Living With Many Computers

For years I have been absolutely happy with my Lenovo X200S laptop. It was light enough to follow me almost everywhere and powerful enough to be the only machine I had. Especially after the SSD upgrade. But I wanted more. I mean less :). I fell in love with the Nokia Booklet 3G and decided to swap the Lenovo for the Nokia. Looking from today's perspective I very often think this was not the best decision. The keyboard on the Nokia is far from what the Lenovo offered. And I miss the trackstick - yes the touchpads are far inferior. And most importantly the Nokia is slow. Even after the SSD upgrade. But on the other hand I love it when I have to carry it, feeling almost no weight in my bag. It fits nicely in my Kata 123-GO photo bag. And most importantly, with its tiny weight, it is able to work all day on a charge. So I never ever carry a power supply with me.

I made some extra setup for the Nokia at home. 22-inch FullHD monitor - the iiyama ProLite E2210HDS (what a name!) connects audio and video via a singe HDMI cable. And the Logitech DiNovo Keyboard / Mouse, connecting via Bluetooth. So essentially docking the Nokia means plugging two cables - HDMI and power. I lived happily with this setup for two months, but realized I needed some more powerful machine for photo editing, video transcoding and other media intensive tasks.

As I was looking for candidates for a desktop computer, the new MacMini arrived. First I tried the native MacOS - the Snow Leopard. Soon I realized I could almost do nothing on this machine, as all my current stuff was on the Nokia laptop. Or in the FireFox browser there, to be more precise.

FireFox now has this FireFox Sync add-on (previously called Mozilla Weave). So I put it to the test. The Sync had been already installed on the Nokia, so all my settings and cookies and autocompletes were stored in the Cloud. I promptly downloaded the FireFox for Mac and installed the Sync. It asked for the account name and security key. The nice thing is the Sync encrypts everything before sending up to the Cloud, so without the encryption key nobody could get hold of your data, even if the Mozilla servers were compromised. After a while it synced the Mac. I could open any page and all passwords and logins were filled by the FireFox automatically. That I used before, when migrating from one machine to another, so no surprise, it worked. But I have never used two active FireFox sessions on two machines simultaneously.

The FireFox Sync has an item called "Tabs From Other Computers" in the History menu. It is a joy. It simply displays all machines you have the FireFox Sync configured on and a list of opened tabs on each of them. Of course the machines do not have to be running. It just displays the last synchronized state. So you can click on any of those tabs and it pops open on the current machine. First I expected all the tabs to be copied across the machines, but the actual approach they use is more clever. There are some tabs you want or need on just one machine. So no point moving everything, especially when you may be on a slow GSM connection or roaming. Any tab from any machine is just a click away.

As I have already moved almost all my workspace to the Cloud (GMail and Google Docs being the most part of my activity), the browser essentially is my desktop. And Firefox with the Sync addon perfectly implements the vision of virtualized context following me across many physical devices. At the moment there are just two devices. Or I should say - three. Three, because I decided to install 64-bit Windows 7 on the Mac Mini. It is a snap using Apple's Boot Camp Assistant and Windows simply flies on this machine. Actually the Mac Mini is the best Windows desktop computer I have ever had. It is fast (the processor / graphics score is 6.0). It is small and absolutely silent, mimicking a desktop lamp stand with a narrow slot for DVDs. And with built in power supply and HDMI out, there are just two cables coming into it: two-pronged power and HDMI. Keyboard, mouse and network are wireless. Beautiful and perfect. So the Mac/Windows 7 makes the third machine in Sync.

Later this week I will be installing the FireFox Home for the iPad. We all know the Safari is the only browser allowed on the iOS. But the Home is the "Sync" part that lets the mobile Safari stay in Sync with other machines, making my iPad just another device my context will follow me to.