Syncing up your computers -- and/or simplifying your digital life.

[Cereal_MF]

Does anybody here vigilantly organize their media, or sync up all of their devices, or put a true attempt into simplifying their digital life? Just interested on hearing thoughts and experiences.

I currently have an android, a macbook pro, a custom gaming rig. and a mediocre hp pavilion laptop which i connected to a monitor since the laptop screen no longer works. i have it in my room for watching tv. just trying to milk it for all its worth... and with that, im trying to milk all of my tech devices for what their worth.

What im mainly going for is to organize and sync up my devices in order to create a more intuitive experience and one that wastes less time fiddling around. I want to use my devices for entertainment, but also want to get the most out of them in terms of them benefitting my life without engaging with them every minute of the day. in other words, when I DO use my devices, I want the fiddling around part to be at a bare minimum, and more time to actually do work (or play games, watch movies, and listen to music).

 

[Frederick McGuire]

For watching movies / tv shows, Plex is a really cool set of apps.

Basically, you run the media server app on whatever machine you have your media on, and you run the media player app on whatever machine you want to watch it on.
It streams the content over your local wifi connection.

You can get both the media server and media player apps for mac and pc, and there is a player app for iOS (maybe android, I'm not sure)

With my setup, I've got my Mac mini running in my bedroom which is the media server, connected to a 27"monitor so I'm also running the player app on it.
I can AirPlay from my iPhone or iPad to an Apple TV, so I can watch stuff in the living room.

I've got a few programs for encoding stuff so that all my video files are the same format - .m4v
It's basically apples version of an mp4, which means that most things that can play mp4 (which I find to be most devices that can play video) can play an m4v without any issues, and I can manually rename the file extension to mp4 if I'm having issues (the ps3 couldn't play m4vs at some point, so I used to rename the extensions, but then after a patch they just played natively )

And I've got a few programs to grab the metadata of movies/tv shows...
So yes, I'd say I vigilantly organise that stuff

 

[t-dub]

Data, along with computing power, will become ubiquitous in our environment. All of your personal data, the data that you consume on a daily basis, all of it, will be served to your choice of personal devices via the cloud. Soon

 

[Enchantre]

I'm having enough trouble getting two B&N Nooks to keep my reading material correct.

 

[Vicki]

Data, along with computing power, will become ubiquitous in our environment. All of your personal data, the data that you consume on a daily basis, all of it, will be served to your choice of personal devices via the cloud. Soon

And with it, our privacy goes right out the door...

 

[Cereal_MF]

The more I think about it, I think its probably preferrable to keep a rather simple online life, where instant syncing isnt a necessity...

 

[Enchantre]

The more I think about it, I think its probably preferrable to keep a rather simple online life, where instant syncing isnt a necessity...

Oh, true that!

I've already disabled my Facebook account, and pulled a lot of photos off my Flickr account, etc. I did that before I became a MMJ Patient, but even more now, I value my privacy. It isn't even that I "don't want to be found", but that I think that putting all details of one's life out there, with FB, Twitter, blogs, photo sites, etc., reduces the value of our lives. They get spread so thin, on a metaphysical basis, that we lose some of our very depths.

It really is more important to have 3 real friends, than to have 400+ FB "friends"... real friends build depth and quality into their relationship, rather than mindlessly "Like"ing everything the other mindlessly reports to the entire world.

 

[t-dub]

And with it, our privacy goes right out the door...

Why yes, it will. Embrace the chip, it won't hurt going in, too much . . .

rather than mindlessly "Like"ing everything the other mindlessly reports to the entire world.

Ha! I "like" your post Seriously though, what is it with the "life management by committee" thing with FB? Its like every decision kids make they gotta put it out there for a freakin' vote . . .

 

[Tweek]

The only aspect of my digital life that I rely on cloud storage for, is my photo collection and video portfolios. Everything else is backed up at home via raid storage and I swap out the drives ever couple of years or when they get full and archive them. Any files that my wife needs to access, can be done through network attached storage/wireless access, etc.