New Year .. new gear : Whats in YOUR bag ?

Jan 10

Well, not really… but I did buy a new bag and did some tweaks and additions to the gear I drag around all day long. Time to check out the pic and run down the list.

gear 

Laptop : 11.6 Macbook Air 4 gig Ram, I5 , 128 SSD. : This is my mobile base of operations. Although I have a 13 inch Macbook Pro at home, the 11.6 goes with me on the road most of the time. Its small, light, pretty powerful, and versatile. The Snow Leopard install is ideal for the podcast production process, but most of the time I run Ubuntu on it. (I dualboot) After the upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10 the Macbook air runs very smoothly under Ubuntu, except for the hypersensitive touch pad so that explains the extra mouse.

Cables : For those places that only have wired internet (Believe me, I know some of those) I drag around my Usb to Ethernet adapter. I also have a small 5 port USB hub for to expand the two onboard usb ports on the Macbook. The 16 gigabyte USB stick makes sure that I can store some additional data, but is equipped with at least 5 different live versions of Linux like Ubuntu, Backtrack, Clonezilla, Mint and Crunchbang linux. With this stick, “All your computers are now belong to me” The micro usb charger also makes sure I can just plug my phone into any usb port to charge or exchange files.

Phone : Not in the picture : My trusty Galaxy Nexus phone running Android 4.2.1. I just pimped it with a 3800 Mah ‘fat battery’ for extended battery life.

Tablet : Yes : that is a 64 gigabyte Wifi only iPad mini. I still use the Nexus 7 at home a lot, but because I need the storage, I switched to a bigger tablet on the road. The iPad mini houses my books, a lot of music, all of my audio and video podcasts and a ton of pdf files. In short its my digital portfolio for everything. In the car I hook it up via Bluetooth to my car stereo to play podcasts and music. At work I plug in my Apple ear buds (or ‘earpods’) to zone out and knuckle down.

Bag :  Samsonite V7609007 : Not a very exciting name but a pretty cool bag. Slung in ‘portrait’ mode instead of landscape mode its a lot lighter to carry the setup. There is not a LOT of room for extra cables and cruft, so I’m forced to keep the setup lean and mean. 

So .. whats YOUR setup for the road ?  Share it with us in the comments. 

 

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kw501: Ubuntu on the Nexus 7 with Alex Chiang.

Jan 09

We kick off season 5 of Knightwise.com by cutting into a hot topic : Ubuntu on Mobile phones. Oblivious to the announcement Canonical made a couple of days ago about bringing Ubuntu to the Mobile phone, we talked to one of their lead developers in December of 2012.  Alex Chaing tells us about the development of an Ubuntu distribution for mobile devices. What were the hurdles, how is it done and how do YOU get it on there. A sneak peak behind Canonicals roadmap, a geeks guide to getting Linux on your tablet.

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kw406 : Free Geek Gift Guide.

Dec 13

We bring you a showcase from an interview we did on the Nosillacast podcast that is perfect for the holiday season. Find out ways to make your geeky and non geeky friends happy with this free geek gift guide, packed with tips and tricks to make the ultimate stocking stuffer .. without spending a single sliver of gold pressed latinum.

Shownotes.

The Nosillacast Podcast

Give a free computer.

Storage

Backup

Remote assistance

Communications

  • Skype account

Pictures

  • Flickr
  • Picasa account

The gift of free applications

The gift of free music

The gift of free knowledge

Signout.

 

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iDropCloudBox – Bringing iCloud and Dropbox Together

Sep 28

This is another guest blogger post on Knghtwise.com, this time from Keith Murray (@kdmurray) who brings us a tip for linking your iCloud and Dropbox accounts.


One of the great things about iCloud is ubiquitous access to your files and data on all of your devices, seamlessly and behind the scenes. There are just a couple of caveats:

  1. your applications need to support iCloud, it’s not a feature of the OS
  2. you have to have Apple gear

While the first one can be a bit of a downer when you realize your favourite application doesn’t yet support iCloud, the second one can be a deal-breaker. Those of us who spend our days moving across platforms as easily as most others cross a room will often find that iCloud is less than useless when it comes to synchronizing content across our devices. If only iCloud worked more like Dropbox, maybe we could have the freedom of choice on our platforms and still keep some of the ubiquity across the Apple devices that we do have.

Enter the symlink.

I just did a post on my blog a couple of days back on using Symlinks to centralize content which is scattered about your computer into a nice shared space in Dropbox. It turns out you can do the same with your iCloud documents as well. While application specific, you can synchronize some or all of your iCloud documents to your Dropbox using the same technique I discussed before.

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile Documents/N24PMNAXEV~com~metaclassy~byword/Documents ~/Dropbox/Apps/Byword

All of your iCloud data is stored in application specific folders inside your Library folder. If you want to browse the files you can see them in the Finder:

  1. Open Finder
  2. Pull down the Go menu
  3. Press the option key Click on Library
  4. Open the folder Mobile Documents

Voila! Your iCloud apps reveal themselves. Each one of the application folders contains a Documents folder which is where your files for that app live.

If you want to be less discriminating you can try syncing all of your iCloud data with someething like this:

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ ~/Dropbox/iCloud

If you try this approach, just make sure your Dropbox account has enough storage to take on what you’re giving it. The default free space in iCloud is more than twice the free default in Dropbox. Now go forth and sync your iCloud and Dropbox data!


Keith Murray is a software architect and developer who blogs about technology and science at kdmurray.net. He can also be found on twitter as kdmurray.

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Kc307 : "A Sliders workstation"

Aug 12

We take a deep technical dive into the “sliders workstation” and how you can “do your computer thing” independant of hardware, operating systems and software and slide from OS to OS. We talk about hardware, browser platform, desktop productivity, communications, entertainment and storage and how to do it between all of your different devices. This is the “sliders 101” of cross platform computing.

Shownotes

  • Intro
  • Hardware
  • Operating System
  • Browser platform
    • Applification Software to “applify” Webapps
    • Extentions
    • Office and Wordprocessing
    • Todo :
    • Multimedia
    • Content Consumption
    • Content Creation
    • Communication
      • Desktop
      • Hootsuite (Web based) Twitter-Facebook-Linkedin-GooglePlus
      • Desktop integration
      • Ubuntu : Web content integration
      • Pidgin or Adium
      • IMO
      • Skype
    • Storage
      • Google Drive
      • Dropbox
      • Portable Storage
      • Shared Partitions
      • Central File storage (Samba – NasDrive – SSH mounts)
    • Offline Life ?
      • Gmail Offline Chrome extention
      • Googledrive + Dropbox for offline sync
    • Signoff
  • New Google Voice number for US listeners : (218) 262-9237

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