Living in the cloud.

Living in the cloud (for free) is possible, if clunky. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to. blog.mindrocketnow.com

I’ve recently been given a new laptop with my new job, and a whole lot of obligations in maintaining security. So that means I can’t use my beloved MacBook any more for work, which means I have to use my work laptop for personal stuff that I can’t avoid doing during the week. And because of the security obligations, I can’t install all of the software that I’ve been used to on my work laptop. All of my music, photos, files are now out of reach.

It turns out that most of my data is already in cloud services like Yahoo! Mail, Dropbox, Google Drive, iTunes Match, even 1Password. And each of these cloud services have web apps, which means I can get to my passwords, music and files without installing anything, just by going to the right URL in my browser. My work laptop is secured because no nefarious files are installed. My privacy is assured because no personal files are copied onto my work laptop. Conceptually, it’s all good.

Practically, there are limitations. Web apps are optimised to run on the latest browsers, which currently are Chrome and Safari (Project Spartan will soon be added to this list when Windows 10 is launched). My work laptop is languishing in the lamentable past of Windows 7 and Explorer 7, so few of the web apps work with all promised functionality.

The worst limitation is with photos. Apple has integrated iPhotos with iCloud, but the cost of storing the full photo library in Apple’s cloud is prohibitively expensive. So I can only see selected photo streams, rather than the whole library.

Now that I’ve strewn my digital life in the digital heavens, I have a whole new problem of overlapping cloud services. To illustrate: I have files in Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, box.net, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive. How do I know where anything actually is? My MacBook knows, because all (except Amazon) are well-integrated with OSX, so spotlight search surfaces results from each of the cloud services. However, my work laptop doesn’t know, because I can’t install the sync utilities.

The answer is to apply the cardinal rule for cloud-based sanity – only one type of content per cloud service. In my case:

• ·      Apple iTunes Match hosts all of my music.
• ·      Amazon Kindle hosts all of my books.
• ·      Yahoo! hosts all of my personal email.
• ·      Google Drive hosts all of my personal files.
• ·      Dropbox hosts all of my gubernatorial files.
• ·      There are no work files in a public cloud at all, only on work servers.

So if I want to know where anything is, I can identify the right cloud service to search, by content type. This currently works for music and files, but not for anything else. All other file types are hosted in the Drobo, my home NAS.

But then the Drobo died. I’m still hopeful that the files can be recovered, as I think either the power supply or the chassis broke. But whilst I find a fix, I have no access to photos or movies. Which has led me to think – once my files are recovered, should I start paying for a cloud backup service?

Cloud backup is different from cloud services. Even if cloud services are cheap, they’re not free beyond the first 5GB or so, and my backup runs into more than 1TB. Most of it is in photos, music and movies. Curiously, we don’t watch ripped movies any more, as all the content we want is available in streamed services. Music is already available as an alternative. So that leaves photos.

Amazon Prime has recently provided a solution to photos storage. Along with the free next day delivery, free TV subscription, and free music subscription, Prime members can enjoy unlimited storage for photos. I’m going to look at how easy it will be to include Amazon Prime Photos into my workflow.

So with the right range of cloud services, and the right methodology in using them, it is possible to live in the cloud for free. However, with my own computer and NAS, it’s much easier not to.

Measuring me.

I’m starting to quantify my life using a fitness tracker. Not sure how it helps, though. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Part of the reason for not getting an Apple Watch was that I had a much cheaper Jawbone Up24 wrist band. I’ve been wearing the band for a while now, and it’s time to write down my impressions.

My main quibble is that I don’t know what it’s for. I know what it does: count steps, discreet alarm, tracks sleep. I just don’t know how all that improves me.

Take step counting: I like that I can measure how active I’ve been during the day. However, counting the steps hasn’t spurred my to make more of them. I still walk as much as I normally do, and work still gets in the way of walking more. Verdict: 6/10.

Tracking sleep is even less useful for me. I’m skilled at sleeping. If only it paid enough, I’d be a bed tester, working from home. Tracking sleep is pointless, because it takes me conscious targeted activity to not fall asleep. Verdict: 3/10.

I do like the discreet alarm function of the wrist band. I no longer have to have the iPhone next to my bed because wristy is my new discrete alarm clock. My 5am alarm to get to the airport now needn’t wake DW (although I make it a point that she knows how grumpy I am at that time). It apparently even goes off at the time just before 5am when I’m at my least grumpy (that bit doesn’t work – I’m still grumpy). I also like the inactivity alarm, which reminds you when you’ve been sitting for too long. Verdict: 10/10.

Finally, I love the battery life. It lasts a week between charges, under normal usage. I don’t have to worry about battery husbandry, it’s always there, always on, doing its thing. That should be true of all gadgets. Verdict: 10/10.

Overall, there’s only one function that really improves my life, and a couple that are meh. My buying decision is therefore based upon how cheap it is, i.e. whether I can immediately mentally amortise its purchase price. I got it for less than £50, which for me is the sweet spot. Overall verdict: 6/10; useful but not indispensible.

It's too easy to hold onto our digital rubbish.

Be honest, you're a digital hoarder, aren't you? But by not deleting now, I risk not finding again in the future. blog.mindrocketnow.com 

Hard drive space is cheap, cloud space is free (up to a certain amount), why wouldn't you hang onto it, just in case? My generation still remembers how fragile physical media can be - old photos fade, cassettes stretch, pages in books yellow as the chlorine leaches out - so why take the risk?  We've also experienced hard drive failure, catastrophic loss of data just before the presentation needs to be delivered, needing a weekend of retracing mental footsteps to recreate what was never as good as the original. 

Faced with the consequences of getting it wrong, you can sympathise with why it's easier to decide to store and decide to deal with it later, than to spend the cognitive effort to weed out digital files. 

But why is it difficult to make this decision? Perhaps it's because it's because we can't tell the difference between a digital object and a digital possession. A possession has imbued value, either at the time of first acquisition (primary value) or in the future (secondary value). This value is perceived through the lens of our own values, which is why possessions are fragments of our own identity. The dissonance with digital is that primary value is often low (a single digital selfie has essentially zero incremental cost) whereas the secondary value can be extremely high (who knows if that selfie will be a memory to cherish in years to come)? We would need to work harder to figure out the secondary value of a digital item, so we put it off for later. 

This idea goes some way to understanding why subscription models are more popular than pay-per-use models. Even if a subscription is more expensive than buying individually, e.g. for low usage, they are generally more popular because there's no additional effort required to value the content. At the same time, this unwillingness to value the individual content means that we incorrectly value the digital artefact, which has caused such disruption to the digital media industry, and the rise of freemium. 

Interestingly, though every post to Facebook has the potential to last forever, the Internet is not immune to the forces of entropy. There's a cost to recovering a specific item of data, and the cost increases as time goes on. The moment after you've made that post to MySpace, you'll have to search to find it again. 100 days  later (the average life of a web site), the service will have been bought and sold and databases ported, corrupted, and only partially recovered, links will decay and point to 404. Five years later, operating systems will have changed, and specialist tools will be needed to find that post again. Ten years later, the hardware won't be sold any more and you'll have to go to eBay or a museum to get more blank media. 

This is a good thing. Death is a part of life, and so digital rust should be a part of digital life. The right to be forgotten is as important as the right to be remembered.  

There's also a pleasure to going through our digital possessions. Those digital objects that survive the updates and upgrades naturally acquire the value imbued by the weight of time. I think I'm going to have a look at my old digital photo albums now... 

For more, have a listen to the Digital Human podcast.