Google not Apple

I have made the first of many moves I expect to make as I set up my computer system for the next few years. I have been Apple mostly from about 1985, with the odd lapse into Windows at some one else behest, namely an employer.

But now I am setting up for a life with Google, I have transferred all of my emails over to gmail and I now use this as my main email services, I have moved my calendar over. Both these were remarkably easy to do, next was all my main files, again this was no more than a drag and drop, plus a short wait for it to complete a large move. Adding Google to my mac as an account on Mail, and pulling folders across made this job so easy, as for my calendar, I just had to add google tags to my Apple cal appointments and all was good, I could see them is Google calendar.

Next were my photos, again Google made this easy and for some time I have had them copied across, I use Chrome for almost all of my surfing, and google drive for my slides and now writing, Blogger is my preferred domain, and sheets my spreadsheet of choise. I now prefer Keep to Evernote, simple because it just as easy to use, and easier to find stuff.

It's not that I don't like Apple, I have a Macbook Pro 15" and an ageing iPhone 5s its that they are a closed wall system, and don't like me sharing as much as I want, Google on the other hand do. Attending a google show in Excel London a few weeks ago, did little to sway me away from this, in fact its was the final nail. As for the phone thats going soon, I fancy a Google Nexus, but could so easily take the Samsung 8, its just down to the best deal.

For the time being, I will stick with my Mac, its a good machine, and I need it for my CAD software, plus a couple of items I like, such as Skype, although I am fast liking google Talk and hangout. but there is little else to keep me on such an expensive machine, even CAD is migrating over to a web based environment, both Sketchup who are still in Beta, and more so Autocad who are in a different league, Which brings me back to my Mac, I don't need it if I go on a trip, I can so easily go online via a Chrome book and do most if not all of what I want to do, take into account the way airlines seem not to want us to travel with laptop, then hiring, or even buying a chrome book at the destination seems feasible.

As for my office phone, well thats linked to Skype, but outgoing land line calls via Google are easy and good quality. Google just have to get the UK sorted.

I look after several web sites and use a Mac based program to do this rather than hard coding, but I will eventually move even this to Google Drive. As you might imagine I have rather a lot of files, and what not, in Drive, so had to upgrade to 1Tb, in doing this I seem to have all the benefits of a G Suite account. My existing Dropbox account will go as I migrate all my files across to Google Drive, but here lies a small problem is the way I share this drive with my business partners, I will have to trial it with Google drive and make sure they are happy with the syncing before I go ahead.

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Link notes to a google Keep Record

At resent, I have several notes about books, my to read, my current reading list, and specific lists of book collections, my construction book list being huge and my Templar book collection not far behind.

I want to now link my personal notes to the list, and have found a way to do this.

So I make a new note and add my comments, thoughts and other items into the note its specific to that book, so I use the book title author and medium, ie paper or Kindle in the title.

Then before I close, I make a copy of the URL

After closing, I go to the specific book list and paste the url on the end of the book list item, see todays photo.

I also add my usual labels, this time adding book comments as the extra label.

For some reason, I find this satisfyingly acceptable, and perhaps a better way to record my thoughts rather than Evernote, ok there is probably a way to do this, but so far its eluded me.

I plan to add this concept to my photos, saved in Google Photos, a specific folder should do the trick, for example my recent flowering Magnolia collection. Although I can also do this to my Moleskin doodles, take a photo and get the link to paste it into one of my notes......... let you know

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Ways to overcome large CAD files bloated with unnecessary Data

In my last blog, I showed how easy it is to add data to almost any Vectorworks object, its not hard, and can add so much to a project, but there is a down side, that is the file can become large and over bloated with information, but taking a step back and looking at this, we can see a way out, and that is to add data like this onto separate files that are linked to the main file by relational links, or X ref files in Autocad.

This can be applied to Engineers structural drawings, heating and vent, planting, almost all services and specialist  drawings.

This can also apply both ways in any Architect, consultant relationship, where the Architects drawings are linked into the enginners drawings to lay out the steel, switching of the links when no longer required.

This keeps his file size to a min, and lowers the need for over rated computers purchased just to handle large files.

Plus the consultants only need to issue his drawing work, not the linked data which would cause so much confusion, as master files get updated.

I must stress, this relies upon a good knowledge of Eastings and Northings, and the correct setup of the drawings for it to ease linking, otherwise time will needless be spent on re alining linked drawings with obvious mistakes.

Also be careful using layer or class naming it's imperative to stop clash of imported drawing layers.

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Data, Data & more Data

As Technologists, we are being inundated with data, lots of it from almost everything we do. The easy route is to just delete, or make a folder on your hard drive, and dump it in there thinking you'll sort it later.

But there are a few simple tricks that will solve you problem and make it easy to retrieve.

First is Email, I use gmail its still the leading service, despite its age,  I get so much, some important and these get tagged and put into a correct folder, the rest just get marked as read, I never ever delete emails. Important ones that I want to keep out side of Gmail, I send to my Evernote account, via the secret email address they give, more on this later.

Never ever rely on your hard drive to store important things, I have, like so many done this and lost it all when the disk failed, and it will. With the cloud now so easy to access, I store all items in one of two places, first Google Drive, this has to be a no brainer, its easy to set up, easy to use, and you get so much free space, and is so well integrated with gmail, next comes DropBox, a paid for service, well there is a free service and its quite large, but my needs have gone beyond this, and it's here I store almost every working file, most are cad files and project documents we use daily, the beauty of DropBox is the sharing, I share all my business files with my partner, and he sees the updates almost instantly.

Now lets get back to Evernote, a product with a difference, here I store any document, scanned or otherwise, my new printer has such a sweet scanning facility, and used with PDFpen, if I get paper in the post, I scan it, and use the builtin "send to Evernote" function and dump the paper. Evernote has the best search ever, the OCR scans the pdf ready for me to search, I pay for the premier account, so its almost instant, free accounts wait for a while, but its done. Don't forget to add the app to your browser, searching for anything from say Chrome will show whats on the web, but also whats in you private archive in Evernote. Your private archive of data will be the subject of a more detailed blog later.

Books I have a problem with, I buy so many, I am a sucker for a good book, my collection, and I will not pass on any book, sorry, is growing, my construction books in particular I scan, not all of them, but the index, and important pages, these I send to Evernote, ready for search, I'll write a new blog on this very soon as there is more to this than just scanning, Kindle and ebooks spring to mind and my highlights.

Photos and my video's used to be a problem, but now I have four different safeguards, Google Drive, Flickr, dropbox, and iPhoto on my mac, all store any electronic photo I take, its automatic and I just don't ever have to think about it, most of my photos are taken with my mobile, the quality is just fine for most things, it auto syncs with all the above, and best of all, it has lat long embedded so search is so easy, which brings me onto my favourite, which is Google Photo, is was with no question iPhoto, but the service google offers is so much better. so all nicely backed up. In many practices, I used to get stinging emails from the IT department, saying I had yet again filled up the server with photos, not any more.

I still have to keep paper, its a pain, and defies the new search and find I am so used to in computer land, and is hosted in an old filing cupboard in my garage. Most are scanned, but the law seems to say keep, so I do.

With all the above, its hard to say no to data, now its more the better, OCR has opened up search to all the content, learning how to use this now becomes the next holly grail, tagging and to some extent, adding files to folders, although I do this simply to allow sharing specific sets of data.

I write profusely, with this blog and the others I looks after, a service I find invaluable is ifTTT look for it or follow the link, its an automated service thats free, which has rules, if I write a new blog it will copy the blog to Evernote, same goes for a lot of other services like diary events.

Todays photo is a vey old detail I like, neat and so full of design.