Josh Kim dot Org

… is that I get to think again about how a desktop or a laptop computer’s role in today’s Internet society is changing.

This must be the 4th time I would be reformatting on the MacBook Pro(if I do reformat…). Every time I do reformat, I make sure I backup everything and anything. I even do an incremental DVD burn sometimes. I recently burned 2 DVDs worth of pictures and movies from my iPhoto, just so that I’ll have a physical backup, just in case my external hard drive blew up.

Just as I do with everything in life, I try to be as efficient as possible, by taking time to see if there are better solutions to problems that I face often. Backing up data is one of those things that deal with all the time… as should all people who use computers. While the Internet is fast enough to just purely store my photos, songs, movies on a remote server, I can’t have access to it with the speed of double clicking on something on my local machine: It’s still fast enough for me to use an external hard drive to back up my media (including my documents) and keep burning DVDs regularly (Hard Drive is still faster than my Internet connection… maybe not so in Korea… but still, even if the Internet was faster than my Hard Drive, then the Hard Drive becomes the limit.) Back in the day, I would make backups of the ENTIRE file structure I had, without knowing that there are programs out there that would make things a little bit more efficient. By making backups of ONLY what changed, I could save lots of time and space… For this solution, I could go ahead and buy some incremental backup software such as SuperDuper or wait until Leopard’s Time Machine comes out. But this doesn’t actually solve my problem.

I want to identify what I need access to, and have all these areas covered by web applications. Call me crazy, but it would be awesome to be able to move seamlessly from computer to computer, while ONLY needing to access my media by an external hard drive. (This is until Internet gets fast enough to be able to stream media from a home server… we’re not there… yet.)

• Email
  • Gmail is a great place to keep your email “backed up”, as long as Google stays un-”evil.” Currently, Gmail keeps copies of all emails that come in, while Mail.app gets a local copy.
  • I just hope there’s a way to send myself the old emails I have archived.
  • Also, if there was a way to make Gmail label emails properly depending on which folder I dropped the email into in Mail.app… that would be great.
• Contact Information
  • Cellphone numbers: No complete solution yet. Facebook is a close solution, but it’s not as complete, since users can choose not to put up their information and not everyone that I know has a profile on Facebook. I think an application that does this is a possibility…
  • Screen names: AIM/Meebo. But I still like using Adium… because I can log conversations and have more features…
  • Email addresses: Mail.app keeps track of them… and there is Address Book.app for the Mac, also I could use Gmail to keep track of this.
  • HOWEVER: There is no complete online solution to contain all such information… and I would also want whatever this system it is to play with my favorite application, Quicksilver.
• Bookmarks
  • Del.icio.us. I heard Ma.gnolia was better… I might have to try it sometime. But this is a great solution… and it plays well with Quicksilver, Firefox (plug-in), and Safari.
• Feeds
  • I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
  • I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
  • I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…
• iCal
  • There are plenty of Calendar tools out there, but iCal is just too easy and great to not use.
  • Easy to backup, since the feature is built in… but once again… have it automatically backed up somewhere.
• Random notes
  • Sidenote: I love this program. I think it’s because it’s triggered by a keystroke, and it’s extremely useful. I shun the mouse for almost all tasks, since it’s less precise than a keyboard is. First reformat I did, I forgot to back this up from the /User/jk/Library folder, and lost a lot of tidbits of information I had. If there was a program that somehow posted all the information I made onto a server… hmm…
• Docs
  • All of the files I’ve downloaded, including applications and full notes I make on presentations and articles I read online.

I see desktop applications becoming more and more useless unless there is an online component to them. The ideas of collaboration and connectivity are just too awesome to not utilize.

I guess until there are solutions for each and every one of these suckers… I’ll be just backing up my library folder…