Frog Up or Down

I have made the first of many moves I expect to make as I set up my computer system for the next few years. I have been Apple mostly from about 1985, with the odd lapse into Windows at some one else behest, namely an employer. But now I am setting up for a life with Google , I have transferred all of my emails over to gmail and I now use this as my main email services, I have moved my calendar over. Both these were remarkably easy to do, next was all my main files, again this was no more than a drag and drop , plus a short wait for it to complete a large move. Adding Google to my mac as an account on Mail, and pulling folders across made this job so easy, as for my calendar, I just had to add google tags to my Apple cal appointments and all was good, I could see them is Google calendar. Next were my photos, again Google made this easy and for some time I have had them copied across, I use Chrome for almost all of my surfing, and google drive for my slides and now writing, Blog...

At resent, I have several notes about books, my to read , my current reading list, and specific lists of book collections, my construction book list being huge and my Templar book collection not far behind. I want to now link my personal notes to the list, and have found a way to do this. So I make a new note and add my comments, thoughts and other items into the note its specific to that book, so I use the book title author and medium, ie paper or Kindle in the title. Then before I close, I make a copy of the URL After closing, I go to the specific book list and paste the url on the end of the book list item , see todays photo. I also add my usual labels, this time adding book comments as the extra label. For some reason, I find this satisfyingly acceptable, and perhaps a better way to record my thoughts rather than Evernote , ok there is probably a way to do this, but so far its eluded me. I plan to add this concept to my photos, saved in Google Photos , a specific...

In my last blog, I showed how easy it is to add data to almost any Vectorworks object, its not hard, and can add so much to a project, but there is a down side, that is the file can become large and over bloated with information, but taking a step back and looking at this, we can see a way out, and that is to add data like this onto separate files that are linked to the main file by relational links, or X ref files in Autocad . This can be applied to Engineers structural drawings , heating and vent, planting, almost all services and specialist  drawings. This can also apply both ways in any Architect, consultant relationship, where the Architects drawings are linked into the enginners drawings to lay out the steel, switching of the links when no longer required. This keeps his file size to a min, and lowers the need for over rated computers purchased just to handle large files. Plus the consultants only need to issue his drawing work, not the linked data which would ...

As Technologists, we are being inundated with data, lots of it from almost everything we do. The easy route is to just delete, or make a folder on your hard drive , and dump it in there thinking you'll sort it later. But there are a few simple tricks that will solve you problem and make it easy to retrieve. First is Email, I use gmail its still the leading service, despite its age,  I get so much, some important and these get tagged and put into a correct folder, the rest just get marked as read, I never ever delete emails. Important ones that I want to keep out side of Gmail , I send to my Evernote account, via the secret email address they give, more on this later. Never ever rely on your hard drive to store important things, I have, like so many done this and lost it all when the disk failed, and it will. With the cloud now so easy to access, I store all items in one of two places, first Google Drive , this has to be a no brainer, its easy to set up, easy to use, and yo...