Let’s go in reverse order from the title. First, the admission.

There is a saying that goes something along the lines of

The best laid plans of mice and men…

In an attempt to revitalise my interest in the blog I started three new series on the blog:

1. Photo of the day. With over 20,000 photos on my hard disc I was intending to share many of them on this blog in an attempt to get some decent comment and traffic, both on my blog and my Flickr stream.
2. My Week in View. Was going to be released on a Wednesday and give a quick run-down of the good, bad, ugly and utter shit that happened in the previous seven days.
3. The Beginner Photography series. I was attempting to share some of my knowledge and help beginners with the basics and getting the most from their digital camera.

As you may have noticed, I have failed on all three counts. I had about 10 days worth of photos posted, I reviewed my week just once and three editions of the photography course. I ran out of time and enthusiasm, then I had one or the other but never both at the same time.

I apologise to both the people following the photography. If you really want to learn more then please leave a comment and I will point you at some sites and magazines that are running exactly the same thing and doing much much better than I have.

The “Cloud” and Linux parts of the post are intermingled, so excuse me if this makes no sense!

Freedom from the desktop is awesome. Plain an simple. I can dedicated more time to real life instead of stuck at the PC answering emails, all the new documents I create are staying on Google Docs and I can share them with contacts without having to block the tubes with attachments. I have hit a problem with it though.

We redecorated the lounge, taking about a month to achieve start to finish. In this time my Ubuntu machine was unplugged in the other room. I had a sudden thought that perhaps I could re-jig my Sony Vaio PIII 833mhz (128mb RAM) with a small Linux install. I had heard of Damned Small Linux through conversation with a geek buddy so I looked. 50mb download, 10 minutes to install and it was up and running on the laptop. Nice and quick too. I only want it to get on the ‘net in the living room and check my mail, possible work on some Google Docs and be happy. Two problems I have hit so far:

1. The version of Firefox that’s pre-installed is (quite rightly) a hugely cut-down version. There’s no flash support and although I have told FF to install the plugin, it’s not working. This kills quite a number of sites (including this one), anything with Video (YouTube etc), the Farnborough Arshw Website and limits functionality on other sites like eBay and anything else with flash embedded.
2. More importantly than the flash, Google Docs works a treat for Word type documents, but will not play with the Google Spreadsheets application at all. This makes it rather inconvenient as I’am doing large amounts of work with spreadsheets for various projects I’m working on.

So, Google Docs is great, but I might have to dump DSL and either try another Linux distro or set the Ubuntu desktop machine up again. No great shakes with that but I like the idea of being able to completely hide the laptop. Can’t easily do that with a TFT screen, keyboard and mouse…

I know that a number of people in my web friends circles already do this, but this afternoon I have converted all my mail accounts (except one!) to work through Google mail. I know Daze is a big fanboy and he’s part of the reason I have done it.

It was always quite a scary proposition to have all my personal data live on the web and it had always stopped me from taking the plunge. After reading a few articles about living in the “cloud” (ie having everything on the web rather than stored locally) I decided that if big name techie people can do it and be safe then why can’t I?

With my life changing the way it is I have less access to my own PC and that can make it awkward if someone wants to get me an important document. By putting all my domain email addresses (4 of them) into Google I can log on from anywhere and view as I need to.

I haven’t used Google Docs or Calendar yet but have been using Google Reader for a number of months with great success. I guess I could start using them much more and I will get the same benefits as with email.

The next step is to grab one of my old pen drives (USB memory stick), put a mobile Linux distro (I haven’t decided which one yet) on it and run PCs from that. It means that I can boot any (USB bootable) PC to my pen drive, get to my favourites, reference documents and other useful info without ever going near the host OS or hard disks. Of course, I could just go for the mobile version of Firefox for the moment although that would restrict me to using either a Windows or Linux machine for compatibility.

So, do you do live in the clouds or are you scared to trust Google (like I was) and are still tethered to your PC? What problems have you found? Got any useful tips or tricks that you want to share?