All the discussions of nifty hardware possibilities, along with my
slightly flower-child "whole shebang" view, leads me to ask folks
about their larger computing ecology and how it has impacted your
choice of new devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, servers,
media (tivo, appletv, ...) and so on.
I'm thinking of a few gagets for my future, and a Mac Mini, for
example, looks likely for a home server/desktop.
My goal is the old Sun Microsystems approach: The Network is the
Computer! Thus I'd like to access my media, data, apps and so on from
many different places and devices.
One example occurred a while back when we bought a SlingBox. Its a
nifty device that makes your TV available on the web. That, with a
TiVo or similar "PVR", makes time shifted personal media available
world wide. In my case, the TiVo can "see" more than just my TV, it
also sees all my iTunes and iPhoto media, thus making it too available
world wide. I've used it with success from Italy, for example (last
year's NFL playoffs).
I want to make further advances, with the goal of making all my data/
media available ubiquitously, from any network device (my phone, for
example).
I haven't gotten involved with Google Docs yet, and probably should.
I *have* used Google Apps and Google Code for a recent redfish project
and am impressed. I've also followed Roger's Amazon EC2 tutorial and
built an "instance". I've also got a great hosting system (Joyent),
and use both BingoDisk and S3 and am using WebDav and other "network
mounted file systems".
Even with all this great stuff, I haven't really connected all the
dots yet. For example, with the Mac Time Machine, I should be able to
backup my stuff onto Amazon S3 or BingoDisk fairly trivially. If I
did that, and had two-way synch working so that if I changed the
Network, my laptop(s) would sync with that.
Is anyone else pursuing a "The Network is the Computer" approach? Any
tales to tell?
-- Owen
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