As I’ve written about before, when it comes to computing I’ve never been real mobile. I’ve had laptops before, but they were old and rarely used. Of course, that was way before affordable wireless home networking. I got my iPod last year and it has been quite handy as a music transporter, but other than that it provides me nothing in the way of organizing anything else.
Work lets me use an iPaq PDA. I got it for testing intranet web pages on a mobile device, but that grand plan hasn’t seen the light of day yet. So with that, most of the time the PDA sits unused. However, once again a wireless network seems to be absent from the workplace so it doesn’t do much good. The only time I do use it is for note taking during meetings. Although the screen is small, I can write in my handwriting and then download the notes into Outlook on my desktop and see my notes, it’s pretty handy. It’s also good for playing solitaire when you’re on the can, but I have yet to win solitaire on the PDA.
Now, as chance would have it, I have acquired two laptops. So once again the mobile lifestyle knocks at my door. But this time, due to the very affordable price of the laptops, I can spring for wireless connectivity here at home. As I experience with my last laptop, having a computer on the couch is nice, but if you’re still tied to a network cable, how mobile can you really be?
So with plans to go wireless for the laptops (and the PDA) at home, I am faced with some data management challenges I’ve never had to worry about. Things like e-mail. I use a desktop mail client on my home PC, Thunderbird to be exact, so it downloads messages as they come in. But with a laptop, if I’m say on the couch and checking my mail, it will download it to the laptop - and even if I set it to leave the messaegs on the server, I’m still double downloading and having to keep things all synched up. A headache eitherway.
Now things like webmail and web calendars become all the more important. Google is nice, but I still really don’t trust Google to handle my regular personal and business e-mail. Right now I use GMail strictly for web site sign-ups and newsletters; nothing serious gets sent to GMail for their indexing or perusal.
Anyway, you get my dilemma. Keeping things all lined up and organized in a manner that it doesn’t matter where I am is difficult. I think. At least it seems like it should/will be. But then again, maybe not.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Computers will never be smart enough to figure out which emails you want to remove from the server, and which ones you want to save for later download on your destop PC. At least not on the fly.
One feature that exists in most email clients (IE and Thunderbird both include it), is the option to leave the messages on the server until you delete them from your email client. This would let you check your email on your laptop, and if you delete them from your laptop client, they get trashed on the server too. If you leave them in your inbox on your laptop, you will still be able to download them on the desktop PC as well. At that point, you can go ahead and delete the message from your laptop.
You might be a good candidate for using IMAP instead of POP for getting your mail. IMAP uses your inbox on the server to store messages, instead of keeping them locally in a mail-store folder. Usually the email client will display your inbox just like you’re used to so that you can create folders on the mail server to sort your mail just like always. I haven’t tried on IMAP on the Cinderblock server, but it was activated by default on the old Crystal Networking server when I installed POP.
This problem goes way beyond keeping your inbox current across multiple machines.
Try maintaining a single iTunes library on multiple PC’s. It’s not really possible (not gracefully at least). It can be done by jumping through some crazy hoops with mapped drives and folders, and only using iTunes on one system at a time (so that you don’t risk two computers updating the database at the same time). You can of course share your iTunes library, but that only lets you listen on another PC by streaming the music. You can’t add to the library from the second machine. Usually this is all that people want to do, but sometimes, you might want to be able to download music, or manage an iPod from either of the PC’s and use the same library of files. Why would anyone want to maintain duplicate copies of all of their music? I’d rather keep it on one RAID-0 volume on a server and access it from multiple desktop “workstations”.
OH well… These are the problems that plague the geek mind. Those of you who are non geeks… Please forgive us. It really does matter!
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I changed my email clients (IE at work and Thunderbird at home) over to use this technique and it seems to be working pretty well.
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