This summer has been so productive in streamlining my computing experience. Ideally, everyone wants his/her experience using a computer to be fast, productive and easy. We want to accomplish our various tasks with the quickest amount of keystrokes, assure that our work is saved and backed up, access our information and data on any computer we use, and start working where we left off on our previous session. We don’t want to be sidetracked from our business to figure out why our email is unavailable or our files seem out of date.

By using a variety of open source projects, I’ve almost perfected my computing experience. Sure, I’m still fine tuning the experience, and as I return to work this week, I will tweak it even more. Look at the list of free services I use to streamline my productivity:

• GMail (used for contact management, occasional emails)
• Google Reader (used for keeping up on the news, saving key articles)
• Delicious (used for saving and syncing bookmarks)
• Thunderbird (used for primary email)
• Lightning (used for calendaring to sync calendars among all computers)
• Lightning/Google Calendar sync (used to update calendars)
• Live Mesh (used to sync important folders into the Cloud and then back down on to all my computers)
• New Ubiquity add-on (allows for easy keystroke mashups and macros on the fly)
• ScribeFire (used for posting to a variety of blogs)

What does all of the above allow me to do?

I can sit down at any computer and access every file, bookmark, email message, calendar, contact, and update it, knowing full well that my information will be synced on the cloud and on all computers. Now this is how computing is meant to be.