Philosophy, cookery and geekery

Recently I’ve been getting very interested in the increasingly large range of services that google is offering. Specifically, interested with respect to creating what would effectively be a distributed higher-level UI (to run over the top of *nix, Windows NT, or OS X) based on the google services – docs & spreadsheets, groups, reader (for RSS), mail, etc. I’ve also gotten into del.icio.us in the last little while, as documented elsewhere on this blog; so basically what I’m looking at is a complete environment for much of the day-to-day things that computers are used for – all from a (customised) firefox browser window. It pretty much has to be FF because it’s by far the easiest to integrate with del and google. I’d then have it all controlled nicely from a personal website which would act as home page in a literal and not-so-literal sense…with what else but google Apps for domains running behind the scenes (still with good ol’ WordPress providing the front-of-house set-up, ‘cos it’s OSS and I like it).

It’s by no means a fully developed idea yet, but I’m playing around with the various aspects in my spare time (what little I have) – and it is inevitably waiting on some more progress by google in certain areas. I’m probably not explaining it that well at this time in the morning, so don’t immediately ridicule the idea – but do question it The benefits are that one can then access the exact same “environment” from any PC, just by having the customised firefox install running from a USB key (if necessary, itself running in a bootstrapped linux-for-pendrive distro (DSL, puppy, etc) on the key) – and get at all bookmarks and personal data (calendar, notes, to-dos and so forth, plus actual documents) nice and easily.

This is probably a project for the near-distant (post-university) future…