Making IT Clear

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction." Albert Einstein

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Blackspot Reception without Femtocell

I pay the usual price of rubish mobile coverage for living the rural life made worse by two-foot thick granite walls which makes reception patchy to say the least. I'm trying to convice Three to give me a femtocell but in the meantime I thought I'd try a different approach.

I've been a VOIP user for some time, when I first moved here it was impossible to get a second line for the business so I started using Voipfone (who are excellent by the way). So I thought I'd experiment with a VOIP client for my iPhone, the one I settled on was Bria from Counterpath which has worked well.

But I still needed to be able to receive calls to my mobile so I redirected calls to my VOIP number when unavailable using the GSM code *62*[dest]# (there's a full list of these useful codes at GeckoBeach). This only affects calls if the phone is switched off or out of range; it won't redirect if the phone is busy or I don't answer it. Bria has a push facility so the phone will ring even if it's locked or you're using another app. So now my phone rings as long as I have WiFi which covers me at home.

But now my voicemail can end up in two different places - VOIP or mobile. To solve this and get visual voicemail (why is it only O2 that does this in the UK?) I signed up with HulloMail and redirected both voicemails (VOIP and mobile) there. I redirected my Voipfone account in all three circumstances (unavailable, busy and unanswered) using their website. I redirected my mobile using the GSM codes again, *61*[dest]* for anaswered and *67*[dest]# if busy. So now all my voicemails end up in one place.

There are a couple of downsides to this approach:

It costs me money when people phone me (the call from my mobile provider to my VOIP account)

I have a passcode on my phone which means that whilst it rings I have to enter the code to answer the call if it's via VOIP

That's about it, not a perfect solution but it only cost me a few quid and it does the job!

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Cloud Experiment Part II

Ok that was a, heavily, quailified success - I now have an encrypted online drive that doesn't cost me anything but it's a wee bit flakey.

The solution comes in three parts:

A SkyDrive account (open one here)

The free version of Gladinet (get it here)

CloudFogger (get it here)

SkyDrive provides the storage space (obviously), CloudFogger deals with encryption and Gladinet glues it together.

CloudFogger is a free app that will transparently encrypt files. It creates a virtual drive which automatically encrypts any files saved to it; decrypting them on-the-fly when they are opened again. The virtual drive itself just point to a folder on the local machine so I though I could just mount the SkyDrive using WebDav and away I'd go.

This was true up to a point but SkyDrive limits its WebDav interface to Office documents, anything else and it tells you the file is too big. This is where Gladinet comes in, the software allows you to mount various cloud storage providers as virtual drives without SkyDrive's folder restriction.

So we point our Gladinet virtual drive at SkyDrive and CloudFoggers virtual drive at the Gladinet virtual drive and we have transparent encryption on the SkyDrive. If I save a file to the CloudFogger virtual drive is is automatically encrypted and stored on SkyDrive and I can open the files again just by double clicking on them. Simples.

There is however a problem. I'm not sure what it is but every so oftn CloudFogger crashes and needs to be restarted. I think CloudFogger is using the SkyDrive to perform the encryption rather than using a temporary location and then copying it across and this is causing problems. But I don't know.

Not the end of the world but also not the seemleass solution I was looking for. Pity really for a few minutes I thought I had it sussed.

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Cloud Experiment

I'm fed up with my server. It sits in the corner whirring like an industrial air con unit and sucking up electricity but what does it actually do for me? I can think of three things:

Email - I run Exchange Server for my email and calendar. Arguably this is overkill considering the number of people who use it.

Shared Storage

SharePoint Intranet - pointless in a company our size and never used

Terminal Server - this used to share a couple of bits of software but little else, Microsoft's restrictions on the use of Office in a TS session make it next to useless for me

Backup - I already do this online to a certain extent but I need to refine the way I'm doing this.

So over the next couple of weeks I'm going to see if I can move everything that I use (bye bye intranet) intofreecloud based solutions. I accept that if this is going to work medium - long term I'm going to have to pay for it but I just want to see what's possible for nothing. We'll see.

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A Tale of Two Launches

The lanuch of the Raspberry Pi has taken me back to the computing of my youth - a cut-price, bare-bones computer built by a British company (albeit via China) excited geekdom and slipped into the general press. The techonlogy may not be knew but the price makes it an experimenter's dream it is the very opposite of yesterday's launch of Apple's slick consumer device.

The run-up to the Raspberry Pi's launch has also been about openess the community has been part of it but this did not dim my excitement. On the other hand the launch of the "new" iPad was cloaked in secrecy and was, for me, a complete disappointment. I don't what I wanted but it seems the actuality could not live up to the expectation.

The iPad's rise, along with its imitators, shows the slow transformation of the computer into a consumer product like a TV or washing machine. The Raspberry Pi gives us the opportunity to recapture some of the excitement marked by the likes of Sinclair Research, Acorn Computers et al. The world of computers is splitting in two and I know which I find move interesting.