As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

Excellent reading.  Via Marie on twitter.

This seminar is intended to provide you with an understanding of the new collaboration capabilities available in the cloud, what is available in the latest Notes & Domino 8.5 version and how the upgrade will work in your environment.

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I can’t get an iPHone unless I pay 400 more.  Im in a plan with sprint, Im a hostage with sprint.  Im a sprint slave for another 4 months, so unless I want to pay 400 on top of the 400 that I would have to pay for the new iPhone, I’m Locked into this fucking blackberry nightmare, this ever seizing, ever thinking piece of shit that i have to pull the battery out of.  How is blackberry still in business?  Because corporations are blackberry puppets, and they need the blackberry network.  I don’t need it.  I don’t know why I even have it.  It was easier to type on.  Fuckit, why am I complaining for a change?

Taken from episode 228 of his very popular podcast. If you don’t know him, go here.  Either way, if I worked for Blackberry (or Sprint for that matter) I would try to keep people like this happy.

This week we are undergoing three four Lotus Traveler deployments/upgrades.  Upgrading the server is a relatively painless process.  For the iOS user, well… em.. nothing really happens.  As for Android, the user is prompted and the Lotus Mobile Installer is updated, then the client software is upgraded.  Below are screen by screen steps of what happens after you upgrade the traveler server to 8.5.3.1 to an android user, out of the box.  Hope it is useful to someone, even to warn your users what is coming.

iOS5 support and a few other updates.

Way back in July, I was introduced to this bluetooth headset in Las Vegas.  The device comes with charger, pouch, usb cable and a bluetooth usb plugin for a laptop (if you need it).  It has been on the road with me for many months.  So it’s about time to give a quick review, no?

The headset comes with a few sized earplugs, and it took me a bit of use to find the one most comfortable.  The buttons on the headset are easy to use, with volume on/off just a tap away.  But at first I was hating it on my Mac.  Pairing it over bluetooth was easy, but unless I manually paired and unpaired, I constantly got “A Bluetooth audio error occurred” followed by volume errors and eventually audio products (like Skype) bombing.

It took me a while to figure out the fix.  There are different sound preferences for Sound Effects, Output and Input on a Mac.  You can choose to have one device for input and something different for output etc.  The issue was Sound Effects.  The bluetooth device was enabled for Sound Effects and stayed that way even after turning off the headset.  My Mac beeps a lot.  If the device is not connected, the error occured.  Once I changed it so sound effects were always the Macbook speakers, the problem went away.  Below is the wrong setting.

Once I caught that, everything else worked a charm.  Bluetooth range is a few yards, and sound quality is good.  Battery life is pretty good too.  I have managed 3 hours talk time easily enough without recharge.  The pouch is very handy for throwing into my laptop bag and it is now a permanent part of my travel kit.

Recommended.

I document a lot.  I actually *like* documentation.  Why?  Years of having my ass kicked by not having documenting trained me into enjoying the self satisfaction of being a smug git when someone asks me for details on a project long since finished.  I take a lot of screenshots.

A while ago, I asked the LazyWeb how to automate the resizing of multiple screenshots or images on a Mac, while keeping the the correct size ratio.  I know there are some image tools that are out there (e.g. photoshop) but I really did not want to go to the expense.  I also prefer to keep my Mac as “clean” as possible.  Enter Automator.

The Mac Automator should be considered a Macro tool.  It can be used to create actions that repeat jobs you frequently do.  I rarely have use for it, but this time it was a good fit.  In my Automator, I have set the “ResizeImage” application to complete the following:

• Prompt you to select the file(s)
• Copy the files to a target directory.  I have it set to default as “ImageDump” on my desktop
• Resize the file to 450 pixels wide using the preview tool.

Not only that, I have saved it as an .app file, so I can easily active this resize application whenever I need.  If it is of any use to people, I have made the file available for download here.  I’m sure there are a billion improvements you can make and another billion alternatives, but this seems to work for me.

We have never ran the Traveler workshop in Ireland, so with the end of the year rapidly closing in, it’s about time to rectify that.

The Lotus Traveler deep dive workshop will be held in the Conrad Hotel in Dublin on the 6th December.  Details here.  Register here.

After seven flights in seven days over last week, this week involves London, and London alone.  That said, it also involves 2 days with a customer, 4 meetings, 2 online demo’s and .. oh yes a totally free presentation given on Thursday by myself and Warren Elsmore (followed by a few drinkies if anybody is about).

Sketched on the street in Rome, Italy.