This weekend, I was faced with the important principles surrounding the owning of gadgets, such as my current laptop. I should add a disclaimer, I’m at an age where I have to be super-responsible for my life and there really is little excuse to make (many) mistakes. And when I woke up in a hotel-room without my laptop, I wanted to bang my head against a wall (if my headache wasn’t already big enough). Luckily, it all worked out in the end, but it sure gave me a reality-check.

So gadgets, by which I mean anything that costs in excess of €200 and more probably in excess of €1000. How do you keep your gadget habit safe? Three things that really-really-really matter:

• Common sense: I don’t need to explain this much, but not leaving expensive stuff unattended is probably rule 101 of common sense. That said, we are all human and common sense will never protect us 100%.
• Backups: I’ve had 2 moments of stress regarding my laptop in the last month. The first was installing Snow Leopard, which didn’t make it very clear whether I was upgrading Leopard or formatting the whole drive. Luckily it was the first, but it was stressful for about 30 min. The second was when I couldn’t find my laptop waking up and had 2 hours at breakfast to reflect on “how important are those pictures/documents/memories really?” Nothing with bits in it is really life-changing in my experience, but still it kind of feels like an extension to our human brain.
• Theft insurance: I currently pay about €200 per year on this, covering about €5000 of property and, at my age at least, it’s a real stress-reducer, especially with things that can easily get lost. You can think logically, you can backup, but having to buy a new laptop out of your own wallet kind of sucks.

So, just a short message to all the gadget lovers out there. Technology rocks, but so does a little insurance. If you have any ideas of your own of how to keep your gadgets safe, feel free to share in the comments.

Vincent

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Meet AddressBookSync, a simple Mac-app created to synchronise pictures and trivial (birthday) data from Facebook with the local Address book the Mac. This is about as much as you could possibly get out of Facebook, without infringing on the terms of agreement that you agreed too (probably without reading) when signing up to Facebook.

And meet my other friend, LinkedIn’s AddressBookExport, which allows me to place all of my contacts into the, again, more useful Address Book on the Mac.

Now, I can take that address book and import it back into Facebook. But I cannot do it the other way around.

Maybe I’m being too European about this, but it seems logical that this should be a law. These are your contacts; there’s a mutual agreement between both parties to come into contact. That same agreement might not exist regarding me importing their addresses into Facebook (Still have to read those TOCs), but Facebook still allows it.

We all get why they don’t allow the opposite. They don’t want me to take my contacts with me to some other social network. Because it isn’t a utility like LinkedIn, but more like a gym-membership, with lots of fun activities to do onsite.

But seriously, shouldn’t this be a law, and if so, why isn’t it being implemented?

Vincent

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