I’ve been enjoying Dr. Drang’s tales of file format lock-in and his crusade against closed formats for his data. His stories always feel eerily familiar.
I bounce back and forth between Macs and Windows machines in my daily life. My OS polytheism goes way back. I started with an old custom built 386 PC in high school. In undergraduate, I took advantage of the steep Apple student discount and acquired a Mac IIci.
There has been a bit of excitement over the Dropbox security standards and controls. This is nothing new, but it might be a slow news week. Dropbox has responded with a lengthy blog post. Most of their arguments make sense to me. For example, they must decrypt user objects if they are to be available through the web application:
"The reason is many of the most popular Dropbox features — like accessing your files from the website, creating file previews, and sharing files with other people — would either not be possible or would be much more cumbersome without this capability.
Tinkering Dropbox is incredibly useful and I enjoy extending it's utility whenever I can. I also enjoy choosing projects that will teach me something new about my Mac. My latest project was to provide SFTP access to my Dropbox account. For security reasons, I am not allowed to install Dropbox at work. I considered several options for direct access to my files (email, webdav) but FTP is the most simple and universal access I could develop.
I had already been testing a new iOS app named Notesy when the boys over at the B&B podcast started to recommend it. I have to say, I really like the app. However, I started to see some funny business while I was test driving new note naming systems. I’ll post about that experiment later. However, I discovered some interesting limitations when using Dropbox for taking notes. Dropbox limits the characters used in note titles.
