This is a view from my back door on Tuesday night, looking to the North. I've always enjoyed the summer sunsets here. Usually they herald thunderstorms, which I'm perfectly fine with. Especially at night. Cools the place off a bit.
Except until it rains through the night and into the morning, and I can't ride my bike in. Not that I really want to - I'm pretty tired from the two days of cycling and running tonight.
Not much to say today - It was a general kind of a Tuesday, and I'm not broken up at all that it's over. These work days in the summer are brutal, just sitting in an air conditioned office, looking outside, wishing I were out there and not inside.
Anyhow. Delving into geek land..
I'm giving up on Dropbox as a file synching tool. After some recent changes in their ToS which effectively make my photos (well, all my content) free to use by Dropbox, the issue the other day where you could log into any account without a password, and general discovery that your files are really not encrypted.. I opted to move on.
I needed a tool that would work on iOS, my blackberry, and on Windows. Linux support is nice, but not necessary - I can work without it.
One option was to use SecreySync, which pre-encrypts your files before it goes into Dropbox. The problem there is that I need to install that encryption client on each computer in addition to Dropbox. Dropbox handles the sync, SecretSync handles the encryption. I take pause at this solution because it requires two components to achieve what I want, and it's not suitable for the blackberry.
Another option (and the one I went with) is Wuala. It took me a bit to grok Wuala, and what it was and how it worked, but now that I've got it, it's good.
For Windows, after installation and rebooting, it mounts a new drive letter (as W: by default), where anything put in there is synced across your Wuala clients. This can be done in Linux as well, I just haven't explored it.
I can also set folders in Windows to synchronize between clients, which is more analagous to how Dropbox works. If you want a direct port of Dropbox, this is how you would achieve that: Run Wuala on your computers, pick a folder to sync between clients, and you're done.
Wuala "says" that they encrypt all content before its uploaded, and your client decrypts it on the other side. I'm just not smart enough to look into it to see if that's actually happening, so I have to put some trust in that.
I can also set the Wuala client to continuously backup a folder on my computer into the Wuala "cloud". This is a +1 over Dropbox - since I can add any folder to Wuala, my life doesn't have to exist inside Dropbox. I've got a good mind to persistently backup my Firefox profile so that when it crashes and eats my tabs, I can get it back….
As far as storage, Wuala only ships with 1 GB of storage out of the box, however you can opt to trade some of your own storage to earn additional storage. So after using it for a few days, I can now store about 10GB of data - double what I had with Dropbox. That amount increases as time goes on (reliability of my clients) and with the number of computers I have sharing.
There isn't a Blackberry client, however I do have much more granular control over what documents and folders are public, and can obscure the URL of the public files for a bit of security. For example, I have a few recepies I use frequently, so I share those by using an obscure URL. I know this isn't like encryption security, but it help prevent mass-indexing
There is an iOS app avaliable, however I havn't tested it out.. So the jury is still out there.
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