Category Archives: Mobile Computing

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Keeping Your Notebook Safe

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Chris Pirillo provides 10 Tips to Keep Your Notebook Safe When Traveling. My two favorites are:

    Keep It On You: It is not uncommon for someone to set their luggage down while standing in line for a muffin, or to sit down while waiting for a flight. With all luggage, it is important to keep an eye on it and ensure nobody tampers with it or steals it. Because of their size and value though, laptops make prime targets and a thief can snatch the laptop bag and keep walking while you are unaware with your back turned. You should keep the laptop bag on your shoulder or keep it in sight at all times.

    Back Up Data: Perform a backup of all critical or sensitive data before departing. Just in case your laptop does become damaged or lost, you don’t want to also lose your important files and information. You can buy a new laptop, but it is much harder to replace lost data.

      Go here to read all of the tips.

      Hat tip to Futurelawyer for pointing out this post to me.

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      The Cost of Not Going Digital

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      The Greatest American Lawyer posted today on the Cost Savings in Going Digital. If you have not yet made the move to keeping all of your documents digitally, I recommend that you check out this post. The post explains:

      I’m often asked how much money it will cost in staff and time to scan in all of the documents which are generated from outside our own office onto our file server.  Essentially, people want to know whether or not a paperless law office will save, or cost, them money.

      There’s no doubt that it takes people and time to scan in documents.

      He goes on to observe

      Scanning documents is a multi-step project.  Obviously, someone has to stand at the scanner and scan them in.  That person then has to pull the document from a common scanning file and place it on the file server under the correct client/matter.  Quality control requires that the person confirm that all pages have in fact been scanned.  This does take time.

      However, this time is more than made up on the back end. The post continues:

      Once the documents are scanned, however, there is lots of time saved on the back-end.  I never have to ask my staff to find me a hard copy of any document, pull a file or engage in host of related administrative activities.  My overall sense is that the amount of time it takes to scan the documents is far less than the amount of time spent in a paper-based office retrieving and organizing physical files.

      I cannot agree with these observations more. My ability to retrieve any document, from any case, at any time, is absolutely invaluable. I cannot calculate the amount of time that I save on a daily basis simply by being able to immediately retrieve any document that I need.

      In my experience, the only way to make this transition is to start scanning everything today. Scan every document that comes in to your office. As you work, you will identify that prior documents that you should add to your digital collection as well.

      I will not tell you that the transition to a digital world will be painless. However, I can assure that it will be worth every bit of pain that you may endure. In fact, the majority of the “pain” that I endured in the transition period was the fact that I got too used to having the digital documents and I became frustrated when I had to pull a physical file to retrieve an older document that had not yet been scanned.

      I have yet to meet anyone who has transferred to a digital practice that regrets it at all.

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      The Mobile Law Firm

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      At The Illinois Trial Practice Weblog, Evan Schaeffer reports that he and his wife, Andrea Lamere, are spending the month in Arentina. Given that their firm consists of Evan and Andrea, some people may be wondering about how they are keeping their practice going while they are both in Argentina.

      In his post, Evan reports that the ubiquitos nature of wi-fi in Buenos Aires makes it easy for him to work while there. He reports he is using services such as Skype, iPhone, MyFax, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, and Slingbox to keep in touch with home.

      Read his entire post here. It’s a nice primer on how to practice while away from home.

      I would also note that all of the services that Evan talks about are useful even if you don’t leave the country. For example, I use an electronic faxing service to receive my faxes. I will never go back to having only a fax machine. It is simply too convenient to be able to receive my faxes anywhere that I have internet access.

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      Has Anyone Tried Box.net?

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      Google Docs and Zoho seem to be getting all of the press for online document creation and collaboration. I recently discovered an additional service Box.net. Box.net allows you to upload files and store them on their server. Additionally, you can edit these documents online as well as share them with anyone you wish.

      Box.net is primarly a online storage, access, and collaboration, service. As a consequence, it uses Zoho to edit documents and Picnik to edit pictures.

      Box.net offers four different plans, including a free plan with 1GB of storage as well as a paid plan at $19.95 a month for 15GB of storage.

      A cool feature that I like about the service is that you can access it from a web enabled cell phone.

      I have just signed up for the service and haven’t had a chance to really try it out yet. I would be curious to hear from anyone who has experience with the service.

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      The Way Computers Should Work

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      I recnetly stumbled across a great post from David Louis Edelman titled Ten Things Computers Should All Do Flawlessly, But Generally Don’t.

      He made some great points, including my favorites:

      Automatic file syncing. It’s astounding how badly computers do this. Every operating system on every computer sucks at syncing files; it’s only a matter of degree. I should be able to turn on any device I own and access any file I own, and it should all happen transparently. I don’t want to have to think about where I put a particular file, or whether I can access it from my iPhone. My calendar events should automatically sync between my Blackberry, my desktop, my Google Calendar, and my websites. Perhaps the key is to have everything save to “the cloud” and sync locally for offline access; I don’t know. I just want it to work.

      and

      Useful battery life. I am sick to death of power cords. If I never saw another power cord in my life, it would be too soon. But I could deal with power cords if they only led to docking stations that charged up my appliances enough to make them usable for an entire day. But right now, my laptop barely survives three or four hours untethered; my Blackberry struggles to get through the day with the WiFi switched on all the time. Fer the love o’ Christ, people, I need at least a day’s worth of juice for every machine I own. Please.

      Go to his post to see his entire list. He addresses some other favorites of mine such as everything wireless and true plug and play.

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      Extending Your Laptop’s Battery Life

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      PC Magazine has a great article on extending your laptop’s battery life. The article contains suggestions that we are all familiar with such as dimming your screen and not using the DVD drive. However the article also contains more substantive tips.

      Some of these include:

      1. Turn off ports. Disabling unused ports and components, such as VGA, Ethernet, PCMCIA, USB, and yes, your wireless, too. You can do this through the Device Manager or by configuring a separate hardware profile (see next step).
      2. Create Power-Saving Hardware Profiles. Configure your laptop for the various scenarios in which you use it (on a plane, at the coffee shop, at the office, and so on). You can do this through the Hardware Profiles menu by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Preferences or by using a freeware utility such as SparkleXP (for Windows XP users).
      3. Configure your display to turn off when not in use. This is different from just using a screensaver, because in many cases a screensaver still requires the display’s backlight to be on. You can set the interval to turn the display off in Windows’ Power Options—found in the Control Panel.

      The article contains several more tips, all of which will help you extend your laptop’s battery life. i urge you to check it out.

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      Blocking Cellphone Spam

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      Spam is the bane of our email existence. Recently David Pogue wrote about how to stop cell phone spam. He explained the problem as:

      OK, now I’m really, REALLY annoyed. Within a week, my wife and I have both started getting spam text messages on our Verizon cellphones. I know that this is nothing new, but it’s new for us, and it’s apparently getting worse.

      David explains that blocking the cell phone spam is relatively easy. He provides instructions on how to do this for all of the major cell phone services. For example, to block text spam if you have Verizion Wireless:

      Verizon Wireless: Log in at vtext.com. Under Text Messaging, click Preferences. Click Text Blocking. You’re offered choices to block text messages from e-mail or from the Web. Here again, you can block specific addresses or Web sites. (Here’s where you set up your aliases, too.)

      If you are having a problem with cell phone spam, you definitely want to read this article.

      A tip of the hat to Jim Calloway to pointing me in the direction of this article.

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      Is the iPhone/iPod Touch the New Laptop?

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      Over the past few weeks I have enjoyed an interesting series of posts from both Dennis Kennedy and Ernie the Attorney. Dennis has posted a three part series in which he explains the process that he went through in deciding to purchase an iPod Touch as his new laptop computer.

      At the same time, Ernie the Attorney was posting a series of entries about his trip to Panama during which he left his laptop at home and took only his iPhone. After his experience, he concluded:

      As you recall, last week when I went to Panama I didn’t bring a computer. I mentioned that I relied heavily on my iPhone, and that I was able to do a lot of work with just that device. But, I pointed out, that the trip was for pleasure so I didn’t really need a computer. If I had been away longer, or if I had been required to do more work on the trip, I would most certainly have brought my laptop. But, for a short trip that doesn’t involve a lot of work, I can say that an iPhone works just fine. In fact, I would venture to say that the iPod Touch would work fine. My daughter had one and was able to check email and do most of the things that I did on my iPhone.

      Although his phone service did not work in Panama, he was still able to make calls using his iPhone.

      I thought my iPhone would be able to work on the local phone network here in Panama. It did last time I was here, but not this time. AT&T assured me it would when I checked right before I left on my trip. “”Yes sir, you’re signed up for the Intenational option at $3.99 a month,” the representative told me.

      That turned out not to be true. But doesn’t matter because I have the TruPhone app for my iPhone which lets me make low cost calls using the free Wi-Fi at my brother’s beach paradise.

      I found both of these series of posts quite intriguing. It certainly sounds attractive to be able to travel without a laptop and still be able to get some work done. However, I doubt that I will be traveling down either Dennis or Ernie’s path in the near future. First, as I have mentioned before, I hate iTunes, and I would be tied to it to use either product effectively. Second, with respect to the iPhone, I hate AT&T’s service (which is your only real option with an iPhone). My wife and I both have Treos. She has AT&T service, I have Verizon. Often I will have better reception than her. Also, when traveling to the less populated areas of the country (where we have family), she often has no reception, while my phone works just fine.

      Nevertheless, if you are considering trying to lighten your load while traveling, check out these posts from Ernie and Dennis and consider leaving the laptop at home.

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      A Mobiliti Solution

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      One of my favorite programs is Mobiliti which is now owned by Packeteer, Inc. When I first started using the program it was called Network Ungplugged. I actually prefer that name, because it is a great description of what it does. The program allows me to synchronize my network files to my laptop so that I can work on the files when I am away from the network. Not only is this program easy to use, but it also preserves the file paths of the files, so that working on the files on my laptop is just like working on the files on my network.

      Mobiliti is a great program and one I recommend for anyone often has to work when disconnected from the network.

      Recently, I had some files on our network that were deleted. I had local copies of the files on my laptop and I needed to synchronize them back to the network. The way that the synchronization is set up, if a file is deleted from either the network or the local drive, the other file is deleted upon synchronization. In this case, I did not want that to happen. Instead, I wanted certain local files to be copied back to the network.

      I looked in the configuration settings and did not find a way to do that. I checked the online Knowledge Base and still found no solution. So I contacted customer support via email and got my answer. I am posting it here in case others need the info and so that I can find it again.

      1. Go to File\Synchronization settings\synchronization tab and set it to fully interactive mode. Save changes by clicking OK.
      2. Sync.
      3. At the preview, select the file that you don’t want to be deleted from the real network. Right click and choose “Change sync action”
      4. Set the sync action to the new desired action and proceed with sync.
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      WiFi in the Southern District of Illinois

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      I recently received an email from the Southern District of Illinois announcing that they will have a wireless network available for attorneys in all court buildings in East St. Louis and Benton. To use the service, you have to obtain login credentials from the Intake desk. I think that this is great news.

      My only question in when is Cook County going to join the 21st century and add WiFi in the Daley Center, or at least in its library.