When I acquired my pre-ultrabook-era but still pretty Samsung NP300V3A laptop some nine months ago, I lamented that I’d probably never be able to put Linux on there due to the NVIDIA Optimus graphics switching thingamagoo.
Well, yesterday I ate my hat.
If you have nerdy tendencies, head on over to VXLabs, my nerd blog, to read all about it.
I’ve been a Dropbox Pro (50G) user for more than two years now, and in this time it has never let me down, not even by a little bit. Still, when Google announced its new Google Drive syncing service, I had to take it for a spin.
For those of you with short attention spans, my conclusion is: Google Drive has great promise due to its price-point, Google’s great infrastructure and the integration with Google Docs, but you shouldn’t yet trust this service with your critical files.
To summarise: Google Drive is Google’s answer to Dropbox (and 50 other inferior syncing services). You install a small app on your Windows or Mac (no Linux yet, although it has been promised), and then it’ll keep a folder of your choosing in sync with Google Drive in the cloud. You can access your files via the website drive.google.com (google docs, but slightly updated), any computer with the Google Drive software, or via the Google Drive mobile apps. You can also share files through authorizing the relevant google accounts, or via URL. Google Drive has a number of built-in viewers, meaning that users will not have to install PowerPoint to view your PowerPoint presentation for example.
Things start to deviate from Dropbox when we look at the storage plans and prices the big G is offering:
You get 5G for free. For a measly $2.49 per month, you get 25G of storage, and 30G of GMail storage as a bonus, and for $5 per month you get 100G! Compare this with the $10 / month Dropbox wants for 50G. This, together with the fact that you could go up to 16 TERABYTES if you would want to, makes you at least think for a bit.
I installed the client on this Windows laptop. For you screenshot-freaks, here’s the context menu for the systray icon:
Google Drive systray context menu.
Note that because I pay a measly $5 / year for 25G of extra GMail space, I’ve been grandfathered into 25G of Google Drive space. Heh, I also only just learnt the term grandfathered. It means I could get this because of my previous price plan that doesn’t exist anymore.
Here’s the preferences dialog, nothing special really, unless you have a screenshot fetish:
Google Drive preferences dialog.
For me also an important functionality: You can easily recover deleted files. If you delete a file on your client computer, it gets synced to the trash folder on the google drive website, from where undeletion is an easy click on the “Recover” button away. Under the File | Manage Revisions you can retrieve file versions up to 30 days ago, or 100 revisions, whichever comes earlier.
Another important difference is that Google Drive, as far as I could find out, does not do something similar to Dropbox’s LAN sync, a pretty cool function that will grab files from the computers on the local LAN if they’re available, instead of from the cloud.
So I set out to do some tests. Before I could really get started, I ran into the first problems. I created a text file in my Google Drive folder with Vim (yes, I use Vim. deal.), as I wanted to test the file revisions. As you know, when Vim saves a file, it first writes to a temporary file, then deletes the original file and finally renames the new file to the original file. This confused Google Drive to no end. For each save, Google Drive created a new file with exactly the same name in the web interface, whilst on the client side, there was only one file.
I then proceeded to delete the text file on the client, leaving me with the following situation, even after Google Drive was done syncing:
Huh?! You call this syncing?
As you can see, on the server is my text file, on the client nothing. I expect of a syncing solution to actually, uhm, synchronise my files. I did notice a sync error message in the systray context menu. After clicking, I got this dialog:
Informative error message. NOT.
Yes, thank you Google Drive, you have an unknown issue. That’s just great.
So, in spite of the really attractive offering, this type of wonkiness (multiple files due to stupid create-new-rename saves, sync errors soon after), even after a few minutes of playing around, does not instil confidence or trust. If there’s one thing a good sync service should do, it’s instil confidence and trust. Dropbox has never failed me, and I’ve thrown some pretty strange things at it. Until Google Drive is able to do the same, I’ll continue coughing up 10 bucks a month for Dropbox.
Posted in review
Tagged dropbox, google drive, review, screenshots, undelete, unstable, vim
(This post has an extremely high slightly-insane-rambling index (SIRI). You have been warned.)
The rhythm of life
I love Unkle. Here’s the introduction to their song Back and Forth:
The only life you can get is one made up of ups and downs. The trick is in learning how to deal with the downs, increasing the number and duration of the ups, and enjoying every last drop out of them. This realisation was brought to the surface by a car advert in which the narrator claimed that time in the car equalled “quality time”. I don’t like cars, but I love quality time. It usually comes in little bits and, as I’ve reported before on this very blog, happiness and other important things also come in little bits, interspersed by other often less interesting bits. Although one has a limited extent of control over some parameters of this rhythm of ups and downs, of excitement and boredom, it can never be smoothed out. As is often the case, the best course of action is the zen one: Step outside and try to absorb completely the multi-factorial whole.
Intermezzo – this post’s title was inspired by this Italian masterpiece:
Selling one’s soul to the Virtual
A week ago, I started going through my bookshelf trying to find books that could potentially be given away or sold, freeing up some space for I’m not sure exactly what. Here’s a photo of some of them:
Books traded for space.
Each of these gave me pleasure at some point in my life, taking me on journeys to faraway corners of my imagination. Each of these contributed in some way to the ball of thoughts that is me. Years ago, I would not have considered giving even a single book away. Now I do, because I convince myself that everything is available digitally. I do read on my Kindle, where everything is far more convenient and takes up zero real-world space. I can never lose anything again. If I want anything, I can either find it in my archives or acquire it anew.
Could this line of reasoning, this position, be something that’s really quite insidious? Besides containing information on their pages, the books are tangible and visible reminders of the knowledge that they represent. By getting rid of them, could it be that I’m exchanging parts of my soul for an empty, virtual promise, for oblivion? Maybe the books should remain there, on my bookshelf, as constant physical reminders of the knowledge that they brought me — of all the knowledge that I should continually cultivate and upgrade.
Maybe the time has finally come for the 21st century reboot of Microsoft BOB. :) Then a failed (and the brunt of many jokes) experiment, perhaps now the seeds of a solution to the problem of trading the physical for the virtual. Imagine a private room where you can walk between your virtual bookshelves, a virtual haven to keep your slow, real humanity intact.
Life philosophy that works
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a prominent American astrophysicist and science communicator. Recently he took part in a IAmA session on reddit, where he answered the questions of random reddit users. To the question “What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?” his answer was the following:
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
This will definitely find its place in the Unified Dogma of Me (UDM). For now, I’m doing my best to fuse it permanently with my atoms.
Posted in life, weekly head voices
Tagged backyard philosophy, books, bookshelf, humanity, neil degrasse tyson, SIRI, udm, unkle
I’ve been dealing with a spot of blog writer’s block, hence the lateness of this post. I’d forgotten that these monthly instalments were initially intended to be extended status updates, with a spot of backyard philosophy every so often. Trying to come up with worthwhile backyard philosophy every week is just plain hard. This week I’m going for half a status update along with a list of possibly interesting sciencey tidbits.
That’s it for the status update. The sciencey bits I thought were worth mentioning are:
Good science should be reproducible. Judging by the blood alcohol content and weight tables on Wikipedia, I should be more creative between 3 and 4 beers, a result I will certainly try to confirm during my next WHV writing session. It is left as an exercise to the reader to calculate my body weight based on this information.
Posted in weekly head voices
Tagged alcohol, climate science, climatology, creativity, denialism, devide, global warming, in4307, medvis, prejudice, writer's block
I’ve spent days writing this post in my head, and now it’s taken more than two weeks to get done. It’s not that I have something complicated or difficult to tell you, it’s just that I was privy to three absolutely awesome weeks of vacation in an undisclosed location to the very far south of my current coordinates, during which I attained ultimate levels of relaxation that caused my brain to shut-down large parts of itself. The only parts that managed to remain online were those dedicated to slow living, appreciation of people and surroundings and, finally, deep thought. My brain is currently taking its sweet time to come fully online again.
Oh well.
I did bring you a photo of Disa Uniflora, a special little orchid that likes living close to little waterfalls, for example just like the one that can be found on your hike up Leopard’s Kloof. Look:
Pretty Disa in Leopard's Kloof.
As is usual for sunny vacations during which we transition into a new year, a number of realizations and resolutions slowly bubbled up to the surface from some usually submerged part of my consciousness. I’d like to share some of them with you:
Life goals are bad. Let’s stop doing them. The problem is that humans are awesome at adaptation. Unfortunately this means that two days after having celebrated your latest epic life achievement, you’re bored with it. Some people even get bored with their lives in general, and then buy a leather jacket and a motorbike because they think that that’ll somehow solve the problem, only to get bored with their new image soon after. Fortunately, there is a way to sidestep the problem quite elegantly. Don’t set life goals, but rather set life directions. Instead of defining the point that you want to go towards, define your preferred direction. If you do it right, you’ll pass those points as you go along in any case, except you won’t land in the depressing goal vacuum right after reaching the point that you’ve been moving towards for so long, because you’re motoring along in a direction, and that’s what’s important. To those more mathematically inclined, ignore the life function, rather design its derivatives. This is a practical way of applying the well-known addage that life is about the journey, and not the destination.
Disconnecting is good. I do love the internet. I also think it’s one of the most awesome achievements of the whole of humankind ever, and it really empowers humans everywhere. I’m more or less addicted to being constantly connected, having constant access to the sum total of human knowledge and in principle to a large percentage of my fellow humans. However, there is a fine line between having constant access and being constantly interrupted by too many not necessarily valuable packets of data. We’re very vulnerable to this latter situation, due to our brain chemistry being optimized by all of evolution for novelty, and for foraging, so we keep on clicking on “refresh”, and our ears perk up whenever a phone goes “ping”. However, when not being interrupted, human thought gets the room it needs to grow and deepen, into importance and into impact.
I’ve also been thinking about consumption. I’d like to do much less of that, and when I do, I’d prefer to consume quality. In my thoughts, it was primarily about information, but it applies to many other things. It’s an ongoing process.
I’m adding all of these to my growing list of little life tips. As regular readers of this blog, you know some of these by now: Keep on striving for balance and harmony, focus on the now, create value, study your manual, and, most importantly, drink lots of coffee. One day I’m going to combine them all nicely into the Unified Dogma of Me (UDM) and then I’ll start a sect. Seriously though, it’s quite challenging keeping these and the other ones in the front of my mind all the time. The UDM would definitely help. And I could start a sect.
One more thing before you go: I came across this recent PNAS article via the science pages of my newspaper. William Ratcliff and colleagues at the Michigan State University showed with a terribly simple experiment that single-celled yeast cells can evolve into multi-cellularity quite quickly. Pouring yeast from one test tube into another about 60 times, an action that favours, or selects, yeast cells that clump together, resulted into a multi-celled organism: The clumped together yeast cells started showing internal specialization. Pretty awesome results, especially considering the fact that you could probably reproduce this experiment in your kitchen.
That’s all for this week kids. Have fun evolving!
Posted in weekly head voices
Tagged backyard philosophy, deep thought, disa, disconnecting, evolution, life directions, life goals, midlife crisis
