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

Many of you who use Google’s various services (Calendar, Reader, Docs, etc.) wll be aware that you can access them over a secure (SSL or “https://”) connection. It’s often a good idea—in fact, I believe that GMail can’t be accessed any other way—and it’s usually quite easy to achieve (often, simply changing the ‘http://’ on the front of the URL to ‘https://’ is enough. I try and use the SSL addresses as a matter of course—certainly when I’m out of the house, and definitely if I’m using public WiFi—as you can never be sure if someone else in range is ’sniffing’ the network traffic.

Recently, however, I’ve been frustrated by my attempts to try and access some Google services via ‘https://’, using my Linux-powered Asus Eee 701 ‘netbook’. Whenever I tried, I would be redirected to the non-secure version of the page, or even the default Google/iGoogle home page—really not what you want, especially if on a public network.

I was stumped by this: was it a problem with the Linux Firefox? The particular version of Firefox I was using at the time (v3.0.1—I have since upgraded)? Something even more sinister…?

Um, no, actually—I have just worked it out, and I really should have thought of it before. Basically, Google usually allows you to access specific services of theirs, via two URL ‘patterns’. For instance, if you want Google Calendar, you can use either www.google.com/calendar or calendar.google.com—either will do.

Or at least, this is the case if you only want to access the non-secure (http://) pages. If you’re looking for the secure (https://) version, you can only use the “www.google.com/[service]” URL pattern—try using “https://[service].google.com”, and you’ll be redirected straight to the insecure pages, with no warning that this is going to occur.

So, if you want to ensure (as far as possible) that you will get through to an encrypted Google service, make sure that you enter the URL in the format https://www.google.com/calendar/ (or whichever service you want), and all should be well. (And while I think of it: at time of writing, I believe that only the “google.com” domain enables “https://” connections, so “google.co.uk” and other national domains won’t give you a secure link either.)

Hope this helps someone else

Web developer and musician Jeremy Keith has posted a heartfelt, even passionate eulogy for GeoCities, the pioneering Web site hosting outfit which was quietly put to sleep by its owner Yahoo!, earlier today.

A decade ago, I had my own plot of cyberspace on GeoCities (even that turn of phrase reads to me as quaintly 1990s as GeoCities itself). It was located at /SunsetStrip/Amphitheatre/5117/—the city/geographical metaphor extended to the thematic ‘areas’ of the site, where “SunsetStrip” was devoted to music, “WallStreet” to business, and so on.

“The Hall Of The Endless Knot” was a small site devoted to my big musical interest of the time: loop-based instrumental music of the type popularised by Terry Riley, Fripp and Eno, and the like. It served mostly as a host for a “virtual album” of my own recordings with electric guitar and loop sampler (a quite exciting idea in 1998), but I also found space to link to other resources along similar lines, including Looper’s Delight (which as you can see, long outlived my own effort, and interest in the subject, for that matter).

Suffice it to say, after a few years the “Hall” was gradually abandoned, and long before Geocities departed this world, I think my own site there did too. Actually, I have no idea whether my pages survived to the end, or were swept away in one of Yahoo!’s periodic remodellings of their new acquisition, and unless the Internet Archive fortuitiously kept a copy, I may never know.

There’s much more that could be said on the subject, but I’ll content myself with observing that the Web as a service known to most of the general public, has been in existence now for over fifteen years, and as time passes, we’re running up against issues of preservation more and more.

Over time, I myself have lost most of the personal Web sites I have built since discovering the Web in 1994. The loss of some of the material, doesn’t bother me greatly—some was downright embarrassing, and most not W3C-standards-compatible—but I do regret not making more effort to save my early blogging efforts from 2001-2, and later from 2004-5. I’m fairly sure some fragments survive somewhere, either on one of my large collection of CD-Rs (which at their age, for all I know, could be disintegrating into unreadable dust as I sit here), or perhaps in the aforementioned Internet Archive (Wayback Machine).

I’m thinking seriously about starting to compile my blogging, Twittering (well, the highlights, anyway), Twitpic-ing and similar online ephemera of mine, in “yearbooks”. I would want to create them in an electronic format which could be easily read/recovered in a couple of decades’ time (or more), which to my mind means LATEX or ODT (OpenDocument), and would also think of having a copy or two printed, in the hope that the contents might be of interest to future generations. (Yes, it sounds pretentious, but who knows?)

Anyway, I have tangent-ed long enough. Farewell, GeoCities, and may a flight of sprites sing you to your rest.

(Update (11pm): Oh wow… the Wayback Machine has a 1999 cache of the “Hall”… now, how can I easily save myself a copy before that vanishes?)

A couple of months back, I looked back on some of my “computing milestones” from the past fifteen years or so, and in passing, mentioned that for a couple of years I was the proud owner of a Psion Series 5mx.

Whilst I had time to write about how I was getting on the Internet with it in 2001 (via my then mobile phone—a Nokia 6310i, as I recall—via GPRS over an infrared link!), I didn’t mention another use for the Psion at the time: it was also my calendar, which I synchronised with Lotus Organizer (sic) on my desktop PC via PsiWin.

Of course, there’s little new in syncing a PDA with a PC/Mac—owners of handhelds have been doing this since the 1990s. However, after parting with my Psion I didn’t get back into calendar-syncing activity until acquiring my current mobile phone (a Nokia N95), in the summer of 2007. This syncs very nicely with our iMac (either over USB, or more often, wirelessly via Bluetooth), but it can also exchange data with calendar hosts on the Internet.

Since last year, I’ve been syncing Google Calendar with the N95 over the Internet (3G or WiFi, whichever is available). A sync setup has evolved over time between the iMac, the N95 and Google Calendar where:

• Google acts as the de facto ‘master’ calendar, mainly because until relatively recently, Apple iCal couldn’t update Google Calendar directly. Therefore, I set up iCal to “read” the GC data, and updated GC via either the N95 or the Web interface. (I just learned that iCal now supports “write access” to GC via CalDAV, of which more shortly.)
• Until now, the N95 has synced with Google Calendar over HTTP, via the GooSync online service. (You will note the past tense, the reason for which follows in a moment.) I also sync via HTTP to Nokia’s Ovi service, as it seems to me one can never have too many data backups…

The problem with GooSync, is that they have just discontinued their Free service, in favour of offering “Lite” and “Premium” packages. The “Lite” package isn’t ruinously expensive (about £6 a year), but being a bit of a cheap sort (!), I thought I’d look around for free alternative solutions for syncing between Google Calendar and my N95, or even completely different approaches.

Well, at time of writing, I’m still looking. Basically, I haven’t found another free service offering sync between S60 phones and Google Calendar over SyncML (the preferred method for S60); they’re all paid services. Google’s own SyncML-based service is limited on S60 to contact information (so no calendar sync); however, they offer contacts and calendar sync if you’re prepared to download Nokia Mail for Exchange, which Google warns may result in data loss (“make sure to back up any important data before you set up Google Sync”, but then that’s good advice anyway).

One positive development: I’ve managed to set up iCal on the Mac to access Google Calendar via CalDAV, so I can now not only read GC items within iCal, but add them as well. Whilst I could get around the GC-N95 sync problem by syncing the N95 and Mac (i.e. the Mac becomes the ‘master’), this wouldn’t work if I’m away from home, and I’d also be stuck if the home Internet connection goes down.

Loads of fun, anyway. In the end, it may turn out that I have to bite the bullet and pay for a Google Calendar syncing service after all (in which case, I’d probably stick with GooSync). It all makes me feel as if I took the ability to sync my calendar online from my phone, for free, somewhat for granted.

Whatever the case, it looks like I have some weighing-up of options to do.

The BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, has written a post for the BBC’s dot.life blog, titled “Who will ride Google’s Wave?“. Along with ZDNet UK’s “first look” at Google’s new baby, Rory’s article may well be the first one I’ve encountered which (IMHO) actually explains in simple yet non-patronising terms, what Google Wave is/does, and why it should be of any interest to the likes of yours truly.

And better still, now I’ve read it (and watched some of Google’s own demo video—embedded below), I can say that yes, I am interested.

ZDNet’s article describes Google Wave as “a cross between IM and a wiki”, and that’s as good a place as any to start. Google themselves put it a bit more prosaically:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

I’m only judging from what I’ve read (and Google’s demo video), but assuming this is all what’s being worked on: imagine a wiki (say, Wikipedia), but a wiki which evolves, sprouts extra text, images, videos, embedded maps, and so on and so forth… all in real time as you are looking at the page. Text can be seen being entered, conversation threads appearing and developing as you watch… yes, basically like “a cross between IM and a wiki”, as ZDNet said. And all this is not a program you install on your computer—it takes place inside your Web browser (well, unless you’re using Internet Explorer, which as the ZDNet preview points out, isn’t quite up to the task).

At time of writing, Wave is a “limited beta”, meaning that you can only use it if you are one of a very select band who found the Golden Tickets inside the Wonka bars… or if you live in the real world, if you have been lucky enough to receive an invitation. This is apparently with good reason—Wave is reputed to be still rather buggy and unpredictable—but I have “signed up” for notification when the service is opened up to the wider Web in due course.

I hope Google Wave fulfils the promise it seems to be showing here, as I can think of all sorts of uses which it could be put to (real-time collaboration between workers, researchers, etc.; the “next level” of Web forums; another tool for customer service; and so on). I can’t help thinking that this is a first stab at what the Web could evolve towards over the next decade or so… or it could turn out to be a fascinating experiment which leads nowhere.

Only time will tell, but I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see where it goes.

I don’t know if you’ve tried Wolfram|Alpha yet, but one example they recommend for a test is to input a date and see what the system sends out the other end.

Well, I tried Wolfram with my birthdate , and amongst the outputs was a nice list of famous personages with whom I share a birthday.

It’s a mixed bag: I was pleased to have been born on the same day as three notable musicians (composer Paul Hindemith and pianists Anton Rubinstein and Diana Krall ) and actor Burgess Meredith , and somewhat less contented to share an anniversary with Oswald Mosley. Most surreally, I learned that I share my exact birthdate (day and year) with the American actress Missi Pyle (Stormbreaker, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)—would’ve been nice if the lucky individual had been a musician or something, but I can live with that

I suspect that Wolfram|Alpha is capable of rather more than telling you who shares your birthday, but it’s fun nonetheless…

Posted by Wordmobi

Musician Bing Futch has just posted a blog entry, marking fifteen years since he first went online at home, which got me thinking about a few of my own “Internet milestones”. Set the time machine going…

• I don’t know the exact date, but I am sure that I got my first Internet connection from home in 1996. My PC at the time was running OS/2 (long story), and the internal 28.8k modem cost around £200—this was relatively cutting-edge technology in the UK at that time (with a price tag to match), and the 28.8k standard was still relatively new.
  (As an aside, the Web server space I was given by my ISP was a disk-stretching 500Kb. Many single Web pages I visit these days weigh in at more than that alone.)
• We think of data services via mobile phone networks as a fairly recent phenomenon, but by 2001 I was getting online via my Nokia 6210i (and shortly afterwards, a 6310i, which gave me GPRS speeds) and my Psion Series 5mx, over an infrared link. I vividly recall spending Christmas 2001 with family at a cottage in the wilds of Dorset, sending festive greeting e-mails from the Psion over a shaky GPRS/GSM data link, to my then fiancée in South Korea—we would marry in Seoul just over two months later.
• Thanks to the positively mediaeval cable network in the town I was living in from 1996, I didn’t get broadband Internet at home until we moved to our current home town in late 2003. (This was despite seeing my first “always-on” cable modem connection on a visit to a US colleague’s California home in 1998, and coveting it massively (the cable modem, that is).) We finally got a cable modem in our first house here, switching to ADSL in 2006 when we moved to where we now live (there’s no cable TV in this new part of the town yet).

Now, of course, in 2009 I take ADSL and 3/3.5G mobile data more or less for granted, and it’s hard to believe that I didn’t even own a PC until 1993 (and didn’t get a ‘modern’ one until after Easter 1994). I can only imagine what I’ll be using by my fiftieth birthday, but I’m pretty sure it will be as unremarkable by then as a telephone or TV set is today.

Apologies for the seemingly endless stream of posts about the Nokia N95, but this one should be the last for the moment…

Ever since I got my N95 just about two years ago, I’ve wanted to be able to access the photos, videos, music, etc. on our home server (a ‘hacked’ Linksys NSLU2 running Unslung Linux), but for various reasons none of the possible solutions I’d looked at were ideal. The good news is, finally I’ve now found what appears to be the best way.

At the weekend, I finally upgraded my N95’s firmware from a positively ancient version (12.x, I think) to the latest (v31.0.017), which amongst many improvements, added UPnP “renderer” (client) support. In other words, the N95 can now play media from a server, instead of only being a server, as was the case previously.

I’m now in the process of trying out a couple of UPnP servers on our home server, to stream our multimedia collection to the N95. The one I’m testing right now is MediaTomb, and aside from it seemingly putting a quite high load on the system (“top” was reporting a load of over 3—the NSLU2 is not that powerful a machine), the functionality seems to work. I’ll be testing this further, but it does look as if my quest for portable multimedia anywhere in the house, may have finally found its goal…