and constantly copy these files between the two Macs. This goes well for a certain amount of time, but eventually I forgot to do the copy trick and was stuck with two difference lists of things.
Method #1: The article Sync Your Things Database via Dropbox desrcibes how you can move the Things library to a different location and then create a symbolic link on the original location for the datafiles that links back to the new location. Read this article carefully, if you don’t feel comfortable using the Terminal use the next method.
Method #2: I was very pleased when I came across the following wiki page describing how Dropbox can be used store it at a location that can be synchronized between several machines. This method is easier then method #1
The only things you really need to be aware of is that you only have one copy of Things running on any machine and make sure synchronizing has been performed between the machines before using Things on the other machine.
Method #1 as described for synching the Things database can be used for other Mac applications as well (for those applications that not let you choose where their information is being stored, like with 1Password), so I am making a list of applications for which I want to keep the data synched between machines.
I am liking Dropbox more and more everyday.
Keeping my digital life in-sync (2)
Some months ago I wrote the post Keeping my digital life in-sync. At this moment I still haven’t found a good working solution to keep my bookmarks in-synch. This mainly concerns the bookmarks within (Mobile)Safari on my iPhone. FoxMarks does a pretty good job for anything bookmark related in Firefox, which is my preferred browser on all platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).
When it comes to being able to access the same documents from different machines I started to use Apple’s MobileMe by using its iDisk functionality. But for whatever reason it didn’t really work well for me.
Since the time I started using Macs I have been listening to the The Mac Geek Gab Podcast by Dave Hamilton & John F. Braun. For some time now I heard them mention Dropbox. So after hearing about their good experience with Dropbox I decided to give it a try.
At the time of writing I have installed Dropbox on four machines (two Macs and two Windows machine) and I like it! It has a nice feel to it, just by looking at the Dropbox folder I can see what the status of my files are (All done or still folders/files to be synched).
One thing that I have found that does not work (not sure that it should) is when you use Dropbox for folders that also contain hidden files. I have some folders that also have files that start with a dot, making the files invisible on Unix based platforms (Mac, Linux, etc.). When these files got synched to the Windows machine the files and folders where created but where visible. When synching between two Windows machines these attributes are also lost. So it is my guess that file and folder attributes are just always lost.
For not a real big issue but I can imagine that for others it is a big deal, so let’s hope Dropbox will find a way of fixing this issue cross platform.
You can get Dropbox for free including free 2.0GB of storage, which if needed can be upgrade to 50GB for $9.99 per month or $99 yearly.
Just so you know…
Keeping my digital life in-sync
In the wake of my new iPhone I am working on making the efforts needed to keep information synced between the several devices I am using easier. Currently I am using at least 4 devices, being;
- an iPod, soon to be replaced with an iPhone depending on the speed of both Apple and T-Mobile
- an iMac
- a MacBook Pro
- a regular laptop running the Windows OS for work
The information I am currently most concerned about keeping in sync are;
- Contact information
- Calendar information
- Bookmarks
- News feeds
Contact and Calendar information
This one I have solved by buying myself a MobileMe subscription from Apple. Despite all of the negative responses revolving around the Push not being a real push and numerous outages around the world, I find myself among the lucky ones. So far I have no real issues when using MobileMe. I had however some issues with the iPod Touch initially, it would sync over the complete calendar down to the iPod regardless of what settings I was using. After some fiddling with the settings I found what was working for me
- Set the iPod Touch up for manually syncing
- Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to off
- Fetch mode to ‘Manually’
- Open the Calendar application and wait for it to (first clear and then) receive all of your data
- Set the iPod Touch up for Push
- Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to On
- Fetch mode to ‘Every 15 minutes’
Bookmarks
Since I mainly use Firefox for my internet browsing, keeping my bookmarks in-sync could be easily achieved by using the brilliant addon named Foxmarks (see also one of my earlier posts). The only downside is that Firefox is not running on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This means that I don’t have direct access to my bookmarks when I am on the road. I could be using Foxmarks website to access my bookmarks, but I would much rather have a way of syncing my Firefox bookmarks into Safari.
This is something I still need to figure out.
News feeds
For getting the latest news from several web sites around the world I have been using NewsFire on my Mac OS X based machines. This has always worked fine for me, but since the introduction of the new software version for both the iPod Touch and iPhone combined with the introduction of the iTunes App Store a whole new world of abilities has been opened for these two devices (unless you had jail broken your device, then you had access to third-party apps for quite some time already).
On the iTunes App Store I found the application NetNewsWire (the link will take you to the iTunes App Store), which is a RSS news feed reader. I already knew this application as a regular Mac OS X application, but I had never really looked at it since I liked NewsFire and was not looking for a replacement for it.
With the possibility of running NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch this has totally changed. So yesterday NetNewsWire has replaced NewsFire on both my Macs and has been installed on my iPod Touch.
The synching of the RSS feeds is handled by using the services of NewsGator. Just sign up for a free account and your are pretty much set.
NewsGator also provides toolbar applications for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but since these are provided as a downloadable executable, these are unusable on a Mac. I have found another way which allows you to add news feeds to your NewsGator account without the need of an addon or applications. I will describe this in a separate post.
Social Networking
Wakoopa
