Tim Teasdale’s blog

The goal

What I want is a system for accessing emails, calendar, tasks and notes on any of the computers I use on a regular basis (both Macs and Windows PCs), in an idiot-proof a way as possible. This should include both work and personal data. Ideally also accessible on the web when at someone else’s computer. This week I bought a new MacBook, and after installing Windows XP on it (twice – in both a virtual machine accessible while running Mac OS X, and on a separate partition so I can run XP natively), I can now reliably use Mac and Windows programs on the same machine.

The locations/equipment

Everywhere

• Apple MacBook, (recently acquired, my main computer for everything except the day job) running:
  • OS X 10.4 (including Windows XP home, running on virtual machine using Parallels Desktop)
  • Windows XP Home (natively, dual-booting using BootCamp beta)

Work

• Dell Desktop PC, running Windows 2000
• Apple PowerMac G4, running OS X 10.3 – used infrequently, so not a priority

Home

• Apple PowerBook, running OS X 10.3
• HP Desktop PC, running Windows XP Media Center Edition – also used infrequently, mainly just acts as a media server.

Email

Work

Work email is available directly through Outlook from both work machines (Mac via Citrix, due to problems with Entourage), and available from any other computer using Outlook Web Access. So far, so easy.

Home

Slightly more complicated. I have been using Google Mail as my main personal email account for about a year. Accessed via Internet from any computer.
Before that I used my ISP’s email account which is accessible as webmail and also via POP. This ISP account was my main email address for about eight or nine years, so emails have been downloaded on a variety of machines over that period. Mostly things I don’t need to access, but having recently acquired a new computer, I have discovered how many little utilities I’ve bought online that I need to track down the serial numbers for.
As my ISP’s webmail interface is not that great, I have started using Fastmail to regularly poll my ISP’s account. I access my Fastmail account using IMAP using Apple’s Mail.app on my Macs, Thunderbird in Windows, and via the web for other machines.

Calendar

At the moment I’m using Airset for my calendar. I can access it online from any computer, it sends appointment reminders by email as well as the next day’s schedule every evening. If you’re in the U.S., you can also have it send alerts to your mobile phone. It currently syncs well with Outlook at work (Exchange server) and home PC (local database) with no major problems. I can add/edit/delete entries from work/home/online quite happily. Work and personal appointments are currently all in the same calendar, until I can sort out a sensible way of separating them without breaking the syncing.
For computer-free access, I keep 3 months’ worth of calendars printed out in my organization file, and “sync” regularly.

Tasks

For a few months I’ve been using MyLife Organized (MLO) Pro, which lives on a USB stick I carry around with me. Obviously this means it is losable/forgettable; MLO is set up to take regular backups on the hard drive, so I should never lose any data as long as I have access to those computers. If I forget to take the USB stick with me for some reason, I’d probably only be a day or two out of date, as a worst case scenario. I run it on my work PC, MacBook’s native XP installation, MacBook’s virtual XP machine, and occasionally my home desktop PC. Currently no “computer-free” access, other than printing out reports of relevant information every now and again. I also use Basecamp for some projects, particularly where I am working with other people (or may be in the future). It also syncs with Outlook. Expect a more in-depth post about MLO in the future.

Documents

I’m still experimenting with the best way to organize this. At the moment, a combination of using a USB stick, and my Apple iDisk, which is a WebDAV folder I can access from any computer, with added features if using it from one of my Macs, which both use a working copy and automatically upload/download changed files.

If anyone has any questions, or any suggestions on how I can improve this setup, I’d love to hear them!