Following the earthquakes that devastated Haiti, humanitarian aid is hugely necessary in the country. Not everybody has the money, the time, or the resources to fly down there to help offer medical attention, aid in the rescue efforts, or volunteer in some other capacity. CrisisCommons.org, however, has created opportunities for techie folks all over the world to pool their resources and volunteer efforts to create useful projects to help those in need.

Left Button Solutions has gotten on board with CrisisCamp - Toronto, the local chapter of CrisisCommons. So far LBS has built a blog to use as a central coordinating location, but in the future efforts could expand to a wiki, or other multimedia projects. LBS is happy to be on board, and grateful to CrisisCommons.org for making the opportunity to get involved so simple.

The Toronto group is headed by Heather Leson and plans to have their first meeting on January 24, 2010.

There is a revolution happening right in front of our eyes. This page is a part of it. Google is a BIG part of it. And many of you, whether you realize it or not, have likely taken part in it. It’s called “cloud computing” and it’s where everything is headed.

As the diagram above shows, the Internet is like a cloud. This is a long running geek-joke taken from many early tech diagrams indicating that various network lines all connected to the Internet in its varied and complicated network of connections and protocols (always represented by a cloud). So the cloud represented the world wide web, chat, e-commerce, e-mail, FTP data exchange, newsgroups, and anything else happening out there on “the internets.”

As time went on, however, the capabilities of the cloud were continuosly expanding. Things like virtual storage, unlimited email boxes, and blogs became a way for people to use features on the Web to perform some of the things that were previously restricted to a home PC. For example, Hotmail and Gmail offered their services at reading POP3 email, a function previously served by a desktop product like Outlook. Blogs and wikis changed the way people edited websites. You no longer needed Dreamweaver or Front Page to make edits; you didn’t even need to know HTML; you could just log into the cloud and type. Sites like Flickr took the burden of photo storage and made it free and easy to use. Google Docs opened up the ability to do basic word processing online, and also introduced the ability to collaborate with fellow users.

All the things we did on our home PC have evolved to things we now do on the Internet. So what does that mean for our home PCs?

It means they can get dumber.

For the last decade, we became obsessed with power. Faster chips, bigger hard drives, water cooled motherboards, and enough RAM to run a Pixar studio were all being packed into the latest Dells and HP desktops, that were then sold for $1500 or more. But thanks to cloud computing, we’re letting the Google and Flickr servers do all the work. We don’t need gigs and gigs of space because we can leave everything in our email, or on our online storage account. We can edit our documents, crop our photos, and listen to music all without much computing power at all, thanks to all the wonderful cloud-based applications. So our computers don’t need to be built on power; they can be built on portability and battery life.

Enter: The Netbook. Originally based on the concept of the $100 laptop for developing African countries, the netbook was built on a free open source operating system (Linux) and stripped down hardware deemed excessive (no DVD drive) to save on cost, and some outside of the box thinking solid state drives to preserve battery life (like a USB key) and a decent WiFi card to attach to nearby networks. With enough power and features to get video off your digital camera and upload it to Youtube, the netbooks have become a stripped down, low cost version of a standard laptop. While the cost never got down to $100 a piece, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and many others are now selling these uber-tiny, super-useful laptops for less than $400.

I’ve recently found a use for netbooks in my life. Most of the websites I build these days are built on some sort of web-based content CMS like Wordpress, MediaWiki, or something like that. Once the initial design is done, all of my edits and uploads can be done ON the website. No need to have a full scale development PC; all I need is internet access. When I have to go back to update an older site that still requires downloading, editing, and uploading, I curse the fact that I’m on a PC that doesn’t have the tools I need. When the tools live on the cloud, life is so much easier!

While graphic designers and hardcore gamers will still require their RAM-thirsty power PCs, the rest of us who want to surf the web, send some emails, and upload some photos to Flickr will soon all be well served by a smaller, cheaper, and more battery efficient netbook. As the cloud becomes more powerful, look for netbooks to become more popular.

So save $1000 on your next PC purchase. Think about going small.

The wonderful thing about digital media is that it is so easy to copy and share. Sending photos, videos, or any sort of file around the world is as simple as a few clicks (much to the chagrin of the music industry). The same reason it’s so great is a reason it’s also dangerous. It is just as easy to delete or lose a file as it is to make a thousand copies.

I like to take a lot of pictures. Vacations and gatherings are all well documented in my photos directory which has grown substantially since I got my first digital camera in 2002. Not only did I still maintain the habit of printing pictures regularly for frames and photo albums, I also burned ALL my pictures to a CD or DVD every few months. If I ever got a new computer, server, or harddrive, I would copy the entire contents of my photo directory and My Documents to that new storage space. For some reason, I’ve always been terrified to lose my pictures, let alone any files that might be useful or important.

On any given day, my laptop could explode and I wouldn’t worry too much about losing files, because I know I’ve got other copies of 90% of the information on that drive. It used to be difficult to back up constantly. There were tape drives, stacks of empty CDs, then DVDs. While they were generally good for backing up files, what if your photo directory was bigger than you could fit on a CD or DVD (Mine is currently 14.5 GB and has more than 11,000 photos).

These days, however, storage is cheap. Not only can you get a 8 GB USB Memory stick for less than $20, portable USB/Firewire hard drives are also becoming very cheap. I bought a 500 GB portable hard drive last week for $89. The first thing I did when I got it home was copy all my photos to that drive. Its only purpose is to be a backup drive for anything useful.

Do yourself a favour. Since life is already filled with enough stressful things, don’t let a fried drive and a few thousand lost files ruin your day. Make backing up your information a habit. Keep copies of your eggs in a few different baskets. That way, hardware failure, a nasty virus, or carelessness won’t leave you saying “If only I had made another copy!”

The cost of a backup drive and the sense to build backing up into your weekly/monthly routine is pretty minimal compared to the benefits and the relief you’ll get should you ever actually require it.