love my chromebook, but...

it was 2002 when i installed thinkfree office as a cross-platform alternative to a popular proprietary office suite. that is when i began moving my life to the cloud. i realized that having to manage data on several computers running different operating systems was silly. i needed access to much of the same stuff on my mac, sparcstation, linux and windows pcs, and i didn't want to have to maintain multiple copies. the cloud made sense to me, though it wasn't then quite the buzzword that it has since become.

back then i predicted that we would one day run most of our software over the internet on a subscription basis. while we haven't arrived there yet, we're certainly going that way. i can now edit documents, touch up photos, record music and video, take notes, send email and text messages, make phone calls, listen to music, read books, watch movies and television shows, and write code all online. since that pretty well sums up most everything i do on a computer today i decided to take the plunge and pick up a chromebook, the samsung series 5 with 3g (in a lovely arctic white.) i have to say, i'm loving it, and i will keep you posted here about my adventures in google's vision of the cloud.

before i wrap up this post, i'll share my impressions after my first week with chromebook. i have to say, there are so many things i love about this device that i can't list them all. speed and convenience are at the top, though. but i have two needs that the chromebook doesn't address. one, i must have a local rdp client. i need to communicate with my company's terminal server from the public internet, but i also need to talk to virtualbox machines that are running on private networks. web-based rdp-to-html5 services can't access my private ip addresses, so a local client is a must. word is, google is working on this, so i'll wait. the second is java. now, if the chromebook had a jre then my first concern might disappear—i've found a very fine java rdp client. but there are many web sites that use java, not the least of which are those that host games like minecraft and runescape. after all, all work and no play...

take your pc everywhere

we use firefox. it has great add-ons like zotero, a tool for organizing your online research, or full screen homestar runner so you can watch strong bad emails in all their glory. we use openoffice. it supports the open document format, it allows you to publish your documents as pdfs, and it's totally free—not to mention that it's the office suite that's used in the public libraries of our own and neighboring burgs. we also like vlc, which plays about every media format under the sun; audacity, a great audio editor; the gimp, every bit as good as photoshop but for one infinite-th the price (i.e. free); and we like to burn optical discs, check email, and so on.

the problem is, not everyone agrees with our selection of software tools. some draconian schools and offices deploy only one option for a web browser or an office suite, and don't give you any choices. many of these pcs offer no photo or sound editing software at all, and certainly don't allow you to burn a cd. and what about all those customizations you spent hours making so that your software will work for you rather than against you? they don't just magically follow you to work or school.

but they could.

enter portableapps, the project that takes great open source software and makes it portable: that is, it runs directly off a usb flash drive with no installation required. carry your favorite customized programs and all your data with you everywhere you go. plug your drive into a windows pc and, voila! there are all your apps. the portableapps suite includes a menu that runs in your system tray, so your applications are always at your fingertips. and portableapps also runs on wine, so you can run your apps on a linux or mac computer where wine is installed.

oh, and when you choose which programs to include in your portableapps system, make sure you grab the clamwin virus scanner—you should always check your thumb drive for nastiness after you've plugged it into a strange computer. you never know where that thing's been.