Sidingsound

Readers of Eee 701 Planetoid (my blog devoted to the Asus Eee 701 ‘netbook’) may be aware that I’m a big fan of Dropbox, the online storage/file synchronisation service which also happens to work perfectly with the 701. I just wanted to share a quick tip for Dropbox I learned from an article at Lifehacker, which may be of use to other users, especially if they’re running Linux or Mac OS X:

As you may know, installing the Dropbox client on your Mac, Linux or Windows computer, gives you a special folder into which you place other folders or files; these are then copied not only to the online Dropbox storage space, but to any other computers linked to your account. This is very handy, especially if you have a laptop or other portable machine; it’s perfect for my Eee netbook, as I can back up files to Dropbox and my Mac with very little effort.

But what if you wanted to link folders/files on one machine to Dropbox, which aren’t located within the Dropbox folder? For instance, my Eee (running the Eeebuntu Linux OS) has a “Documents” folder in my home directory, and I’d like this to be backed up to Dropbox (nothing sensitive or confidential there, BTW), even though the folder should really stay where it is.

The answer—certainly if you’re on Linux/Mac—is simple: you just create a symbolic link (or ’symlink’—like a Mac alias or Windows shortcut) within the Dropbox folder, which points to the folder (or file) you’d like to link to. In the Linux and Mac terminal, you would change to the Dropbox folder, and from there, enter:

ln -s /path/to/your/item

This would create a symlink in the Dropbox folder with the same name—if you wanted a different name, you enter the new name for your symlink after the path:

ln -s /path/to/your/item alternative_name

(I would recommend symlinking a folder rather than a file for this purpose, just to be ‘tidy’.)

I use this method to ‘place’ my Eee’s Documents folder within Dropbox, so it appears to exist in two places (within my home directory, and within the Dropbox folder). The contents of ‘Documents’ are backed up to Dropbox, and also to the Dropbox folder on our Mac, meaning that in effect I have three copies of each item in the folder.

Check out the original Lifehacker article (“Sync files and folders outside your Dropbox folder“) for more details, including how to achieve the symlinking effect on Windows (basically, if you’re on Vista or Win7, use MKLINK at the command prompt).

Last October, I posted about a small problem which I was trying to work out: how to synchronise the calendars on our Mac and my Nokia N95 mobile phone, with Google Calendar.

Four months on, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t made much progress in the interim. To recap, these are the essentials of the setup which existed prior to last October:

• The N95 calendar synced “over the air” with Google Calendar via the GooSync service.
• The Mac calendar synced with the N95 via iSync on Mac OS X.
• The Mac can also update Google Calendar directly via iCal, thanks to GC’s CalDAV interface.

You may have worked out that Google Calendar acts here as the de facto “master” calendar, i.e. the primary copy of the calendar data. In this setup, the Mac doesn’t have a “local” copy of this data (it connects to Google’s server and displays what’s there), whilst the N95 does have its own copy of the data, but still treats Google as the “master” version.

This arrangement worked fine until last October, when GooSync ended its free service level, in favour of “GooSync Lite” (£5.99 per year). I haven’t renewed my subscription to date, as I’ve been prevaricating on what would be the best option—a lifetime subscription to GooSync Premium is £40, with a fair number of additional features, so that might be worth consideration. (The same service costs £20 for 12 months, and £30 for two years; how likely is it that GooSync might disappear within that time?)

So, at present, I can access Google Calendar via the Web, or via CalDAV (using either iCal on our Mac, or Mozilla Thunderbird (via the Lightning calendar add-on) on my Linux-powered Asus Eee 701 netbook). If I want my calendar synced to the N95, at present I would have to sync the phone with the Mac rather than Google; this is all well and good, but what if I am away from home and therefore unable to access the Mac?

I am also unsure whether iSync will transfer calendar items which aren’t located in the Mac’s own iCal database—i.e. because they’re on Google’s servers instead. For me, this is a wider issue: the Mac and netbook can only display the calendar if they have Internet access (more of a problem for the netbook, as the Mac stays at home). Therefore, I would like to find out whether it’s possible to sync the Mac and netbook calendars with Google (i.e. create synchronised copies on these machines of the events on Google), so that the events can be viewed and interacted with when the machines are offline.

I think I have a few options at this stage:

• “Admit defeat”, and cough up for a GooSync subscription. Otherwise known as the “path of least resistance”, at least this would sort out the N95/Google sync issue. If there are SyncML-compatible clients for Mac and Linux, I suspect GooSync Premium might also solve the “local copies on Mac and netbook” issue above, as GP allows up to four “devices” to use the service; this may require an email to GooSync to clarify.
• Sync the N95 with the Mac (and/or netbook) instead of Google. This would rely on a few “ducks in a row”: for one, clarifying whether iSync on the Mac needs the calendar items to be present in the Mac’s iCal database first. There is apromising-looking “one ring to rule them all” syncing utility for the Linux GNOME desktop—Conduit—which looks like it might be able to act as the go-between for Google, the netbook and the N95, but so far it appears that mobile phones are not yet supported explicitly (no doubt that will follow).
• Some combination of the above—e.g. GooSync for the N95, and other methods for the Mac and netbook.

So, the saga continues—just hope I can come up with a suitable solution before that vein in my head goes “pop”…

At the present time, I use a Web-based service for keeping up with RSS feeds. (I won’t name it, but if you really have to know, you can hazard a guess or hunt through my “lifestream” entries for clues, off-the-cuff references, etc.)

For various reasons, I am looking to move away from using this service, to reduce the amount of free demographic information for advertising purposes which they could extract from my usage of their facilities, if they were so minded (and I strongly suspect they may be). I would like to move my feed-reading activity to a “desktop” aggregator application; fortunately, the online service provides a feature to export all my RSS/Atom subscriptions to an OPML file, which any aggregator worth its salt can import and re-use.

The catch? Obviously, a major benefit of a Web-hosted feed-reader service is its “access anywhere” advantage—i.e. if you have an Internet connection and a browser, you can log on wherever you happen to be. If I was running an aggregator application on (say) my Mac and my netbook, the two apps would presumably use separate “databases”, which would normally be difficult to keep in sync.

However, I use Dropbox to provide me with a folder on each machine which is kept in sync via Dropbox’s online storage area. This means that if an application allows you to specify a location for its configuration settings, it’s possible to store these on Dropbox, and therefore share the same settings between machines. (I already do this with a couple of programs—e.g. an encrypted password database—and it works like a treat.)

So, here’s my question:

Does anyone know of a cross-platform RSS aggregator—preferably, which will run under Mac OS X and Linux—which allows you to share the same “database” of feeds, posts read, etc. between multiple machines?

I’ve already thought of one or two possibilities myself:

• BlogBridge satisfies the Mac/Linux test, and it helps that they say the application is free and open-source. However, the synchronisation of settings between machines is achieved by setting up an account with BlogBridge, meaning that this element is not entirely under your control (a major reason for my considering this move in the first place).
• Thunderbird has feed-reading capabilities, and there is guidance out there on storing your Thunderbird profile on Dropbox (though it’s Windows-centric, I think the advice could be adapted). However, the idea of placing my unencrypted (?) e-mail details on an external server doesn’t appeal particularly, though I could put up with storing just my feed-reading data.

So, I’ll continue my hunt for a solution, and I’d be pleased to hear from anyone out there who might have a handy idea or two