In my earlier FreeNAS post I talked about my use of VirtualBox (VB) and thought it might be useful to do a ‘How to…’ type blog showing show to create a VB jail and get a Virtual Machine (VM) up and running. It’s really not that difficult, I promise!
I’ve decided to try and break this down into 2 blogs, and as a small homage to the greatest film ever made I’m calling the first one Episode IV!
I thought it would be useful to understand what I use in macOS before diving into the alternatives available in eOS. This is likely to be a real deal-breaker, as I know some of the things I use daily just don’t exist outside macOS, but let’s cover off some of this to begin.
Let me start by saying I LOVE PLEX!!!
I needed to get that out of the way, as I’m sure others will love their choice of Media Server just as much, but for me, Plex does almost everything I want, and even some stuff I don’t!
I’ve been using Plex almost from the start in 2009 and had played around with XMBC before that, but it wasn’t until I started using Plex that I realised how great it would be to have all my media content in once place. This was also the start of my journey to what seems like an ever-growing need for storage and various devices to try and provide this.
I configured Dropbox in the last blog, which I use to send scanner output from my WF-3640. I also use it to sync a number of services between iOS and macOS devices (1Password, YNAB, MacDive, and Mindset to name but a few) but other than that I don’t really use DropBox for data anymore.
For me, and I suspect many others, Dropbox was probably one of the first ‘cloud’ services I used regularly. I guess I was a bit of a ‘Dropbox Evangelist’ when it first became popular, mainly as it made sharing files so simple, but also because for every friend you recommended they gave you an extra 250MB of free storage! I can’t remember exactly what you got free, to begin with, but over time I managed to increase my limit to 9.25GB. But once I’d realised how useful this was for keeping things in sync across multiple devices, whilst being able to share and/or access from any device, it really wasn’t enough. I know you can get almost an unlimited amount now for a whole range of different providers, and I’ve probably got basic accounts with many of them (Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Onedrive, Box, etc.) but back then it wasn’t particularly cheap to get more storage, and at the time I think I preferred the idea of keeping my data (especially the important stuff) on my hardware.
No, I haven’t screwed things up just yet, but in trying to connect to all my devices I realised just how ‘locked out’ of just about everything I’d be (both locally and online) without access to 1Password!
I’ve been listening to all the scary cyber security stories, and whilst I’ll admit that many years ago I probably used 2-3 passwords for just about everything, I’ve been using 1Password for quite a long time now and almost every password I use is unique and relatively complex. Where possible, I’m also using 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) which makes me feel a little more secure but also raises the issue of what would happen if I couldn’t access 1Password.
I’ll digress a little here, but what did we do before the world wide web, and more specifically Google?
Yes, I hear all the anti-Google arguments, but they don’t charge me anything and the convenience and access to knowledge they provide is a price I’m willing to pay. I’ve not really hunted around for alternatives, as I’m pretty sure I’ve found the best.
I remember using Yahoo and Netscape in the early days, but where are they now? I’m actually forced to use Bing on a clients laptop I’m currently using, and even that doesn’t work quite as accurately as Google.
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