Headworx

You have to back up your files. Only my Mom does not have to. She is new to the computers world, and the only things she has been using are online applications (all from Google), namely Gmail, Documents and Spreadsheets. So Google admins take care of her data. But you have to back up. I doubt you have everything already moved to an online service. So... what do you use for backup? Windows backup? Ok, this was a joke. What if you plan to migrate to MacOS or Linux some day? Do you want your data to be left in some proprietary format? If you think, you probably back up individual files and directories, in their native format. Like pictures in *.jpg and music in *.mp3 and so on... So how do you track what has already been backed up and what hasn't? My "MyDocuments" folder contains some 50 thousand files. Far too many to keep track of them manually. For several years I have been using a very nice utility, called SyncToy from Microsoft . Some of you may not be eager to put a j

I have already talked about Google Office . Just two months later we have a brilliant integration of spreadsheets and documents (formerly Writely, redirecting now to http://docs.google.com ). The suite may not be enterprise ready yet, but it surely does almost everything a typical consumer may want to do with document editor or a spreadsheet. We used to use an Open Office at home, but are migrating towards the Google Documents and Spreadsheets. The starting point for the service is a list of recently edited documents, sharing with family members and others is a no brainier (just enter an email address and that is it). And we are moving our picture library to http://picasaweb.google.com , although the sharing model within Picasa should be improved to match the overall security of the documents service. Google Calendar has made some significant improvements in the meantime as well. What is especially important (and has been reflected in the recent blowout earnings report) are the inte

The recent IPTV buzz brings to my mind another convergence story. Television and Web applications together. The match seems natural. Assuming the screen you will be using for IPTV is going to be a HD (High Definition, where minimum resolution is defined as 1280x720 with 1366x768 being more common), makes it quite reasonable to display a Web page on. Web on TV was approached several times in the past, but the ordinary (non-HD) TV sets used to give us just a fraction of what was needed ( 544x372 , which was about 5 times less than HD). And the IPTV screen is connected to the Internet, where it streams the content (movies, news, shows) from. OK, so we have two important components of an Internet-enabled PC already in place. A screen and a connection. What else is needed? Input controller. I hate remote controls. I have dozens of them scattered around. I use just 1% of the functionality they provide. Volume up / volume down (that refers to the TV set), channel up / channel down (that re

Last week I spent most of my time traveling. The goal was the 10th annual Telecosm , at Lake Tahoe , California . But going across the Atlantic for the two mind-blowing days, I always try to see some more places on the way. This time I picked Dallas , TX as the destination of my flight and then drove across Texas , New Mexico , Arizona , and Nevada up to Tahoe. As I have been using GPS navigation even when driving around my home town, I thought it would be a good idea to rent a GPS unit as an option together with my car. What a disappointment it was! I got something looking like an old mobile phone. Antenna, keypad, small monochrome display. After many months with a Kenwood unit built into the dashboard of the Subaru or another months of using the iGO on my HTC smartphone, the unit I was supplied with by Alamo together with the rented car was like bad memory from the past. Actually it was a Motorola iDen phone, equipped with a GPS receiver and a simple Java application capable

This time the story won't be about how powerful software is , but how much power it consumes. And we are not talking about processor power required to run an application either. We talk about the power consumption. Strange, you think? No longer strange... This issue affects all users, but has most impact on those who live their lives on batteries. I mean using battery powered notebooks or PDAs. The stress modern applications put on processors is growing at least along the curve of Moore's Law . And despite engineering efforts put in the design of new processors, the power consumption of portable devices is still far from what we would like to have (a notebook recharged once a month?). Recently there has been much talk about so called performance per watt, a number representing how many CPU instructions can be executed consuming a watt of energy. But does this really matter to the typical end user, who struggles to get his 3 hours of notebook life from the batteries? Performance