Tuesday, July 10, 2012

It's all in the Cloud

Mozilla's recent announcement of putting Thunderbird into maintenance mode has prompted me to sweep away the last vestiges of keeping my personal information on my local desktop.
I've just started uploading my entire local (Thunderbird) mail history to my gmail account via IMAP. I probably won't ditch the local copy entirely. Maybe I'll still use Thunderbird over IMAP to gmail for a while.
Recently I started paying for Google Drive, and using Cloudfogger for encryption, I am now storing all my personal documents and projects there. There are a bunch of providers of cloud storage these days, but it does make sense to use one provider for everything, and Google covers pretty much everything. Sure, I use the Apple cloud for storing some stuff between my iDevices, but they tend to exist behind their own little wall anyway, and it tends to presented more as magic integration between devices. GDrive is now available for ios devices too.
Next on the list is all the family photos and video and all that will be left is my cache of films and music. That's a little big for the cloud at the moment.
Cloud. It's a just wanky term for server storage.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Discovery of the Higgs Boson

You should already know by now that CERN is calling a discovery on the Higgs boson. Probably the best coverage I've read yet is at the New York Times.
This is exciting stuff, not because they've essentially confirmed a theory, but because it may lead them to further discovery and understanding as the LHC is ramped up to full power.