Einleitung / Introduction
Willkommen auf Comp-Fu. Ich bin ein freiberuflicher Compositing Artist aus München und arbeite von Oktober 09 bis Weihnachten in Shanghai. Dieses Blog ist mein Reisetagebuch für euch und auch eine Art Notizbuch für Sachen, die mit Visual Effects zu tun haben. Und doofe Youtube-Videos. Aber keine Katzenfotos.
I’m a freelance compositing artist from Munich/Germany and from October ’09 right until xmas I’ll be working in Shanghai. Comp-Fu is my public diary for sharing travel reports from Shanghai for my German folks at home and will also be a notepad for stuff related to visual effects. No photos of kittens. But probably the odd youtube video. Please scroll down for my latest posts.
Um nur meine Reiseberichte zu lesen ohne meine beruflichen Fachsimpeleien, einfach diesem Link folgen und ein Bookmark setzen. Alle anderen aktuellen Blog-Einträge befinden sich weiter unten.
Keeping my data in sync
When I’m travelling around, I have to sync a few important files and directories across a Mac mini, a notebook running both Windows and Ubuntu and my iPhone. I still haven’t found a solution to keep calendar, contacts and e-mails across all devices because – call me old-fashioned – I refuse to put everything into the hands of a single service that forces me to rely on one vendor (like Apple’s mobile me) or stores everything on one website (like google mail/calendar or any IMAP mail service).
My contacts and calendars are covered by iTunes. They aren’t synched to my Windows/Linux laptop but whenever I’m carrying it around I also have my phone with me so that’s not a big deal.
For e-mail, I’ve been using Opera for ages and I like it. Its not good with IMAP but I can copy my whole mail directory from Windows to Linux to Mac OS and nothing breaks. So after years of using Total Commander to copy stuff between network drives I’ve finally found a service that takes care of all my synching needs.
It’s called Dropbox and offers 2 GB of free online storage space that is kept in sync across all three operating systems. I use it for my e-mail directory, my bookkeeping files and handy VFX related files like Fusion macros or scripts. It works perfectly and it is smart enough not to upload huge files again and again if only small parts have changed. Two additional features that might be handy: it will create an online gallery of jpegs that are uploaded to a certain directory and it allows you to share the contents of arbitrary directories with other dropbox users or the public.
Well, that’s enough corporate endorsement for today. But if you feel like opening up a Dropbox account too, kindly use this link which will earn both of us 250 MB of extra space for free 🙂
