My Uninstalled Life

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.

MyMemorizer is a reminding service. You add events and it will remind you via e-mail, SMS/textmessage to your mobilephone.

I would say it’s more of a calendar service. You can share events with other users, import from iCalendar, vCalendar and Outlook. I wouldn’t say the interface break any new ground – it’s pretty basic!

What makes this service stand out is the possible to send reminders via SMS. Only 2 free/day though, but it’s possible to buy more (from 50 SMS for $8 to 500 SMS for $35). So if you’re looking for this – MyMemorizer might be something for you!

So you sit down at your computer and you open up your favorite browser. Either you open several windows or tabs and manually enter the address for Hotmail, Google Docs, EditGrid and some other online apps. This is not a very efficient way of doing things!

Here at My Uninstalled Life we want to be effective in our way to start our applications – even though they are online! How do we do it?

Our poll shows that around 60%w still do it manually (half write address manually and half using bookmarks). Some 10% have shortcuts on their desktop and the rest use some kind of technique/tool to start more efficient.

So here are some ways you can do it in a more efficient way:

• Use the built-in function in IE7 and Firefox that lets you open up several pages, one on each tab, once you start the app? Just enter the addresses separated by a “|”. You can also choose “Show my windows and tabs from last time”
  

• Use del.icio.us Bookmarks add-on for Firefox. Tag your webapps you want to start with for example “go”. Choose “open in tabs” in the “go” tabs view of the delicious extension
  
• Use the SessionSaver add-on which restores your browser -exactly- as you left it. PS. Here’s a patched version for FF 2.0
• In Firefox, bookmark pages in a certain bookmark folder, and then open the pages by right-clicking the bookmark folder and choose “Open All in tabs”

Thanks to John Wilson, Chris, Jay, Sean Feeney, mel my finger, Cyril, ZivP, George, Daniel, iiis and everybody else who sent me tips for this post.

They guys over at EditGrid are busy updating their application – which we here at My Uninstalled think is the best spreadsheet application.

Now beta 16 has been released with what they say is “EditGrid’s biggest major release so far, in terms of both time and effort spent, because we are making big changes!“.

The biggest differences are a new portal home page and a tag cloud. You have the possibilty to add a searchbar to Firefox and IE7. If you want to know details, check out their change log.

Thanks to Thomas for the tip.

What’s the future for “uninstalled mini-computers”? What I want is a miniature PC that looks good on my desk and I want it completely uninstalled, silent and cheap. Can there be such a thing? Michael Barnes, expert on the subject from NorhTec answers a few questions. One of their products is the MicroClient Jr seen below. So, lets get technical!

“NorhTec is focused on creating tomorrow’s computers today. Each generation of computers has been replaced with new computers which are smaller, more energy efficient and less expensive. NorhTec is delivering computers today that are smaller, more efficient and less expensive than anyone else.”

Q: What do you think? Would it be possible what I want to do in my article on a small miniature computer that is uninstalled?
A: What you want to do is becoming technically more feasible all the time. Most of the products shown on your page are based on technologies that are about four years old. That goes for the SiS550 chip used in the MicroClient Jr and it goes for all the VIA based platforms currently on the market.

Q: So what’s the next thing coming up?
A: In the next year, much is going to change. The first change will be that VIA is transitioning to their new C7 chip [MUL note: hey, I got one of those]. This chip will offer from 1Ghz to 2Ghz performance and allow devices to be built on small platforms that offer four times the performance of the previous technology.

In addition to this, there will be new Taiwanese chips that are based on now not protected x486 designs (as the patents expired on the 486 core). These chips will offer high clock speeds, low energy and low cost.

Q: What about the big guys over at AMD and Intel?
A: Both Intel and AMD will be releasing new chips. AMD bought out the Geode chipset from National. While the Geodes from National are aging technologies as well, AMD is rebranding Duron and Athelon Mobile chips as Geodes and these offer a competitive alternative to the VIA chipsets.

Intel promises to have 1Ghz processors that operate at the sub-5 watt level in the next few months.

Q: Ok, so that’s the hardware. What about the software to use?
A: Today, there are several options for running a cost effective office solution. If getting on the network and running AJAX or web based applications that is all that is required, then there are many options indeed.

Personally, I am a fan of Puppy Linux because it is very easy to install and provides an amazing amount of software.

Damn Small Linux is a very good starting point that is very easy to enhance.

Thanks Michael for answering my questions helping me to realize my plans!

Ian sent me a suggestion to check out this little device called Linutop. It’s a Linux-based diskless computer. It offers a completely silent, low-power operation in an extremely small package.

It’s based on the AMD Geode CPU, 512 MB ROM, 256 MB RAM, some USB ports, network card, audio in/out and VGA.

It has some apps by default and of course Firefox. I think this would be perfect for what I’m trying to do. They don’t mention any price yet, but Reghardware mention $368. I’ll see if I can get my hands on one to borrow so I can test it…

30 Boxes consists of a calendar, to-do list and a webtop.

The Calendar is pretty basic – you can add Events and the usual information such as reminder, repeats, notes, tags and invites. The To-do list is very simple. You can more or less only tag your entries. The interface is fast and quite “web 2.0″-ish.

30 Boxes also offers a “webtop” – which is a web-based desktop. First it will give you an overview of your calendar, to-do list and search. You can change your desktop’s background and then the important things, add docks. Docks are small “applications” that plugin to your webtop at 30 Boxes. At the moment, the following docks exist:

Those services will open up as a “window” on your webtop. Netvibes, My Yahoo, Personal Google offer you to add feeds and other components to a “personal startpage”. So if you’re a fan of any of these, or use several of them for different purposes – be sure to check out 30 Boxes.

Google Calendar, MySpace and Flickr - I think most of you know of those services.

Meebo lets you run ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, JTalk and MSN Messenger over the web! Facebook is a social utility that enables you to share information with your friends. Webshots is a service where you can upload and share photos.

I’m amazed how fast everything is. With a few new docks – this thing will be very useful. I often struggle with the fact I have several different “portals” I have to visit for specific tasks. Keeping them all together – and still use the unique features of each service is a good thought.

Here are some more screenshots of the Webtop when opening upp different services:

I’m not only trying to uninstall software from my desktop and replacing my desktop with a uninstalled client, but also looking into uninstalling as much as possible. Why?

• My vision is to make my life easier and more effective and spend less time on day-to-day problems and boring activities.

I enjoy life too much to spend it on those things. So it was then I got one of these ones. Not very “web 2.0″-ish – but I’m just waiting until I can schedule cleaning over a web interface ;)

PS. No, I’m not single and live in a bachelorpad. I actually live with my fiancé and she actually LOVES this thing! “Truly effective! I think it produce the dust itself…” DS.

Since I have all my tools on the web, I want to simplify the way I start them. For example, when I sit down in front of my computer I open up Firefox and then I manually create a tab for each “web application” by either writing the address or open up the bookmark. Now, how can I make this more efficient? Any tools? Any tips? Please answer this poll and comment with your suggestions.

I realize that the road to keep everything online isn’t always a walk in the park. Maybe I should keep some stuff locally? :)

I’m trying to uninstall ALL applications from my PC and only run tools on the web. For me, it’s more important that the machine look good, small and silent.

I could buy myself a Mac mini – but I want to be more flexible than that. So the first thing I went out and bought was a miniature motherboard – the mini-ITX EN12000EG. Only 17 x 17 cm big – it’s small and since it’s fanless – it’s silent.

It’s like any other motherboard but it also has an CPU soldered to the board. You can run what-ever you want on it – Windows or Linux. I added some memory and a harddrive and I had a complete computer. I also added a Compact Flash reader so I could try booting from that one instead of the HD or USB-drive.

But then I needed a case. And it had to look good – my last requirement. So I spent a few hours looking at different boxes and decided for this beauty:

You have them in different colors to fit your interior design:

I would really recommend Qform in Germany if you’re planning to purchase design hardware or mini-ITX cases – they were VERY helpful!

Installing took a little bit of time but once everything was in place I was very happy with the result:

After this it was time to start installing (ok, I prefer uninstalled but I had to install at least ONE thing – some kind of “base”). But I’ll get back to that in later posts.

Are you interested in mini-ITX projects, make sure to visit mini-itx.com Projects Page.

So I decided I want to live the uninstalled life. Nothing installed on my desktop PC. Let’s start with what I had before this.

First off I had a huge tower case. It had 2 x 2.4 GHz Xeon CPU’s, 2048 MB RAM and fitted 4 harddrives, graphics card, network card, a bunch of extra fans to keep it cool and the noise was awful. Something had to be done! Way too much power to do what I ultimately wanted to do.

It was running Windows Server 2003 since I used as a webserver, FTP-server, fileserver – server this and server that.

I’m a fan of GTD – Getting Things Done – The Art Of Stress-free Productivity. It’s simply a technique to getting things done and more efficiently.

“- GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks.”

I can promise you – it really works and I suggest you check it out.

“Now what does this has to do with the My Uninstalled Life blog?” – you might ask. Well, since I’m a fan of it and before starting this blog I was stuck with Outlook 2003 and moving to Outlook 2007 (BTW, Melissa and Simon have good posts on GTD and Outlook 2007 without plug-ins). And since I wanted to move to an uninstalled desktop – keeping everything online – I decided to see how I could approach the GTD technique only with online tools.

So this category will help me with the search of applying GTD with online tools. If you see any articles/services that might help me in this search – let me know.

Today I got an interesting comment on my popular post where I try to store 100+ GB on an online service. The comment reads:

“You say: The interfaces are too slow. If I would replace my local storage they have to be faster and more reliable.”
Why would anyone ever possibly think pulling and pushing data from online could be as fast as a local hard drive, much less faster?! How old are you?

First of all – thanks for commenting – I love these comments. I do understand the technical difficulty. Hey – I work with systems managing tens-of-thousands of users every day so I got a pretty good idea of the limitations (BTW: I just turned 29 this weekend).But as I’ve stated earlier – I see it from a user’s perspective (just as I do managing our users at the company I work). They shouldn’t have to care where their data is stored. Just like our users, they don’t store anything locally on their PC. They have everything stored on our servers and they would tear us apart if it would be too slow.

At home, I don’t store any files locally on my PC – I keep all my files on a fileserver stored away – and access everything using my 100 Mbit network and I don’t really notice much difference during my day-to-day usage.But then you probably think: “But the server is on the local LAN…“. Well, what is a LAN? Probably most common speed is 100 Mbit which means around (theoretically) 10 MByte/s. And 100 Mbit is not completely uncommon for people to be getting at home if they’re living in a newly built house with fibre connectivity.

But of course, you can’t expect the same fully-blown 100 Mbit dedicated speed to a server situated on the other side of the globe – both you and me know that! But that again – that’s just technology! Do you really need 100 Mbit dedicated except for when you’re copying the file to the server? Probably – no! Why do you even have to copy the files to the server? Why not simply download everything directly to it? I’m trying to draw out new ways of using the technology!

Why should we stop at 100 Mbit? A few years ago you couldn’t get more than 0,5 Mbit to your house – today you can get 100 Mbit. You even got 1 Gbit to some places in Sweden [swedish link] since they year of 2004.

So yes – today “speed” is a problem. But it’s just a matter of time before this can be solved and in a few years I think we’ll have “our second harddrive” on the net instead of moving around our external USB-stick or drive. And maybe in a few years we’ll just keep everything online.

But that’s why I have this blog… I try to get it to work by keeping everything online. I’ve run into numerous problems and found out “hey – this doesn’t work as I hoped…“. But everything improves – the speed – the usability – the security. So keep reading my blog and every month we’ll find new exiting services that will make our online life easier.

I told about the excellent online tool Zamzar the other day. For me, this is really groundbreaking news. Why? Because Zamzar deals with personal data.

If you think about it, many of use the tools online to share stuff and many of the services out there have the philosophy to share. YouTube, Flickr and all the other big ones are made for sharing your files. Social bookmarking such as del.ico.us also focus on sharing. And if you look at any of the Office suite such as ThinkFree, Google Docs, Zoho – they all have the ability to share and make that a huge key feature. Now, don’t get me wrong – I love sharing!

But data that reside on your PC – you consider that personal data – you don’t want to share that with anyone. And since many of the services focus on sharing – people directly think of terms like privacy, personal integrity, “- Will someone be able to read my files?, “- Will they index my files and send them to the government if they ask to”.

So why do I think Zamzar in some way is different? Because it involves YOUR data. You will upload your file, they convert it just for you and lets you download it and then deletes it (OK, the converted files are saved for anyone to download if they just have the link – but let’s forget that for a second even though the UID is pretty hard to figure out). There’s no question about sharing it – that is not what the tool is made for.

And I think, for the “online revolution” to happen, this has to become more common sense for some services because otherwise, people will keep using the online tools for some stuff, but as soon as it involves the users’ personal data – they will keep it offline and locally on their PC.

Me on the other hand – don’t care. I just upload everything I got and hope they won’t share it or send it to someone else :). Ok, I admit I have some directories that contains personal stuff, but I keep that on a USB-stick encrypted with the excellent open source software TrueCrypt.