davidklecha | Digital Nomad (Reply)

I feel like I’ve blogged on this before, but… I don’t feel like losing the rest of my day to my blog/LJ archives, so I’ll just pretend it’s new. Well, it’s at least an ongoing problem so it’s always relevant.

Anyway, my problem is this: I use too many computers.

Part of that is occupational. I’m an IT guy after all, and it’s hard not to hear the siren call of a new computer when the current one gets the slightest bit clunky or unwieldy. But, I also have a situational computing situation–a desktop with a big monitor that I use for gaming and writing, a laptop that was…charitably financed by a family member while I was laid off, and a work laptop significantly more powerful than the personal lappy that I probably do a little too much personal stuff on.

Naturally, what this amounts to is needing documents, browsing, and e-mail to be the same on all three PCs. Documents I’ve solved through Dropbox, which also works as an automated backup and phone-based viewer. Browsing has improved thanks to Firefox 4, which now offers a secure sync service, syncing bookmarks and saved passwords and such between PCs. That’s very nice.

But e-mail is my strange downfall. I tried GMail, but it just doesn’t quite organize things the way I like to be organized. I like that their labels/tags vs. folders concept, in theory, but in practice I think I’m just mentally bound to the idea of buckets to drop my stuff in, and frankly not enough of what I get e-mailed about is so deeply interconnected that I need to find it in both places. Just… not really a thing with me. Not mention that I’m just plain leery of the whole cloud thing. By default, I would just rather have everything accessible offline with a minimum of possible fuss.

So, I’ve also tried several times to work with PortableApps, with varying success. I like Thunderbird well enough that it makes this doable, but I also don’t like having my e-mail and junk on an easily-lost-or-destroyed thumbdrive. I could go get an IronKey or something like it, so I’d know my data was safe if I lost it… but I’d rather not be in a position to lose it in the first place.

Then I hit on the idea of installing PortableApps inside my Dropbox and, while that’s kinda cool… it’s not, really, and I need something else to do.

So, right now, instead, I’m thinking about doing the remote desktop type solution. The big advantage, of course, is that if I want to look into things from my work computer, which helps keep things more neatly separated. The only problem with that is the annoying latency of working in that kind of environment, but I suppose such is the life of the digital nomad.

Someday, someday I’ll have this all figured out.

And then I’ll get a Mac.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.