SARS Background Ok, so not the Severe Acute Respiratory sort of SARS, but in fact a form of computer… In fact, SARS is what I’ve nicknamed my new “supercomputer”. SARS stands for Small Array of Raspberry piS. I built this as I’ve also been interested in multi core computing, even before dual core and multi core chips were the norm (this is back in the pre-64 bit chips as well, when AMD Athlon chips were king!

ChromeOS is to Windows like Android was to iOS circa 2008 I think this is a fairly accurate article. It’ll be interesting to see where Chrome OS gets to in the future. Afterall, new Chromebooks have been announced.

So I’ve been using Bittorrent Sync for a while now and thought I’d write some thoughts on it. A brief description of it would be that it’s the sync elements of Dropbox, but running on your own server. It doesn’t have the web interface (but that can be added with third party applications, such as Owncloud) but does one thing, and one thing well. Basics BTSync is advertised as server-less Dropbox.

Day One is a journalling app for iOS and OSX and is an great app for keeping track of things during the day - be that photos or text. It’s a great app and I’ve been using it, almost as long as I’ve been using a Mac. I love the fact that I can view and add enteries on all my iOS devices and my Mac and that the data storage format is open (it’s all XML files).

I’ve seen a lot spoken on various places online, such as MacStories and more recently in #iPadOnly, about Byword so I thought it was about time I give it a go, both on iOS and OSX as I’m a keen user of Markdown. Byword Mac Byword focuses on simplicity and minimalism and offers you a blank screen to get started. Digging into the options lets you view the meagre amount of settings, something I was after.

I’ve had the Chromebook for a while and I’ve used it off and on over that time. A few niggles would creep in here and there, namely due to the offline access. Yet, this didn’t prove to be to problematic most of the time. It’s main use seemed to be as a second machine as the girlfriend would often use it when she was round to browse on, whilst I would use the iPad.

So I’ve been using a Chromebook now for a few weeks and I thought I’d say a few words on it. I’ve seen it slated in various places because of what it is (basically a dumb terminal with access to the web). However, whilst that’s pretty apt, I thought I’d mention my thoughts on it. Chromebook I purchased the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook, partly due to it’s similarities to the Macbook Air.

So this year has been a bit of an up and down ride. Though I can probably say that it’s been better than last year, though as I’ve felt the rollercoaster ride recently, I thought I’d sit down and do a summary of the year so I can see exactly what I’ve achieved. Achievements Getting a job, working for company I enjoy working for and enjoy what I’m doing.

Boring (A Review) The mark of a great device is that it should just become sort of boring. A tool. One that is reliable. One that you just grab and use when you need it to perform the tasks for which it is built, and that you then put down satisfied that you have it even if you are no longer OMGing every time. I think this just about sums up my iPad.

My long standing dislike of emails (well, email software) is well known as I moan about it here and here. Well this came to a head this week again when I decided to slim down my hard drive due to boot camping again. Part of this involved running JDiskReport to see what was taking up space. As part of this, I ended up moving my iPad to back up to iCloud and will then eventually remove all the apps from being kept on my machine (as that’s a fairly hefty 7GB - which adds up when you only have 320 to play with and you want at least 60 of that for Windows!