Frog Up or Down

Apple to Google Migration For the past couple of months, I have slowly been transferring my loyalty away from Apple to Google. For more than a few years, I have lived on a balance between Apples closed platform and Googles more open view on life. You might ask why, well as a blogger, lecturer and Technologist, I liked the Google system, sharing was easy, I liked the interface and apart from just a few small quirks, I happily used Drive and all it offered. Apple, on the other hand, apart from the excellent MacBook Pro, upset me a lot, with their closed shop mentality, and high pricing. Another player in my life that I might add at this stage was Dropbox, who I used to store all my office documents, and although I liked their system a lot, I meant I had filed in Google, Dropbox and a little on the Mac cloud, not a good state of affairs, but I lived with it, until I saw just how much I was paying for storage on all three systems, the volume of which could easily fit onto one...

Suddenly the world has woken up to the idea of Cities being smart, well that's what the marketeers think we should call cities that are increasing their technology limits from almost no digital control to a new understanding of city control in the form of digital information and communication. This blog together with my website  Smart City Review  will look at all aspects of this growth in digital cities all over the world. from the UK to the USA, to India, the Hong Kong and beyond. You might think this is all new, that we are right at the start of this revolution, simple answer to that is no, it's been ongoing for a long time, there have been one or two partial success stories, and a lot of unsuccessful attempts.

Leica disto EDM Reading, I read a lot, no I read continuously, from daily papers to the weekend papers and their glossy magazines, I read book like they are going out of fashion! both in good old paper format! but so often these days, in electronic version! mostly from amazon! although I have tried Apple I read flicker, Zite, and almost any news feed for my subject list, and many I transfer to evernote! again building up my personal knowledge base. I scour old book shops for books, picking up such classics as old construction manuals, and the classic AJ metric handbook. I even scan in old trade magazines, just in case I want to refer to them. My repository is Evernote, and for the most part it's very easy to retrieve, yet what happens to my personal archive should I ever fall out with Evernote! that's a question I so often think of, but as yet have no answer to, so I continue to load up information. My driving goal is the research I do, on a variety of subjects, I us...

At present, I am watching several films, reading mail, and pulling thoughts together on a separate Doc, oh, and drawing in a CAD package. I use several screens to keep this little lot in the air and viable. My mac is at present pushing a lot of air through its self, keeping up with all of this, not surprising really given the work load I am putting on it. I work from a small home office, but today I am in the dining room, it takes about 20 min to set up,  or decamp the usual equipment from my small office to the dining room, but I like to keep my Flatcoated Lab happy Data storage is now easy, Google drive handles it all, except for my CAD files which I still store on Dropbox, a legacy from earlier days and one I will eventually move to drive. but other projects need more time to evaluate, such as my sensor project, howwill I handle the massive data I know will be generated. For this, I need to gain a better understanding of sensors their generation of data, routin...

As part of my move to Google Drive and all it entails, I have been wondering how I might get on with my brother Printer Scanner . The printing side is just not a problem, but and here is the usual BUT, I at present have no way of connecting my Chrome browser to the scanner, I have to use the Apple interface and scan in that way save and then use the imported pdf file. But there is a work around that seems to work. that is to use the scan button on the printer and set the destination to either mail or file. Here's how it works. for mail, I have my printer connected via   USB link, so the Brother printer can see mac mail and uses that to link up, I send that to Gmail  and all as before. Why it picks mac mail when I have it set up for Gmail is beyond me, yet this works so not a problem, although I managed to correct this simple by going into Mac mail and setting the default mail to Google Chrome. The other method, and the one I shall use in the future, is to save to fi...

Have you had chance to play with my.sketchup.com lately, I should if I were you, its suddenly becoming a very useful tool. I have left it alone for a month or two, and today I thought lets have a peep and see whats been added, well to my surprise, most of the major tools are there and working well. First is section plane, and scene settings, these work well and the dialog box for playing the scenes is so easy to set. Next is save, now if like me you use Chrome, then you might have to addmy.sketchup.com to the advanced privacy setting to allow it to communicate, but as its a named site ythis is the only one that it will allow. Views works well and all the usual are there, so are styles, and to my mind are easier to use than the stand alone program. Layers are also there and again I find them easy to use and set. The two main menu pallets are simple to use, but not movable, but they work well and as so small they fold away without taking up to much Realestate. As for up...

For so long, and I have written about it her and in other places, but my todo list have gone through so many different formats, and for a long time this been a series of paper lists that were rewritten as new item appeared and old items completed. It beat electronic versions, in as much as I just like the feel of pencil and they are always there, as I use my Moleskin to keep the lists with a sort of yellow sticky note -it as a label for the current page that had the latest list. I even went as far as copying the page to Evernote , my goto place for all storage for a while, well a long time,,,,,, that is till I found Google.Keep. And keep for so many reasons has transformed a lot of my note keeping and todo lists ot tasks or as Keep describes their version, a Reminder. So its so Keep that I moved, not so much as a complete goodby to Evernote, but more a trial, and I just clicked with the whole thing, ok so I am a big Google fan, and use Gmail and all it offers, Drive plus a ...