Dude, Where's my laptop?

Dude, Where's My Laptop?  NFI, I hardly use it any more. 

Over the past 6 months I have pushed all my data into the cloud and migrated to as many cloud based applications as possible.  When I started this cloud computing based approach, one of the results I did not foresee was that I would no longer heavily rely on my laptop. 

For the last 10 years I have carried my laptop with me everywhere.  To work, back home, on holidays, to the coffee shop, parties, everywhere. I had just come to accept this laptop as a part of my life. I didn't mind taking my laptop everywhere and the main reason is travelled with me is so that I always would have access to the data and applications I need to do my job at any time and anywhere.   

Over the last 4 weeks I have done a fair bit of travelling and as per usual I have taken my laptop with me.  On returning from one of these trips I rushed home and didn't go through my usual arrive home ritual of unpacking and quickly setting up my laptop.  When I eventually turned my attention back to my computer related activities I  jumped on my home PC and started working away.  A couple of days later I thought, Dude where's my laptop? 

Today I find that I am using my laptop less and less.  If I am home or in the office I use a desktop PC, if I am out on business for the day I will work from my Android, if I am at a friends place I will work from any PC I have access to, and if I am sitting in the lounge room watching TV or relaxing with a drink I will use my wife's net book.   

My laptop still has its place in my life, however I am no longer reliant on it. It is not critical if its stolen, blows up or I just forget where I put it. It is no longer the most important item I own, its just a computer like any other.

Google Buzz: How will we use it?

I have been a user (or is that addicted) of social computer applications since I was old enough to care. In the early 90's I enjoyed participating in closed BBS applications since. In 1994 I discovered a couple of computer nerds who seemed to be spending large amounts of time in the computer science lab writing and reading lots of information in Notepad. They of course were using one of the very first versions of MIRC and participating in whatever teenage computer nerds discussed back then.  I of course joined the nerds and would spend a lot of my free time exploring the many and varied channels of IRC. 

Since then I have always been quick to adopt new social Internet applications.  Not long after IRC I started using ICQ, my ICQ number is #866536 which makes me one of the very first users of ICQ and I still have this account today.   I went onto use MSN, Yahoo Chat, Skype, various blogs and of course MySpace , Facebook and Twitter. 

It was with great interest when I woke up on Wednesday and started reading my morning RSS feeds to discover Google Buzz.

It was a very smart move for Google to convert their 100 Million Gmail users into a social network, basically overnight.   

When I am introduced to a new social Internet application the first thing I think about is, how am I going to use it?

Throughout the last 15 years of using social applications to communicate on the Internet I have noticed one constant always remain true.  The social circles I participate in, do not cross over from one platform to the next, because most people connect with only one or two at most. Of course there are exceptions and some of my friends, family or work colleagues join me on more than one, however as a general rule I find my audience to be different on each platform.  Interestingly I do not get to choose my audience on these platforms either, although of course I can adjust my audience on each platform by removing and inviting users. 

A quick run down of my audience with these applications for me as of today is as follows: 

Facebook : 90% Family and or close friends audience.  

Yahoo Chat: 90% Business communication.

Xfire: 100% gaming communication.

Twitter: A mixed bag of audience which I think of as just "public". Oh and of course to rub shoulders with famous people.

MSN: Friends from all parts of life.

ICQ: Does anyone apart from Russian girls with web cams use this anymore?

GTalk: Friends and past work colleagues. 

Blogger: Anyone that cares to read.

LinkedIn: 100% business

What does it matter who my audience are within these applications?  Well for me the audience decides how I use a social application. Lets look at some quick examples of how and where I would publish the content: 

Sharing my travel status and personal thoughts : I would use Facebook for this as sharing this type of message with my family and close Friends is the objective.  I don't want to tell my gaming buddies or random twitter users my travel plans and personal thoughts. 

Sharing my work status, what I am working on or how busy I am. 

For this I use Yahoo Chat and LinkedIn. It would not be appropriate to use Facebook for this type of content. 

Sharing many interesting technical or humour articles I find on the web.

I currently share these via Google Reader and or Twitter. I daintily don't want to be sharing all this content with my family or business networks. 

One thing is for sure, if I published everything to everyone, most people would block me because of the amount of content I share, with only a small amount of it being relevant to each person.

So with all these existing social applications and networks how and where is Buzz going to fit in?

One of the things Google Buzz achieves through its integration with the full Google suite of products is the ability to organise your contacts into groups.  You can create an audience group for any type of content that you want to publish in Buzz and before you make your post you can choose who your audience will be. 

How do you achieve this functionality in Twitter?  You run multiple accounts.  I guess you could do that same in Facebook and most of the other applications. This is not a workable solution for me.

I don't think a lot of work or thought has gone into this grouping contacts and choosing who to publish to as yet. Maybe its just there because it came with the integration with other applications? 

I personally believe this functionality is a master stroke, if I could ever manage to get 100% of all my online network within Google Buzz, I could drop most of the other applications and Google Buzz would become the one central place for all my social Internet activities. 

How am I going to use Google Buzz?  I am going to start publishing all my content through Buzz and as my network builds I will define my target audience to suit.  Who knows, with functionality like this,  Google just might become the online social application leader. 

Things you should not use on a domestic Qantas flight

I travel around Australia a lot for work and I fly with Virgin when I can.  This week the only direct flight home  that was available was with Qantas, therefore I had the pleasure [dis] of flying with the big Q.

Now I usually keep myself well occupied on flights, reading a paper or magazine until I can start using my laptop or phone.  The problem is, that I always tend to find when we begin our decent and the seat belt sign goes back on, I am bored with nothing to do after I turn off my electronic devices.

So this week I was getting desperate and ended up reading the safety instruction card where I found the following diagram which of course justified turning my phone back on to take this picture.

I was happily learning the things I should and should not do whilst on a Qantas 737.  I was pretty sure I had it worked out.

• No mobile phone from the pre 2000 era.  Check
• No stop watches. Check
• No music players that resemble microwaves. Check
• No walkie talkies. Check

But the last one had me stumped.  I decided to ask the gentleman sitting beside me for some help in understanding the last item that I must not bring on Qantas flight.  He put his glasses on and was quick to inform me that we are not to bring any wild animals onto a Qantas flight.  Now this makes sense but what on earth is the freak of a creature they decided to use in the diagram, should have they not gone for some brand recognition with a kangaroo? 

Creating a great home network

I recently had to find and move into a new house.  One of the most important things on my list of things to look for in a new house was what broadband was available. I even went as far as to locate the local phone exchange and measure the distance between the prospective property to ensure I was not going to have a degraded ADSL service.  With the NBN roll out  fast approaching and the prospect of fibre to the home this will become less of an issue in the future.

Once we had chosen our new house the next thing I was determined to do was to ensure I had good network connectivity throughout the entire house.  At my last house I never got around to ensuring a had a good network across the house and in the end I kept thinking, don't worry your moving soon. This was PITA and in hindsight I should have just fixed it.

The major issue for good WiFi connectivity across the house is the location of the wireless router with respect to physical distance and the physical mass between the router and your device

My new house is multi story with my home office downstairs and main living area upstairs. My initial thought was that I would connect myBillion BiPAC 7404VNPX ADSL modem / router Wifi to the phone line in my office and work from there, however as I was setting up I noticed that the phone socket in the office was fed from a make shift extension cable which was probably 10 meters long if not longer.  This forced me to change my plans. To ensure for a very good internet connection you need to have your ADSL modem as close to the main phone socket in the house.

After a quick change of plans I setup my ADSL Router behind my lounge room TV which is the dead center of the upstairs area of the house.  This location proved to be great with an internet connection which runs at 90% capacity 100% of the time. It also provided a surprisingly great wireless coverage throughout the entire house. I did not expect to achieve excellent wireless coverage in my office from the upstairs router and in fact I had initially planned to run a separate wireless device down stairs to ensure this was not a problem.

With a good wireless network in place the last challenge was to ensure a fast connection between my gigabit network upstairs and my gigabit network downstairs where I store my NAS, PC,s and anything else I am working with. The prospect of getting in the roof and running a Cat5 cable down the walls was not very enticing and I didn't want to pay someone or wait for them to do it , therefore I decided to look into an EoP (Ethernet of Power) solution.  I have always been a skeptic of this technology, however it was not going away, so I decided it was finally time to give it a chance.

After some quick research I decided to go with the Netcomm NP201AV which provides two plugs both with an Ethernet socket. There was no setup required with these plugs, I simply plugged them in and attached a Cat5 cable to each end.  Once connected to the gigabit hub downstairs I had a great connection to the network upstairs, simple as that. I then tested the plugs running from my power boards in an attempt to free up two precious power sockets.  For some reason when I had both plugs running through a powerboard I experienced dropouts and connectivity problems, this is most likely due to the internal filtering of the powerboards.  I tinkered around and ended up achieving perfect connectivity whilst having 1 plug through a power board which I was satisfied with.

The Netcomm Home Plug devices provide a theoretical bandwidth of 200MBPS however it is generally far slower than that.  I am yet to give it a good test to see the true bandwidth of this solution, however it seems fast enough and streams 1080p blue ray movies from my Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ to my WDTV Live without missing a beat so am happy with the solution. It is also yet to drop out or have any connection problems what so ever.

I am now very happy with my home network and internet connection and have learnt that I should have taken the time to do this in the past as it has stopped me having to work around connectivity black spots and problems, saving time and providing extra functionality.  Below is a quick and nasty network diagram I threw together to share my final result.