New Year's Resolution

Though spring is still a couple of months away, I've been doing some cleaning on my own with my digital devices (computers and iPod in particular). Here are some of the things that I've done so far.

1. Restore. Did a clean install of OS X on my Macs and restored my iPod touch to factory settings. Fresh start for the beginning of the year. It felt really good (trust me). Limiting to a few essential apps, I've managed to squeeze and maximize the available storage in my hard drive.

2. Upgrade. I have also upgraded the memory of my PowerBook (from 1GB to 2GB). I was happy to see some improvements in performance. Not only that, it hardly accessed my hard drive for swap files.

3. Organize. I simply changed the way I access and store my information. In the past, my main point of storage is in my PowerBook. That's where the logical place I keep things since it was the hub of my devices (every single thing is connected to that computer). Fast forward to 2009, most my data (email, documents, home videos) reside up somewhere in the cloud. Considering I use multiple computers (between home and work), thus the information that I need should always be available. Thanks to MobileMe, not only I was able to migrate the folders of my emails to the cloud, I was able to have my documents folder reside on it as well. As long as I'm connected to the web, I would be able to open those folders as if they were in the computer that I'm using. The process is instantaneous (without lag). There's something in OS X Leopard that made it fluid. Cloud migration will also protect you from hardware failure (making the switch from one Mac to the other painless, not to mention being able to access those information on my iPod touch). It's like having a third backup.

Inorder to do this, I have setup my PowerBook as my "master image" computer (to where every single Mac that I own will have thesame look and feel). Afterwards, I synchronize every preference option to MobileMe (with all the option boxes available selected). Once a new computer has been registered to MobileMe, that computer will have almost everything that my "master" computer have. I know hard drive cloning is probably a faster initial approach, but that doesn't give you the ability to update and synchronize those settings (as you move along). This is like IMAP for computers.

4. Backup. This is still in progress. I'm planning to purchase a NAS for my backup and extended media storage. The process will be a good test on how Time Machine will perform.

**During this writing, Palm has just announced the WebOS and the Prė. Exciting times!**

Sent from my iPod