How much is enough?

We're all bombarded with mobile phone plans offering more and more minutes or more and more data for a standard monthly fee, and with ISP's offering phenomenal amounts of data - the 150Gb for $70/mo crew, all of whom do so in the knowledge that 90% of their client base won't use it and that the other 10% can be slugged with punitive excess usage fees the moment they step out of their allocation.

The point being that once you have excess capacity, enough to accomodate the outliers, you can start supersizing your offerings and in the process get people to pay for more than they need becuase it looks like such a good deal (just the same way supermarkets offer you six, as opposed to four, cents off a litre of fuel if you spend more than $150 in a single transaction)

Interestingly I think we're on the edge of seeing this with 'free' storage: Windows Live offers you a massive 25GB - probably more than most people will use, iCloud 5GB, Google is reputed to be about to offer a 5Gb Gdrive and Dropbox 2Gb with sync. There are others, such as Box with similar offerings. Evernote bases costs on usage, not data stored.

Now when my work mac slowly borked itself I burned myself a dvd of my documents and desktop - it came to just over 4 Gb for six years worth of work and projects. Embarrassingly the downloads folder came to just under 25Gb - just showing how bad I've been at cleaning out pdf's and drafts of shared documents. (The other lesson is that using de facto standard document formats, doc(x), odt, xls, ods, pdf is a really good thing)

But what we can draw from this is that for someone using their machine for work and creating a lot of text based documents (as opposed to movies or images) you need somewhere between 5 and 25GB, ie you are unlikely to fill the hard disk of any modern laptop during the lifetime of the machine. What's more, unless you work intensively with images, video and sound you are unlikely to accumulate more than ten times the average, which is still less than a disks worth.

So, people who are disorganised and profligate, like me, could happily use current free cloud storage for their work over a reasonable time without bumping into usage restrictions.

The implication is that provided one has reasonable connectivity a syncing storage model like dropbox or evernote is perfectly tenable, as is working with cloud based storage and applications, meaning that one doesn't need that much locally, making the use of low capacity machines such as tablets or netbooks a viable computing option ...

Really living in the cloud ...

I have periodically ranted on about how it's applications that are important, not platforms, the browser is the new desktop etc etc.

Well I've had to eat my own dogfood. My work laptop started showing all sorts of weird permission based problems and lost blocks on the disk so it's gone off to be poked at and either rebuilt or acquire a replacement hard disk.

That of course left me with a problem - no work laptop. I could have brought in my personal windows 7 machine fom home  but instead opted to use my linux (ubuntu) development machine.

As my mac was dying I'd had the good sense to burn myself a dvd of my recent work and move the really recent documents into either windows live skydrive or google docs, and have chrome sync things as well as installing Chromium on my ubuntu machine.

I also piped my work email into my personal gmail account so that I only needed on mail feed - incidentally this also works really nicely on the android email reader - all your work mail sitting there neatly sorted into a folder for you to ignore.

Twitter's not a problem for me as luddite  that I am I use the web version.

So how's it going?

Pretty good, but not perfectly:

• No unbuntu evernote client. NixNote/Nevernote is slow to update and the web version is a little slow
• No editing complex spreadsheets with macros. Windows Live's Excel client doesn't like them and neither does libre office. But at least you can look
• Google Docs doesn't like some embedded images . So far Libre Office has got me out of the hole

Otherwise it's all there - you really can do everything that you would normally do on a normal desktop or laptop, which means that you could probably get away with something more basic such as a netbook in a lot of cases.

The key of course is that I'm sitting on high speed university network that basically doesn't ever go down. If I was working at home on our attenuation challenged adsl service that seems to go down several time a day it might be a more frustrating experience.

I don't have enough experience of working plugged into a 3G network to make a call on how good an experience that would be - certainly when I recently did a review for librarything I wrote the review using AbiWord on my netbook and uploaded it as I was only getting a reliable 2G GPRS service at the time as opposed to the more usual 3G service.

So, conclusions

1) yes you can work in the cloud using free apps but Google Apps and Windows live is not an either/or  - you really need both they both have strenghts

2) you need a really really good reliable network connection

3) the underlying operating system is irrelevant but it does need to provide a decent pdf viewer and office aware suite capable of dealing with the newer Office 2010 formats

4) having essentially the same browser across machines is a boon, especially when you can sync data

 between them

5) dropbox (or equivalent) is your friend - keep your work there by default

6) Skydrive and its 25GB storage is a lifesaver

Clay Johnson - the Information Diet

I've just reviewed Clay Johnson's book for LibraryThing - see http://www.librarything.com/work/11912604/reviews/82846524 if you're curious.

On the whole I didn't like the book - a potentially interesting idea spoiled by an overstretched analogy and a lack of appreciation of life outside of the American bubble - in its way proving that America is a parallel but separate reality.

As always your milage may vary but this is one I'd take a long look at in the bookstore before deciding to buy ...

only 54% of Australian homes have wifi

I tweeted a link to a report from the Register to the effect that 54% of Australian homes have wifi compared to around 74% in the UK. At the same time another survey claims that less than a third of 'smart' tv owners have plugged their tv's into their home network.

The real question is why so low - almost everyone seems to have a laptop or a tablet so you would tend to expect that they would have ADSL and a wifi router at home - or is it because a reasonably large number of people use 3G in preference over the sometimes erratic and pathetic fixed infrastructure that is Telstra's copper network.

Certainly 3G is a revelation - I recently purchased a Virgin broadband key and 4GB of data to free me from the perils overpriced hotel wifi and the service is  as fast and reliable as hotel wifi and at 4GB with 30 day expiry and a 'free' key (usb modem) for $25. Recharges are similarly priced.

At home we use around 8 or 9GB of data a month - we're not big downloaders on the whole,  and the service can't cope reliably with streaming media.

Given what we pay for our service, buying the equivalent amount of data from Virgin would be cheaper, except that of course we need wifi for the tablets, the kindle, fixed ethernet for the laser printer and the internet radio and sometimes we want to run multiple devices at once, but in a house hold of one (which is of course a growing trend getting you internet over 3G would see worthwhile and cost effective ... 

The logistics of early printing

I was watching Stephen Fry on TV last night talking about early printing, and I was struck by the thought that it must have been a damned inefficient business - say about an hour to set up and proofread a page and about a minute to print a single page, meaning that printing 500 pages on an early printing press would take most of a day, and book of a hundred or so pages close on three months to print and bind.

I'm going to guess that a good copyist could write a legible page in under ten minutes, meaning that it would take a little more than two days to produce a single copy. Now of course the printer needed a couple of lads to help him and they needed to be paid. So if we say a copyist was paid the same as a printer we really ought to have two copyists doing this to account for the printers lads. If you work through the maths you can come up with the conclusion that in three months our pair of copyists would have managed to knock out around a hundred copies as well as ending up with a terminal case of writers cramp.

The important point is that printing books was only five times more efficient than copying - a decent gain but not startling. Of course as the size of the print run goes up it becomes more and more efficient, but even with a run of a couple of thousand it can't have been that efficient.

And this goes part of the way to explain the paucity of printed books in sixteenth and early seventeenth century even in moderately well off homes - they were expensive and hard to produce - hence the lack of penetration.

Chapbooks and pamphlets were another thing entirely - by late Tudor times pamphlets and ballad sheet were widespread and sold for a penny or so they helped spread the news.

It's interesting that government was also quick to adopt the technology - when Henry VII died in 1509 Richard Pynson, the royal printer was used to print copies of the decree announcing pardons on the accession of Henry VIII to ensure their widespread (and accurate) distribution throughout England.

The licensing of printers in Tudor times has always struck me as a parallel to the control of xerox machines and gestetner machines in the old Soviet Union - no one or only a very few were going to use them to produce a copy of Solzhenitsyn, but as a way of producing a flyer or samizdat newsletter they were unparalled ...

The end of the letter?

Postal services are dying the world over.

In the States the USPS is closing a swathe of rural post offices, and in the UK the cost of letter delivery is about to skyrocket rendering first class mail unaffordable.

In Australia the personal letter service still exists, but in an attenuated form - no Saturday delivery - a single delivery anytime during the business day, and no next day delivery except for mail in the State and Territory capitals and a few other larger towns. Subsidised by the parcel service, at least it's affordable, at $0.60 for a standard letter.

The demise of the letter service has implications for historians of the recent. Before the advent of the penny post - the cheap universal postal service - from the middle of the nineteenth century people did not write letters.

There was of course official correspondence and the occasional personal letter between the great and the good and their spouses, but on the whole people didn't write letters due to the lack of a reliable delivery service, cost, and a lower spread of literacy.

Come the nineteenth century we of course see a rise in literacy and with the penny post letter writing. However because the post was still slow these letters tend to be definite epistles, describing what people have seen and done and in effect act as eyewitness accounts of the times.

And people wrote a lot - if for example you take a look at the Frank Kelmsley blog - a reposting of the diaries of a Canadian soldier in Europe during the first world war the first thing that is remarkable is just how many letters he received.

They also wrote about things - for example Robert Byron's letters home Beijing which give a picture of life among the foreign community in 1930's Peking.

Nowadays with Skype and email people no longer write letters. And because of the immediacy of communication they no longer write long letters - people are more likely to recount matters in a Skype call and only write emails as short notes.

And this has definite implications for the business of history. In one sense today's Robert Byron might well blog about his experiences but then blogging is a public forum and they may be inclined to some reticence on occasions ...

And in this we somersault back to the eighteenth century and earlier where we are reliant on people's diaries and on official correspondance to work out what people thought and felt about matters ...

when did the great war stop being great in NZ?

Way back in August last year I blogged about how using Tim Sherrat's work harvesting data out of the Australian newspaper archive coluld let you see when people changed their usage of a certain stock phrase - in this case when they stopped referring to world war one as the 'Great War'.

Tim has now gone and done it again - this time for the New Zealand newspaper archive. Unfortunately the archive stops at 1940, but their just a hint that it's going to parallel the Australian pattern.

Tim's work can be found at http://wraggelabs.com/shed/querypicnz/