The Long Memory of Zumodrive

April 25, 2010 | Comment

I am a highly active and avid user of the cloud storage system Zumodrive. In fact I have written about it a number of times before and it was one of my favourite apps from 2009.

One of the things that it can do (unless you turn it off) is to give you little pop-up messages telling you what it is up to. On a Mac this is done via the Growl notification system which I then have pushed to my iPhone. Today I received a notification from Zumodrive that it had updated six files in the list … Read the rest

ZumoDrive for iPhone

April 9, 2009 | Comment

I have spoken about ZumoDrive a couple of times already (here and here) but that has always been about the desktop app. Now there is an iPhone/iPod Touch client available that allows access when you don’t have you desktop/laptop access.

Zumodrive bills itself as a way of having additional storage available on devices that are traditionally limited, such as Netbooks. I guess that is true providing you have a deep enough wallet to be able to afford the storage – it wouldn’t take long to pay for a portable harddrive for example. However, that would be missing some … Read the rest

Zumodrive and Windows Live Writer

March 26, 2009 | 2 comments

I have been using Windows Live Writer for blogging for quite a while now and really prefer it to the online interface provided by WordPress. Of course one of WLW’s strengths is that you can work on posts off line ready for posting when it is appropriate. In my case I have scraps of posts waiting for me to finish them off and post them.

Another thing that I need to be able to do is work on posts on both my home machine and my laptop. This implies being able to synchronise between both machines – something that … Read the rest

Zumodrive

March 21, 2009 | 3 comments

There are a number of online storage companies popping up and I have covered Dropbox, Box and Skydrive previously. Now there is a new player, Zumodrive, offering something that sets it apart from the rest.

On the face of it the service is similar to the others: a (small, 2gb) amount of free online storage that you can access from your Windows, Mac or iPhone devices or via a web interface. However, where Zumodrive differs is in how it is presented on the host machine. So on my laptop ZumoDrive appears a a removable storage device on drive … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

Top tech of 2009

January 7, 2010 | 3 comments

For the last few years Michael Arrington has been producing a list of the top tech that he has regularly used in each year and I thought this year I would give it a go. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2009 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

A lot of my life is spent in a browser and this year I changed over from Firefox to using Google’s Chrome. Why? Because it is fast. In fact it is the faster browser I have used and speed is important to me. I don’t … Read the rest

Moving to Windows 7

October 4, 2009 | Comment

So I have slowly been getting my PC ready for the arrival of Windows 7.

I have had my existing machine for about four years now and it is beginning to show its age with it being slow to start and, at times, sluggish in operation. The underlying architecture of the machine is still fine (P4 3.4 GHz & 2GB Ram) and particularly when considering how my computing requirements have changed over the last four years. All of this has led me to believe a fresh install of Windows is going to give the machine a new lease of life … Read the rest

Services I use and Recommend

July 9, 2009 | 1 comment

In a previous post I talked about the freemium model and how it has affected my attitude to software purchases. I wanted to go through the services that I use regularly and pay for and highlight them.

This is obviously just a personal selection. Over the years I have tried out numerous applications that rival the one that finally made this list. In the end it is just personal preference as much as anything else. You may prefer something else but these are the ones that made me put my hand in my pocket and purchase a subscription

So in … Read the rest

Paid Apps and the Freemium model

July 1, 2009 | 2 comments

Over the years I have tended to avoid paying for applications because the up-front cost was prohibitive. So I either went without, used an older version that may have been given away with a magazine, or found an open source equivalent. However, I am now finding myself committing to a number of applications because of the small up-front cost and, quite often, after a period of using the service for free – the so call freemium model. The question is whether that is good value for money.

The applications below are all ones that I use on a regular basis, … Read the rest

Carbonite Remote Access

May 1, 2009 | 3 comments

I’ve been using Carbonite as my online backup service of choice for about a year now and it works seamlessly in the background sending my important files to the cloud just in case. Until recently that was all it did. A one way upload of files from my machine to the cloud. You could see them but unless you wanted to restore them they were untouchable in a virtual vault somewhere.

That changed just recently when Carbonite Remote Access was launched. Remote Access, as the name suggests, allows you to get access to your archive from just about anywhere via … Read the rest