Like a curious little hawk (or a persistent stalker - whichever you prefer) I have been drooling over a couple of technological innovations of late that I will most probably buy into in the near future, but not yet! They aren't ready for me yet.

1. I "need" a tablet that supports Flash (for BBC videos and Flash games) but also has a resolution as impressive as the iPad 3 (apparently you can't see pixels). Some say a new Samsung tablet will come out that is larger (11") with a resolution greater than that of the iPad 3. Perfect!

2. Cloud storage. I have my work laptop, my GF has her personal laptop, I have my smartphone. I'm planning to get a PC (for games and music) and also the tablet (for couch browsing). Having all these devices causes a problem when trying to find an answer to the following question..."Honey, did you upload our photos? Where are they?". 1 HD/SSD per machine is now a problem since your stuff is scattered everywhere. Cloud storage is kinda new and it's basically online storage space. Works well in principle if you have decent internet speed. Trouble is, I don't trust small companies with Terabytes of my personal data because if they suddenly go bust, they'll lose it. So, Google for me is the way to go. Unfortunately right now, the free service gives you a useless 5GB (need to pay monthly for more - which I don't wanna do). So I need to wait for something better.

For point 2: prevents the problem you mentioned of a smaller company going bust and your data going poof through their cloud-but-not-really system. Basically it's a shared folder on your/others' PC that syncs almost instantly when anything changes. It's quite elegant, with a no-nonsense client. Definitely recommend it. I've been using it for years and very pleased with it.

The bad news: it's only free up to 2 GB. You can get a max free limit of 18 GB by signing up people as a referrer, though (500 MB per person). I suppose that could be done through making spam addressses and signing them up through your referall link, but they may check IP's. I dunno. At worst you can use it alongside google's cloud. Still, the cheapest membership is around 10 bucks a month (100 for a year) and gives a limit of 50 GB with +1 GB for every referred user. Not too shabby, and your information is more secure than in a third-party cloud.

If you're thinking of giving it a whirl, let me know so I can send you a referral link. I could need 500 MB extra storage!

I don't trust cloud services. My recommendation is to use something like TrueCrypt to encrypt anything that you put up in the cloud. If the government can't crack it, a corporation certainly won't be able to.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Meh, i don't mind that they look at my family photos, music or videos.

Really? You're crazy. You don't mind that a corp scans your photos to see what products show up in them so they can market it to you? Or pick out street signs or other things to figure out where you're located? Or use face recognition and Facebook to identify your friends? That stuff bothers the hell out of me, but it's a marketing treasure trove.

Don't really care. Some company is making money from my photos, good for them. If they start spamming me, calling me, or putting stuff through my letter box, i'll change my opinion.

Yesterday I let the postal service know. I've accumulated a couple weeks worth of pizza fliers and marketing letters and so I took it all and shoved it down a public letter box. Pretty satisfying experience. That'll team 'em. If it doesn't, i'll just keep doing it.

And in other news, a man was arrested today for vandalizing public.....

They have to caution me first for such petty offences. No big deal.

haha. It's not really the post's fault that you're getting spammed like that. It's the companies. If the UK post office is anything like ours, they need every shred of business just to keep from going completely under. Still, spammage is annoying.