Tales From The Cloud – Day 1

UPDATE: My laptop was actually fixed on February 6th. The reason I neglected to post any more updates is because very little else happened except for me realizing that portable and web-based apps are most definitely no replacement for your own laptop, at least not if you need stuff like Photoshop on a regular basis. While I’m sure if I was bored enough I could learn GIMP, that doesn’t solve the fact that portable apps have ridiculous RAM requirements, and that personal settings (like what clicking the middle mouse button does) still can’t be shoved on a USB stick. In conclusion, there is not yet a convenient way to be completely flexible about what computer you use. Original post follows, though, just so you can all laugh at my hopes and dreams which were shattered.

My MacBook Pro died. Well, okay, it still works, except for the graphics card. So if I could figure out the keyboard shortcut to turn on the screen reader, I’m sure I could pretend to be blind. Actually, no, I would really like a monitor, so it’s unusable for me. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t quite mass-producing parts for 2007 MacBook Pros anymore, so it’s on back order. The guy at CAVA told me to expect it by “the end of February”. Loooooovely.

Fortunately, a lot of my stuff is stored on the web and external drives, and I can still pull any essentials off my Mac with a convoluted process involving holding down the “T” key for a very long time. So it’s time, for at least a little while, to free myself from being dependent on one computer. I have a 2 gigabyte USB stick on my keychain for the bare essentials; for everything else, it’s time to live in the cloud.

Every day from now until I get my laptop back, I’ll be babbling about my experiences using any computer I can find, but with as much of my own settings and stuff as I can access. Hit the jump for day one…

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Around 5 PM I got the call about my part being back ordered. I called Apple to see if maybe, possibly, could they tell me if a local Apple Store had it in stock without me needing a 4 AM Genius Bar appointment just to possibly be told that it isn’t. Nope. Well, okay then.

Fortunately, I have an Android phone (yes, it’s the G1, what other Android phones are out yet?), armed with browsers of Steel and the best mobile email app ever. What it doesn’t have, though, is an office suite (or Google Docs support), screenwriting software (or Zhura support), a decent MSN/Yahoo IM client, or battery life. While it’s likely to get Flash before the iPhone, it doesn’t have that either right now, which means I still need a computer to get any Photoshop capabilities at all. So I grabbed a USB stick which I’d gotten for Holidaynakuhmas and brought it to the Monkey Bar, which is SVA Studentese for “the student center.”

The Monkey Bar has three G5 iMacs. This would be great if they had more than 256 megabytes of RAM. Opening more than a couple tabs in Safari made them cry tears of blood. I was only using Safari to find a Mac version of Portable Firefox, which I downloaded from FreeSMUG, whoever they are. This did not help at all. Now browsing the web still ate 75% of the memory and often 90% of the CPU as a result, but at least I hadAdblock.

From the same people I grabbed Portable Adium, which crashed spectacularly when I tried to run it next to Firefox. Then I remembered I have a Meebo account so why bother? I also grabbed their version of Cyberduck; haven’t touched that yet, but I don’t expect to on one of those machines.

But I had all my Firefox extensions, especially Feedly, so all was good when the computer would respond. All my passwords and cookies get saved to my USB stick, so that makes life easier. Now I just have to find a way to sync it with the Windows version.

All this isn’t very cloudly, though; I’m talking about local apps a lot, even if they are on a USB stick. Well, that’s because so far not much is new and exciting. I do all my screenwriting on Zhura and have for a while. I’ve used Google Docs before for a lot of things, and I often connected to Meebo to IM people whenever I had to boot into Windows. And I’m posting this via the web.

I expect that I’ll be uploading anything that won’t fit on my USB stick to some kind of web server…like, um, Plankhead.com. So, let’s make that my first discovery…

Discovery From The Cloud:

Replace big hard drives with a personal web server.

I’m sure there are tons of other services that let you upload stuff to a private area and share it in a public area, all for less money. But I’m paying for unlimited space and bandwith already, so why not?

I’ll try and figure out a new thing which I can do in the cloud instead of on a local machine each day. The ultimate goal is to make every computer I find nothing more than a “terminal”, a gateway to all my stuff on the web. Like Uplink but without the bank hacking and constant techno music.

I still miss my Mac, though.

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