Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: Evernote

On the road failure

generic_road_crash Well it had to happen, I am on the road and my netbook suffered a hardware failure. This was a non-fatal failure but a failure all the same – the WiFi went on the fritz and would not connect to any WiFi network. Now in the office this was not a major problem as I have wired Ethernet there but the company I work with has a second office which only have WiFi which pretty much meant that I could not work there nor could I do anything when I was back in the hotel.

So the decision was taken to replace the machine with something that could work particularly since I was four nights/five days from base. So given machine obtained (an Asus EeePC 1008HA), the recovery mechanism started.

What can I say about the experience? It took way longer than I hoped… in fact to basic usage of the machine it took the whole evening (expected) and to fully complete four days. Why did it take so long? Well the big time killer was synchronisation of files using Live Mesh – it just took a long time because I have a lot of data to put on the machine. Even then, this was sped up by the use of the non-dead machine I was replacing being local to the laptop for much of the recovery time, so this is not an issue of upstream performance on the small business ADSL. The one main thing though about the recovery mechanism was that it did work and got me working on the road. How about your on the road recovery mechanism? You really do need one for when you are on the road.

Note: My recovery steps

1. Base install of OS and configuration for basic networking including Anti-Virus (including machine hardening steps that I always follow)

2. Install key applications – Live tools, Live Mesh, Evernote, VPN client, Firefox, Firefox addins such as delicious and Xmarks to ensure I have my bookmarks and saved passwords, RocketDock, Skype, Skype handset drivers, Spambayes, WinSCP, Adobe Air, Tweetdeck (using group sync so I have all my groups) and Syncback.

3. Install MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using online downloads of Trial software (hey I do not carry the disks, no need to when you can get the Trial versions that work up to 60 days).

4. Configure Outlook 2007 for my multiple Exchange hosted mail and IMAP4 accounts.

5. Install key driver software for 3G card etc.

6. Setup Live tools such as Live Messenger and Live Sync as necessary (I use Live Sync for My Pictures rather than Live Mesh just because it is setup in a better way for those file types).

7. Sync core file folders that are in Live Mesh

8. Sync secondary file folders in Live Mesh

9. Install iTunes and move my iPhone over and setting up Podcasts that I listen to on it (Music waited until it had completed synchronisation as I use Live Mesh that my MP3s are on all my machines).

10. Install Truecrypt for whole disk encryption, although activating this is outside of the four days :-)

11. When back at base, reinstall MS Office 2007 and Project 2007 using my actual media and proper activation keys (needed because the trial versions do not activate with my keys probably because my keys come from a volume licensing deal).

Evernote – Your External Brain

logo Evernote is a feature packed note taking application that synchronises it’s data into the cloud, allowing access from a variety of devices and software clients, such as iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X, Sandisk U3 USB Flash Drives and a web interface.

Evernote allows for a variety of different types of notes to be saved in Notebooks, including text, freehand drawings, voice or audio recordings, and photos with searchable text.  Notes can be tagged with keywords or put into separate notebooks to aid organisation and searching of stored notes.

A great example of the power of Evernote is taking a photo of a business card from a mobile device, uploading the image of the card and then being able to search on information such as names and contact details from that business card to be searched upon, no more having big piles of business cards lying around or manual data entry.

For all but the heaviest of users, the free account proves more than adequate allowing a maximum of 40Mb of data transfer into the cloud per month, you can however, upgrade to a premium account at $5 (approx £3.50) per month or $45 (approx £33) per year which increases your transfer limit to 500MB per month and gives additional features such as SSL encrypted data transfer. Each account also comes with an email address so that you can forward email messages with useful information to be stored within the Evernote system for future reference.

The only drawback I can find is when using the application on a mobile device, your note data is not stored locally as well as in the cloud as it is on a non-mobile device, requiring a connection to the Internet to upload newly created notes and view previously created ones.

Laptop or Smartphone

This one is the biggie – as a mobile worker, a long distance remote worker, what is the main technology you need to do your job? Do you believe you need your hulking 15″ or 17″ Laptop that weighs 3kgs (6.5lbs)? Is that really a portable solution? Or are you the newly born iPhone convert who only needs that few small inches of screen and 6 hours of battery life? Which is it? Nick Wingfield at the Wall Street Journal has just written an interesting set of thoughts that at the headline level, imply that we all should be the iPhone convert by now.

However I believe that the choices as to which technology is best, is down to exactly what you have to do and where you have to do it. In fact for the generalist like myself, I see a continuum of devices as being needed for the mobile worker with a very important cornerstone at the centre – decent and effective data synchronisation. This is not fully the cloud world view – oh no, I see the need for the cloud to be part of a complete solution that ends up with data spread from device to device, over the cloud and in the cloud – pretty much of a whole atmosphere approach.

Right now I have been experimenting with Microsoft Live Mesh as that cornerstone, combined with hosted Microsoft Exchange, Activesync, Evernote, Box.net, Logmein and JungleDisk. Some of these are more mature than others (Exchange and Activesync – although I have to be very Microsoft based from a device perspective), some are more small business than enterprise (Logmein/JungleDisk), and some are really flaky – Live Mesh. Right now (let us leave Mesh out of it for now), I have a very effective ecosystem for tech use combining two Netbooks, four other laptops, two mobile smartphones and three separate working locations – to the extent that I can (and have) suffer individual device failures and gone straight back to work – an important characteristic for an independent consultant like myself.

Now back to Live Mesh, this has showed promise and sort of does work but suffers from a failure to sync certain folders for no apparent reason, something I have shared with Paul Thurrott of winsupersite.com. I have stuck with it though, and not returned to Microsoft’s Foldershare or gone to competitors as yet although that is getting close.

So what sort of user do you believe you are? Smartphone or Laptop or somewhere in between, or somewhere else?