Google Play Music (Android) Never Stops Syncing

As part of my ongoing effort to move my life into "the cloud," I've been making pretty extensive use of Google Play Music, which allows me to upload my collection (up to 20,000 songs) for free, and stream them back on any device (I love never having to worry about scratching, or misplacing a CD)!

I've hit on a few limitations, which I'll come-back to in a future post, but overall, it's a pretty amazing platform, and it pays to watch their Free Song of The Day, which occasionally gives you a chance to score something you like.

One thing that's been annoying me, however, is that the Android app slipped into this state where it's in perpetual sync.

My Experience With a New Samsung Galaxy S3

Back around Christmas, my wife and I were ready to upgrade our phones. We'd been using the first generation Samsung Galaxy S phones, and had nothing but good experiences with the build quality, and since we'd been Android users since pretty much the beginning, upgrading to one of today's best Android phones was a no-brainer.

After a few weeks, we really love our Galaxy S3s.

I was a bit concerned at first, since our carrier (T-Mobile) had pretty much rendered our previous Galaxy handsets useless with copious amounts of crapware bloatware junk, that I was forced to have to root both, simply to free-up enough memory to make them work.

I'm pleased to report that the S3 was a better experience, although it still came with its fair share of rubbish, which, as usual, cannot be uninstalled without rooting. Why is that still legal, when the only solution is to root the phone, which voids the warranty? That's a topic for another day.

Hopefully, your carrier is more ethical, and at the very least, T-Mobile has gotten a lot better about not using every last bit of memory to install refuse you don't need, and will never use.

Scanned Photos & Geolocation

Many cameras (and camera phones) nowadays include a photo's geolocation data. Simply put, that's the latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken, so that it can be viewed on a map.

That information can (and should) be stored within the image itself, in what's called the file's metadata. Metadata is essentially supplemental information about the image, including who's in it, subject matter, and so forth.

As a part of my ongoing project, I'm in the process of scanning boxes upon boxes of old images, and adding them to my online archives. I highly recommend that anyone with old prints do the same, and sooner rather than later. Many of mine (even fairly recent prints) are beginning to fade, and by digitizing them with a scanner, I'm stopping future degradation.

Along the way, I'm learning all kids of great tricks for restoring many of these old photos (to the extent that can be done), and I'll touch upon some of those another time, but the biggest hassle I'm facing is adding the geolocation information to them.

Google Drive Didn't Cut It For Me

As one of the people who was all excited about the release of Google Drive a couple of weeks back, I found myself disappointed in the end.

I’m not one of those who jumped on the rumors about Google “owning” what I store there. Those who actually read the privacy policy have found that it’s fundamentally the same as the others in the online storage game. Rather, I ended-up with a pretty significant list of usability issues, not the least of which is their mechanism for sharing files.

To say the least, I was disappointed. Google’s been using this internally for so long, I’d assumed it would be more mature at launch, but it still “feels like” a beta, unfortunately.

I’m sure they’ll revise (and improve) Drive in the months to come, given the flood of criticism online, but I can’t wait around for Google. The lack of an online file sync and storage solution was holding back progress on my Operation Cloud project

Google Drive Has Arrived - My Review

Google Drive, or "GDrive" (originally) had become an almost mythological enigma, with reports and speculation about the service from Google reappearing periodically since 2006. It was to the point where every time it was mentioned in the "geek press," people simply tended to disregard it as a digital unicorn - A thing of legend and myth.

It finally launched yesterday morning, and as you can imagine, I was one of the first "on-board," anxious to see how this new service fits into my Operation Cloud project.

How Google Drive Compares

For the purpose of this post, I'm going to compare Google Drive with Dropbox, which I'd settled-on as my standard file sharing service before the launch of Drive. I realize there are plenty of other competitors, but Dropbox is what I've been using, and am most familiar with.

I realize this is a "first pass" from Google, and that the product will mature with future releases, but when it comes to desktop syncing (with a Windows 7 computer in my case), the desktop experience is lacking.