6 Responses to Pick your ecosystem carefully

1. Roberto Castillo says:

   December 28, 2008 at 7:26 pm

   I have to say that com­pared to you, I’m a ver­i­ta­ble ecosys­tem slut. I use a Vista lap­top, an XP net­book, an Apple Mac Mini, and they all con­nect to an XP home file server which I built myself. I use Forte Agent and GMail for e-​mail, mainly because I don’t use e-​mail enough to jus­tify learn­ing any­thing more com­plex. I don’t use IM or play con­sole games. I use both Fire­fox and Chrome (although I prob­a­bly use Fire­fox 80% of the time). I have an Android phone but I also carry an iPod and a Palm TX. I blog through Blog­ger and use Google as my search engine. OpenOf­fice is my office suite.

   I don’t do photo albums, I have a large com­plex set of image fold­ers which I man­age with Win­dows Explorer or Explor­erXP and view my images with ACD­See and Irfan­View the way God intended! I don’t have a sin­gle home the­ater or media man­age­ment sys­tem either. I use my Mac Mini and iTunes for the iPod com­pat­i­ble por­tion of my media library and a Win­dows based video player (Gom Player) for video. It’s funny how much more com­fort­able I am run­ning a Win­dows video appli­ca­tion on a Mac under Par­al­lels than on Win­dows PCs.

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2. Alan says:

   December 28, 2008 at 8:10 pm

   I enjoyed this post. Here is my pro­file. It’s more mixed up than yours. To jam this lot together I have to run XP in emu­la­tion on OSX.

   Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: OSX
   Web Browser: Mozilla Fire­fox
   Email: Gmail (IMAP client is Mail.app on desk­top, Thun­der­bird on eeepc, still counts as Gmail, right?)
   Instant Mes­sag­ing: N/​A
   Photo Albums: iPhoto
   Search Engine: Google
   Office Suite: Open Office
   Synchronization/​Cloud Stor­age: Ama­zon S3/​Jungledisk
   Blog­ging: N/​A
   Home The­ater: Front Row
   Phone Plat­form: Win­dows Smart­phone Edi­tion 2003SE! But due for some­thing new and lean­ing toward Android.
   Portable Media: same as phone plat­form
   Media Man­age­ment: iTunes
   Con­sole Gam­ing: N/​A

   Reply
3. john says:

   December 29, 2008 at 10:53 am

   Hard­core Linux fan­boy in the house. I’ve only bought one new com­puter in my life. Every­thing else has been used, referbed, or scav­enged. These sys­tems tend to be very ane­mic, so the stan­dard soft­ware solu­tions won’t work for me.

   Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Xubuntu

   While prob­a­bly still a lit­tle bloated for my needs, it is a decent com­pro­mise between speed and ease of use. I don’t have to go hunt­ing for hard­ware dri­vers or media codecs. It will install them all after giv­ing me a short mes­sage about how I’m being a naughty boy for installing pro­pri­etary software.

   Web Browser: Mozilla Fire­fox and w3m

   Fire­fox has (had?) a rep­u­ta­tion of being a light and fast browser, but on older sys­tems it can really bog things down. Espe­cially if one has more than a few tabs open. How­ever, it is stan­dards com­pli­ant and can pretty much han­dle any web­site I throw at it, so I’m pretty much stuck with it. Also, the ad block­ing and flash block­ing exten­sions make the web much more usable on a slow computer.

   For text-​heavy web­sites such as web­mail, and cer­tain blogs and forums w3m does a really good job. It’s a text-​only browser à la good ol’ lynx, but it does a bet­ter job of dis­play­ing pages in the way they are sup­posed to look than the ven­er­a­ble text browser of yore.

   email: mutt, gmail

   Mutt just kicks butt. It has a heck of a learn­ing curve, but once you learn it, all other mail clients are mad­den­ing. It’s espe­cially use­ful now that it has SMTP sup­port, so you no longer have to learn how to con­fig­ure Send­mail in order to use it. I rec­om­mend it to any­one who is a heavy email user.

   Instant Mes­sag­ing: bitl­bee & epic4

   bitl­bee is a gate­way server that lets you use an IRC client for IM. I use the ancient epic as the IRC client because it lets me use one win­dow for all my chats. I get really irri­tated when Pid­gin wants to open a new tab or win­dow for each con­ver­sa­tion. I find all that Alt-​Tabbing to be distracting.

   Photo Albums: I really have no pref­er­ence. All of them seem to work pretty much the same way. Ristretto is the default album that comes with Xubuntu, and it is more than ade­quate for my purposes.

   Search Engine: Google

   Just too use­ful. Espe­cially when using the Advanced search options.

   Office Suite: Abi Word, Gnu­meric, and JPilot.

   I really want to like Open Office, but it’s just dog slow on most of my sys­tems. Abi Word is usu­ally good enough, espe­cially for sim­ple documents.

   I actu­ally pre­fer Gnu­meric to OOoCalc because, in addi­tion to it’s supe­rior speed, my fin­gers never learned the Excel for­mu­las and still want to do things the Lotus 123 way. Gnu­meric can han­dle both for­mula styles.

   Jpi­lot is the best PIM for linux that I have found. I would use it even if I didn’t use a Palm. Evo­lu­tion is such bloated, buggy crap, that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

   Synchronization/​Cloud Stor­age: various

   I’m fairly well dis­trib­uted over var­i­ous web ser­vices. I haven’t switched to online office utilites such as Google Doc­u­ments, because the inter­face tends to be too slow.

   Blog­ging: vim & ftp

   In my world, Django is a gui­tar player.

   Home The­ater: Grr

   This is caus­ing me the most grief. It seems that I have to have half a dozen media play­ers installed in order to do every­thing I want. DVDs are espe­cially ridicu­lous to watch. I some­times have to try three or four play­ers before they work.

   Phone Plat­form: Meh.

   I don’t really care about the phone plat­form. As long as it has blue­tooth, I can get it to do what I want. I think the Android plat­form has poten­tial, but it seems to be chas­ing after the iPhone, which I think is the wrong direc­tion. I’m look­ing for some­thing more flexible.

   Media Man­age­ment: cp

   That’s kind of a joke, but also not. My favorite audio player right now is mpd. It has a very low mem­ory foot­print and can be con­trolled from the com­mand line and scripted quite eas­ily using mpc.

   Con­sole Gam­ing: Wii

   I’m cur­rently semi-​crippled from play­ing Wii box­ing for a cou­ple of hours on Saturday.

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4. tycho garen says:

   December 29, 2008 at 12:26 pm

   Ok this seems like a fun game:

   Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Ubuntu + OSX from time to time

   My desk­top runs ubuntu, and my lap­top (a mac­book) mostly these days runs ubuntu, but I still have OS X setup for a few things

   Web Browser: Mozilla Fire­fox (when I have to) and WebKit-​based browsers when I can

   I hate fire­fox, but its hard to use any­thing else. I expect that webkit based browsers will begin to be a bit more pre­v­e­lent (chrome for other plat­forms, and I look for­ward to hav­ing a fast browser again.)

   Email: mutt (patched)+procmail+fetchmail+msmtp+gmail+git*emacs+blackberry

   I have a sort of com­plex email scheme that basi­cally re imple­ments IMAP inside of a git source con­trol man­age­ment sys­tem. Advan­tages? It doesn’t require a live Inter­net con­nec­tion, down­loads are fast, the fil­ter­ing is super pow­er­ful, and I can use mul­ti­ple machines, and because the trans­ac­tions are encrypted over SSH, it’s more secure.

   in reply to john, I use msmtp as a send­mail replace­ment and it feels a lit­tle more robust than mutt’s built in support.

   Instant Mes­sag­ing: mcabber+xmpp+service trans­ports (on dreamhost) and Pid­gin if I need it

   I really like XMPP and jab­ber, though the dreamhost imple­men­ta­tion is some­what lack­ing. With trans­ports I can talk to peo­ple from any ser­vice, and mcab­ber is a great con­sole based client that removes a lot of the “flashi­ness” that makes IM so dis­tract­ing with GUI clients.

   Photo Albums: Flickr

   Don’t do much photo stuff, but I upload stuff to flickr from my phone when I need to.

   Search Engine: Google

   Yep.

   Office Suite: Emacs/​Open Office if I need it

   I clearly have devel­oped a bit of an aver­sion to “easy/​pretty” appli­ca­tions in the last few years. While I do end up using spread­sheet pro­grams from time to time, and using Open Office to read doc­u­ments that peo­ple send me, most of my own work uses mark­down and LaTeX to pro­duce doc­u­ments. My text-​editor jour­ney started with Text­Mate for OS X, and when I made the leap to ubuntu I used a lit­tle vim, which was nice, but emacs is more my style, for bet­ter or for worse. So emacs it is.

   Synchronization/​Cloud Stor­age: Dreamhost+git+google+chandlerhub

   I have a dreamhost account, and a num­ber of git repos­i­to­ries that I push con­tent to, and store there. I also use google cal­en­dar (and gmail address book) via google sync on my black­berry, though most of my cal­en­dar­ing stuff is on Chan­dler… Some­day soon I’ll prob­a­bly leave dreamhost for Slice­Host, because it’d be nice to have sudo access, and slice host’s price is amazing.

   Blog­ging: Word­Press and Emacs

   I’m going to be chang­ing away from word­press in the new year to some­thing more flex­i­ble and light­weight, I think, but for now, I just write posts in emacs and copy and paste them into word­press. Not ideal, but it works. I also tend to queue up my posts in advance which is mighty nice.

   Home The­ater: N/​A

   Phone Plat­form: Black­berry (Bold)

   Love it.

   Portable Media: iPod

   I have a 2 year old 80gb ipod. It works great. When it dies, I’m not sure if I would get another, but prob­a­bly. The truth is that most of my ipod lis­ten­ing is done via my com­puter speak­ers which have an ipod cra­dle and line splitter.

   Media Man­age­ment: iTunes

   The­o­ret­i­cally I still use OS X for this, though I don’t actu­ally have it set up at the moment. I sync my ipod very rarely, but use it pretty con­stantly. If I were to do things over again, I might just put my music library on my desk­top, and lis­ten to that most of the time, and use my phone for other music lis­ten­ing tasks. I do like hav­ing access to every­thing in my library at once.

   Con­sole Gam­ing: N/​A

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5. Rockdragon says:

   January 3, 2009 at 8:49 pm

   Oper­at­ing Sys­tem — Win­dows Vista (peo­ple who don’t like it don’t have enough RAM or a good graph­ics card.

   Web Browse — Mozilla Fire­fox (the save tabs and exit is an inspired addi­tion to ver­sion 3.

   Email — Microsoft Out­look 2007 and 2003 when I am at work. Out­look on my PDA and Out­look Mobile Access for when I am on the train.

   Instant Mes­sag­ing – icq or Win­dows Live Mes­sen­ger
   Photo Albums – Hmmm, prob­a­bly should inves­ti­gate this at some point.

   Search Engine — Google

   Office Suite — Microsoft Office 2007 and 2003 at work.

   Synchronization/​Cloud Stor­age – I’m just start­ing to inves­ti­gate the Cloud so not really using any­thing yet, and prob­a­bly won’t until some­thing lets me view and edit my Onenote 2007 note­books on a com­puter with­out Onenote 2007 installed. For syn­chro­ni­sa­tion of files I would be lost with­out Super­flex­i­ble. It lets me stay in con­trol and doesn’t assume it knows best like Microsoft’s most recent offerings.

   Blog­ging — Word­Press

   Home The­ater – Haven’t got a home the­atre or com­puter attached to the TV but cer­tainly wouldn’t use Win­dows Media Player. I hate it! BBC iPlayer and 4 on Demand are invalu­able when I’m travelling.

   Phone Plat­form – Sym­bian on an N95. I also have a work phone (O2 ver­sion of the HTC TyTN II) with Win­dows Mobile 6 and I can’t get the hang of it at all. I have never man­aged to answer the thing before the call goes to voice mail and the screen keeps switch­ing off in the mid­dle of calls no mat­ter what set­tings I change.

   Portable Media – My iPaq has Win­dows Mobile 5 which is great as a PDA oper­at­ing sys­tem. It con­nects via Blue­tooth to my N95 phone and surf­ing the inter­net, email and mobile icq is a dod­dle. I have a Cre­ative Zen Stone Plus for play­ing audio books while ironing.

   Media Man­age­ment – Cre­ative Media Source 5. It does what I want it to – plays MP3s into my headphones.

   Con­sole Gam­ing – Only Gui­tar Hero on the Xbox (I’m very bad at it).

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