Slowly Increasing my Technological Dominance of The Situation

[andrewducker]

Having tried a couple of different methods of carrying my state around with me I've settled on PortableApps versions of Thunderbird and Firefox. I really wanted to carry around a VM of Ubuntu, but what with everyone I know having USB 1.1 connectors on their PCs (making it very slow) and Ubuntu over VMWare not being able to hibernate (meaning it had to boot from scratch every time), it took 5-10 minutes from plugging in the USB stick to having my email. Which sucked.

The portableapps thunderbird takes about 7 seconds to load, which is much better. And with Foxmarks keeping my bookmarks in synch and ScheduleWorld keeping my Thunderbird contacts synchronised everything should be the same as it is at home. Oh - I've also got TabMix Plus and AdBlockPlus installed as well, obviously.

Oh well - eventually I'll have an excuse to carry around a linux distribution, but apparently not this week.

Comments

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Is it not possible to save the state of a VMWare VM from VMWare rather than having to have the guest OS do it itself? I haven't used VMWare in a while, so I may be misremembering...

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

Indeed it is possible to suspend with VMWare, but USB 1.1 is going to suck no matter what, and even USB 2.0 is still a bottleneck. Of course, the other specs of a computer with only USB 1.1 are probably not the greatest either...

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

This is true, suckage is inevitable; but for basic email and web, a VM with 128 or 256Mb should be reasonable (so long as GNOME isn't involved...) which at 11Mb/s can be restored in about 11 or 22 seconds. Not as good as 7 seconds, of course, but better than 10 minutes, and more general-purpose than just mail and web.

[andrewducker]

My brother's PC is powerful enough to play WoW with high levels of shininess, but the motherboard only has 1.1 USB for some reason...

[matgb]

Gmail? That's what I switched to, not going back to a client now. Although it does support IMAP now.

[andrewducker]

Gah! Clearly I never posted about having moved all of my email over to Google Mail as the back end using Google Apps for Domains!

email.ducker.org.uk now redirects to gmail :->

I do use IMAP though, because I hate the gmail email threading.

[matgb]

Really? I find that's the best bit—once I got used to it it was a godsend, especially if I'm on dial-up or using my mobile, can get all the message history really quickly.

YMMV I guess.

[andrewducker]

However, it stops you doing some things.

For instance, I can't archive all the messages in a conversation except the ones I'm interested in. So if there are 60 replies to a post, of which I'm interested in two, I couldn't archive off the 58 of them I'd read. As I use my inbox as a to-do list, this was less than useful.

[matgb]

Fair—I star messages I want to get back to, especially useful in a long conversation.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

You, monsieur Ducker, are a big fat geek!! (but we love you that way!)

[andrewducker]

Cheers.

Apologies for not getting back to your email. Work's been hectic and I haven't had any time. I'll get to it tomorrow!