feeding off the cloud
A brief taking stock of my digital environment:
First: Google Reader is fucking awesome. It's vastly reduced the amount of time I spend on the internet hitting f5. My basic rule of thumb is that anything that updates twice a day or less gets stuck in Reader and debookmarked; this includes all comics that aren't super reliable. If something updates more frequently I just check it manually, because it sucks when your feed turns out to be too much of one thing. (Krugman might get a pass on this one.) And I like the sharing features, for all three or so people I'm linked to; it's nice to have the articles--often culled from the prolific blogs that I don't quite have the patience for--show up right there in the stream.
I barely Twitter ( @dreamless), though I follow a few people; I will admit to being charmed watching minor domestic dramas unfold in real time-- @GreatDismal needing printer cartridges at midnight for his wife's thesis (solved by a trick with electrical tape); @samuelpepys talking the king out of taking all his cousin's stuff after her husband kills himself (and smugly congratulating himself afterwards). It'd be nice to be able to use it as my default login for things, if only because I don't really like or trust Facebook. Not in the "it's evil!" way, though it's certainly at best neutral; more in the "I'm never sure if a button click will disgorge my real name into a site I'm browsing or accidentally spam all my friends" way.
(I do have a Facebook! Because at one point we were trying to put our games on Facebook; for all I know, we may still. I check it once a week, at most.)
I've got what feels like a decent grasp on the random notes problem, at long last! I used to do it as a mix of text files and word documents (there was a brief interval where, if you turned off clippy, autocorrect, and all the toolbars, Word wasn't unusably awful) spread across my desktop and a folder or two, and the same at work; synchronization was accomplished by emailing crap to myself. I migrated about halfway to a mixture of google docs and text files, but I stuffed too many documents in there, and they got mixed up with shared documents from work, and I'm just not really happy with it.
The new plan is ResophNotes, syncing to Simplenote online (and on phone) and to a folder of plain text files in my Dropbox. So far so good; I'm liking that it starts up as fast as Notepad did.
I don't have the kind of professional (or social) life that requires a calendar or rolodex, so those just kind of get by the way they do. The one piece of the puzzle it feels like I'm missing is the shared grocery list.
One thing that still kind of irks me about the new world of feeds is the redundancy, the way you'll get the same info in Reader and Twitter, or Reader and Buzz (which ffs i ought to turn off at this point, it's just more bold text that needs to be dismissed). It doesn't help that Twitter is about 15 minutes fast.
ETA: Bookmarks! I use Chrome's bookmark sync. I was getting a big pile of stuff in my "hold" folder, but... the bookmark manager really isn't the best thing for that, so I'm giving Instapaper a go. (Not that there's much choice; it's where Twitter for iPhone dumps its links.) It is nice having a separate "read later".
First: Google Reader is fucking awesome. It's vastly reduced the amount of time I spend on the internet hitting f5. My basic rule of thumb is that anything that updates twice a day or less gets stuck in Reader and debookmarked; this includes all comics that aren't super reliable. If something updates more frequently I just check it manually, because it sucks when your feed turns out to be too much of one thing. (Krugman might get a pass on this one.) And I like the sharing features, for all three or so people I'm linked to; it's nice to have the articles--often culled from the prolific blogs that I don't quite have the patience for--show up right there in the stream.
I barely Twitter ( @dreamless), though I follow a few people; I will admit to being charmed watching minor domestic dramas unfold in real time-- @GreatDismal needing printer cartridges at midnight for his wife's thesis (solved by a trick with electrical tape); @samuelpepys talking the king out of taking all his cousin's stuff after her husband kills himself (and smugly congratulating himself afterwards). It'd be nice to be able to use it as my default login for things, if only because I don't really like or trust Facebook. Not in the "it's evil!" way, though it's certainly at best neutral; more in the "I'm never sure if a button click will disgorge my real name into a site I'm browsing or accidentally spam all my friends" way.
(I do have a Facebook! Because at one point we were trying to put our games on Facebook; for all I know, we may still. I check it once a week, at most.)
I've got what feels like a decent grasp on the random notes problem, at long last! I used to do it as a mix of text files and word documents (there was a brief interval where, if you turned off clippy, autocorrect, and all the toolbars, Word wasn't unusably awful) spread across my desktop and a folder or two, and the same at work; synchronization was accomplished by emailing crap to myself. I migrated about halfway to a mixture of google docs and text files, but I stuffed too many documents in there, and they got mixed up with shared documents from work, and I'm just not really happy with it.
The new plan is ResophNotes, syncing to Simplenote online (and on phone) and to a folder of plain text files in my Dropbox. So far so good; I'm liking that it starts up as fast as Notepad did.
I don't have the kind of professional (or social) life that requires a calendar or rolodex, so those just kind of get by the way they do. The one piece of the puzzle it feels like I'm missing is the shared grocery list.
One thing that still kind of irks me about the new world of feeds is the redundancy, the way you'll get the same info in Reader and Twitter, or Reader and Buzz (which ffs i ought to turn off at this point, it's just more bold text that needs to be dismissed). It doesn't help that Twitter is about 15 minutes fast.
ETA: Bookmarks! I use Chrome's bookmark sync. I was getting a big pile of stuff in my "hold" folder, but... the bookmark manager really isn't the best thing for that, so I'm giving Instapaper a go. (Not that there's much choice; it's where Twitter for iPhone dumps its links.) It is nice having a separate "read later".