Does using a viewer like VNC mean you are working remotely or just rather lazily using your PC at home from another computer because you couldn’t be bothered to setup a real remote setup from the start?

This is just me dumping my brain in a blog so feel free to comment!

The things that I think need to be remote are…

• Important User Files
• Email
• Calender

This article doesn’t cover keeping your pictures, music or videos stored. I have approximately 1.5 TB of pictures, music and videos … yikes! I am just trying to cover basics i.e. word processed documents and personal management.

There are now quite a lot of services out there to get you going a working (in my view) truly remotely.

One service that has been out for a while now MESH its a utility that syncs files from you local computer to a file store on the internet and then has the ability to sync those with another computer e.g. your laptop or work computer. Its a good system but at the moment it only works on MS Operating systems! Which for some is fine however for me thats just not acceptable due to the fact I switch OS’s all the time! It also has the facility to start VNC sessions so you can actually use a computer from another computer.

Homepage: www.mesh.com

A service that is very similar to MESH is Dropbox. It has the ability to synchronise from one computer to another by relaying it via a web service and it has clients that will run on Mac, Windows and Linux. In my view that’s just awesome. I am already running it on Ubuntu and Windows XP and its working brilliantly for me. At the moment as a free service you only get 2GB of space to store your files but for $10 a month you can have 50GB of storage which I am seriously considering at the moment. In comparison to MESH I do believe that Dropbox is not as intrusive a MESH and it feels as though it knows what its doing with its folders. MESH wants you to pick the location of every folder Dropbox just gives you a folder by default called ‘Dropbox’ so everything past that point gets synced… perfect! Dropbox works great as a backup solution to.

Homepage: www.getdropbox.com

Email and Calendering is another interesting aspect of working remotely. The best solution for storing my email and calender remotely is to use Google Apps. Google offer an IMAP service with Google Mail which means you can point your favourite email client at it and browse your email without having to use the web client. The email clients that I use depend on the OS that I am using when using Ubuntu I use Evolution because I like the integration that it offers with the desktop environment, although you have to manually configure Evolution to use Google Mail via its IMAP service it has an auto setup tool to add your Google Calender. When I use Windows XP / Vista I use Thunderbird and then add the following addons… Lightning and Provider for Google Calender.

Useful links: Evolution, Thunderbird, Lightning and Provider for Google Calender.