Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Tag: storage

  • Calibre with Dropbox

    After using Dropbox long enough to be satisfied that its performance would remain good and my files wouldn’t spontaneously disappear, I decided to try using it in conjunction with Calibre. Calibre is an open-source and cross-platform ebook management program which organizes ebooks in all different formats and can convert between most of them. I use it to keep track of all the ebooks I’ve downloaded for my Kindle from sources other than Amazon–which is actually the majority of them. Like most open-source projects it has a ghastly user interface, but it works well despite that handicap.

    Kindles are recharged through the USB cable that connects them to a computer, and I’ve been connecting mine to the Mac Pro I use for working with photos–it’s easy to plug it in and set it out of the way to recharge when sitting on a desk. However, I actually download ebooks fairly often on my laptop or generate them using Fanfiction Downloader on my PC. In the past I’ve then moved the ebooks over to my Mac Pro via iDisk, but as I’ve mentioned before iDisk doesn’t perform all that well.

    Calibre lets you specify where you want your ebook library to be located in its preferences, so I moved the folder it had been using on the Mac Pro into my Dropbox and pointed Calibre to the new location. I then installed Calibre on the other two computers, and now I’ve got access to my library from three different computers. When I download an ebook on my laptop I can stick it in Calibre there, add any metadata I like, and the next time I plug my Kindle in to my Mac Pro it’s there already, waiting to be copied over to the Kindle. So far this has worked out very well.

  • Dropbox and iDisk

    I’ve been using MobileMe for a while to handle syncing of contacts and the like between two different Macs, an iPod Touch, and now an iPad. It works quite well for that, but the iDisk feature is sadly lacking. I use it to move small files between various computers (including my Windows desktop), but only for that limited purpose. If I try to move a file larger than about 1 MB it will at best take a very long time, and not infrequently will freeze up entirely. Leaving files that I need to have reliably available on my iDisk and opening files there directly are right out.

    After seeing positive mentions here and there I decided to give Dropbox a try. The Dropbox interface is basically the same as iDisk’s–it puts a folder in the sidebar of Finder windows, and you interact with it the same as you do any other folder. Unlike iDisk, where you are connecting to a server, the contents of the Dropbox folder are stored locally and synced to the server when something changes.

    Keeping files on the local drive makes it practical to work directly with files located in the Dropbox. Syncing also happens much faster than iDisk–for example, a 1.2 MB Curio file which broke iDisk when I attempted to upload it synced to Dropbox in under a minute. As a test I put a (roughly) 1 MB Tinderbox file that I use to keep track of all the builds I’m responsible for at work on Dropbox, and found that changes made on my Desktop Mac sync in the time it takes to walk the ten feet to my laptop Mac.

    The current version of the Dropbox software on the Mac doesn’t preserve file metadata such as file type (for files with no extension) or Spotlight comments when syncing, but there is a prerelease version of the software on the company’s forum which does preserve the metadata–that’s the version I’m currently using.