My Uninstalled Life

There are many nice web 2.0 and uninstalled tools nowadays that can help you plan your next trip. Here are some tips:

Have you every simply wanted to fly to a city but don’t really care when and want to know when to go to get the cheapest tickets? Farecast might help you. Simply tell you where you want to go and it will give you a graph showing when it’s cheapest to go!

So you want to do some trip planning? So what better is someone who is actually there, blogging about the place and travelling there? On the following “web 2.0-ish” places you’ll find the stories they and their photos. Just browse on the map and you’ll see how many who are travelling there. Check out TripHub and RealTravel (TechCrunch on TripHub and RealTravel). Also, check out Blogabond, Travelpost and Travbuddy which all offer this service and of course the good ‘ol Yahoo Travel. With those sites, you can get some good ideas what to do!

Also, the web 2.0 travel tools blog posts about web 2.0 websites and webtools that are, in some way, related to Travel and Tourism.

Happy travelling!

Time for another poll! There are plenty of sites out there offering you to create your personalized homepage including feeds, bookmarks and much else. Let’s do a poll on that!

I don’t think there’s anyone who haven’t used Hotmail – so it’s time to update! Windows Live Mail is a part of Windows Live Ideas which is more than just a new webinterface to access your mail. It’s, as Microsoft says themselves:

“Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That’s the basic idea behind Windows Live.”

So the live.com concept is simply putting all your online services together instead of keeping your mail in one place, your RSS feeds in another place, your favorites somewhere else and so on. But this article is not about the complete suite but Windows Live Mail. If you already have Hotmail – you can upgrade in a few seconds and still keep all your e-mails. Just go to ideas.live.com and click to register.

I already covered Hotmail, so I will only cover the news your get with Windows Live Mail. Please note that live.com is under heavy beta so new features will probably be added every week. Here are the main new features:

• Previews of your messages you can read without leaving your inbox
• Drag-and-drop organization
• Easy importing of your Microsoft Outlook contacts
• One-click control over junk and scam e-mails
• Right-click power—reply, delete, and forward
• 2 GB of storage

Compared to Hotmail – this is way better so I would suggest you change today! But if you’re using Google Apps for your domain, I think it’s just a matter of taste what you prefer.

Some time ago, I wrote about Zamzar which lets you convert your files between different formats. There’s another tool out there called Media-Convert.

There’s a bunch of formats supported. Just select your file and it will figure out the format. Then you select output format and except for format you can also have some options such as resizing, changing FPS, CODEC and so on.

Except for videos it does documents, texts, archines (zip etc), images and sounds.

Zamzar e-mails you a link to the converted files but Media-Convert starts processing online and will provide you with the link to the file directly. During the conversion, it just shows you:

Some testing shows it just takes a few minutes.

Just see yourself which one you prefer. Downsides with both Zamzar and Media-Convert is that you have to upload the file and there’s a limit of 100 MB. It’s pretty common that files are more than 100 MB, but still, you’re limited of the time it will take to upload because of your upstream speed. And since I only got 1 Mbit – I guess I’m stuck with some local tools.

Many of us have made a new year’s resolution to loose weight. Since my fiancé is a nutrition specialist, I’d like to point out some online tools for keeping your nutrition/diet daily journal. Track how much stuff you eat and see if you’re missing out on some. I used to use a locally installed one but hey – now I got some uninstalled alternatives!

• FitDay
• Traineo
• My Pyramid Tracker
• Ontri
• The Daily Plate

Of course, they’re all free! Hopefully they will help you live more healthy! Let me know if you find them useful!

Voo2do offers you to manage your to-do lists. Here’s a quote from their site that kind of gives you a good look of what they offer:
“What makes voo2do different?
Unlike most online to-do lists, voo2do tracks priority, due date, and time estimates for each task. There is no notion of “lists” in voo2do— tasks can be grouped by project, but you can view and edit a bunch of projects together. Voo2do supports some basic sharing of tasks”

With that in mind, here’s the main tabs once you login:

The interface is quite “ajaxy”. What you do is add tasks to the tasks tab. You put the description, priority, due date etc. You can also e-mail your tasks to the list:

Then you have projects. Each task can be put to a project. When you create a task you get a list of all your projects once you start writing in the projects box. You can then list the projects and see which tasks are assigned to which project:

Collaboration is possible in two ways, either you can collaborate so you can assign who is responsible for a certain task but you can also make your list viewable to public (or with a password…). Notes is a summary of all notes for all tasks. Deadlines is a summary of all tasks that have a deadline coming up. History is a list of tasks that has been completed.

Then there’s the Dashboard which gives you an overview of everything which you also can customize.

I like Voo2do. It’s playful and easy to use. However, it lacks some functionality like a calendar so you really need some other tool aswell to do the job to replace your “Outlook” or “Moleskin”. However, if you’re looking for a to-do list – check it out!

I’m always looking for a device to replace my desktop PC which makes too much noise, takes up too much space and cost too much since I only use a small fraction of the power in the box! A few weeks ago, I replaced it with a beautiful mini-ITX computer.

But what about the laptop? Craig Gunderson sent me a tip on the $150 laptop computer (wasn’t it $100 before?).

“Lite Appliances says its Lite Computer will be based on Analog Devices’ Blackfin processor and a custom-built OS that will include Web browser, media player, IM and VoIP functions and work with online services such as Google Docs. There will be no built-in hard drive, but you can attach external storage via USB.” Wired says.

These devices are made for the web! It doesn’t have all the unnecessary power you don’t need when running tools over the web! I’d get one – just for the sake of tetsing it. But I hope they make them look better than this :)

In my recent articles in 4 different ways to effective ways of starting your webapps – here are some additional plugins to Firefox that might help you! 

• Faviconize plugin for FF. It gets rid of the text on a tab and just leaves the icon so it takes up less space on the tab bar.
  
• Have you ever accidently closed the tab where you have your e-mail service? Get the PermaTabs add-on for FF and they will definitely stick around!

If you have any other plugins that might help you in effective ways of starting/running your webapps online – let me know!

There are new features for Google Apps for Your Domain which I reviewed some time back.

• The start page

Just as with the ordinary “personalized homepage” with content, links and RSS feeds – you now have one at Google Apps. You can also preview your Inbox, calendar and search the web. You can customize the layout, header area and overall color scheme. You do this from the control panel.

• Support for new languages

Now you can use the most common languages out there: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish or UK English. You also configure this in the control panel.

• Custom URLs for your domain’s Google-powered apps

Now it’s possible for your users to use more simple domain names. For example, your users could access their email accounts at yourdomain.com.

• Support for multiple domains

If you have more than one domain in addition to yourdomain.com, then it’s possible to associate all your domains together. So no matter which domain name and e-mail or calendar event invitation is sent, it will be routed to yourdomain.com.

So we have done some basic stuff during the first parts of using the Bubba Mini Server. Maybe that is enough for you, but here we look into some more complicated uses of the Bubba Mini Server.

• You probably want to access your files wherever you are in the world. Just make sure to do some port forwarding of HTTP/FTP to your Bubba and you can access it by just browsing to you public IP-address
• The Bubba is a fully functional Linux computer! There are more than 15000+ Linux/Debian applications available – just install them!
• Let Bubba stream music to your Itunes compatible music player as long as it supports DAAP.

If you have any other ideas of using the Bubba, or maybe you even got one yourself, be sure to contact us – I’d love to hear your stories!

Conclusion

Everybody needs somewhere to store their files and if you want to be able to be more flexible to access them (from your computer, your webbrowser, FTP from home, office or Internet) and you want to do it with minimal fuzz – then the Bubba is definitly for you! It offers so much more than a simple NAS – and is extremely simple, quiet and flexible.

Of course you could setup your own server and add all this functionality but then it’s out of scope of this blog – “uninstalled”.

If you’re interested in buying one, be sure to visit Excito. Thanks again for letting me borrow one!

After going through the e-mail server, it’s time for the file/ftp/web/download server part of Bubba Mini Server.

You can either access the fileserver through your normal Windows explorer att \\BUBBA\ and there you will have the complete tree.

If you access it via FTP you have access to the home directory. If you want to access the directory tree over the web, this is possible throuh the web-admin interface.

If you want to create your own webpage to publish, just put your html files in the web-directory and when you browse to the root of the Bubba, you’ll get to that page!

What about Downloads then? Let’s say you have any FTP/HTTP/torrent download that will take hours to download and you don’t want your computer to be kept switched on? Just add it to the Download list in your Bubba and it will download it for you! Since it only consumes 10W and makes no noise at all – it’s perfect for that!

Just right-click any download link, add the link to Location and press Add. Simple as that! You can watch the progress in the interface and the files will be saved to your home\downloads folder.

Continue to part 5.

The competitor to Microsoft Visio and Gliffy called Cumulate Draw is out with a new version.

This new version includes:

• Network shapes
• Support for text bounds
• Ability to change shape properties from properties box

BTW: Did you know you can download Cumulate Draw and publish it on your own tomcat or jetty server?

Once you configured the basics, you can start looking into the E-mail server part of Bubba Mini Server.

Even though most of us who live the uninstalled life, you might want to have Bubba Mini Server to handle the e-mails for you?

Just add a user and go to http://bubba/webmail/ and you’ll be logging in to the Bubba’s webmail which is based on IlohaMail. IlohaMail’s interface is pretty basic – if you want to try it, there’s a demo available.

It’s fast! It got e-mail, Contacts and Bookmarks. You can search through your folders and you have many Options, for example, you can change the appearance to fit your needs when it comes to colors and fonts. There seems to be a Calendar too but I haven’t been successful adding anything to it – probably because it needs mySQL which the Bubba doesn’t have.

The way it works is that in the Administration interface you configure your POP3/IMAP account on some server on the Internet. Then you configure this POP3/IMAP-account to an local account on the Bubba. When you login it will simply access that POP3/IMAP-account.

Continue to part 4.

In part 1 I gave you an overview of the Bubba Mini Server. Now let’s get into details regarding the administration.

All administration is performed from the webinterface.

• Users offers you to add users
• Services is where you enable the different services (FTP, DAAP streaming, Mail, Printing and Torrent downloading)
• Mail is where you configure details regarding the mailserver
• Printing is where you add the printer (most brands are supported)
• Settings are network/time/backup-restore/update
• Filemanager is the web interface to get/delete/upload your files

The administration interface is really simple and does the job fine! Continue to part 3.

As you all know I want to uninstall everything to simplify my life. And as you saw in my article where I tried to store hundreds of gigabytes of data at an online service provider such as MediaMax – it simply didn’t work!

So why not get your own server at home where you store all those files? Of course, you could simply build your own server, install what-ever Windows/Linux operating system and you have yourself a server. But then we’re there again – installed and not simplified. I want it uninstalled and simple! Introducing Bubba Mini Server:

The guys over at Excito were kind enough to borrow one for me! I like that!

What is it? It’s a miniature server that offers a file server, streaming media server, web, e-mail and FTP server, print server and torrent downloader! All this in a almost-totally-silent 18x12x4cm case! And it’s good for the environment (and your electricity bill) – it only consumes 10W.

Installation is extremely simple. Just plug in the power and network cable and it will switch on. The LED will flash during bootup and it takes a minute or so. Point your browser to http://bubba/ and you’re finished!

Let’s get technical! I don’t want to focus too much no the technical side but since I know most of my users want just that – here goes! It’s available in 80/320/500 GB sizes (330/385/540 EUR). It’s a 3.5″ 7200 RPM drive, a 200 MHz ARM9 CPU, 64 MB EAM, 10/100Base-TX and USB-port.

Software-wise it’s running Linux 2.6 Debian, Apache web server, Dovecot IMAP server, Postfix SMTP server, Fetchmail and Samba.

This was the first part! Continue to part 2.