Tomorrow husband, son, and I are traveling to go see my in-laws and friends for Thanksgiving weekend. There's still tons of packing to do, but my iPhone is synced and ready to go. As I was choosing what music to sync to my iPhone, I was debating on whether or not I should shut my iMac down before we head out tomorrow. We'll be gone for four days, so it seems logical to turn off everything to save power. However, I have two reasons why I would rather leave my machine on: Simplify Media and email.
First Simplify Media is a must have for any iPhone owner. I love my iPhone, but my 8 GB version makes picking and choosing music a pain. I have a very large collection of music in my iTunes Library and I want to take it all with me. Simplify Media does that for me. It allows me to stream my entire music library from home and listen to it on my iPhone. The one catch is my iMac must be on and it has to be set to never go into sleep mode.
Now about email. I have a MobileMe account that I've had and loved since the beginning of .Mac back in 2002. I use Leopard's Mail App to check my email on my iMac, and of course I check my email regularly on my iPhone. Problem is, the iPhone doesn't filter junk mail, so I need the mail app to work it's magic to keep spam out of my inbox. This wouldn't be a problem if MobileMe's server side junk mail filtering was as sophisticated as say GMail, but that's another topic. It is what it is, and I can deal with it by setting my own junk mail rules locally. But again, the catch is I have to leave my iMac on all the time to filter my mail, and I have to set my iPhone to fetch email instead of push, otherwise it pushes me all the junk too.
So now I'm curious how many carbon credits I'm burning by leaving my iMac on for the next four days while I'm out of town, or is it nothing to worry about to have access to my home machine while on the road? To turn off or not to turn off? That is the question.
UPDATE: Poll Results 11/26/08 - 12/3/08
Do you turn your desktop off when you're out of town?
33% Leave it on
33% Shut it down
33% Sleep mode
00% No desktop
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
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As far as the music goes, consider how much you'll really be listening to music during the trip and what you'll most likely end up listening to. If you make sure that the content you'll want is on the iPod, there's not much reason to leave the computer running for you to stream from. (Being able to prioritize and knowing your listening habits is key.)
ReplyDeleteIn terms of e-mail, what about redirecting your mail (even temporarily) through G-Mail or some other free e-mail service with a spam filter, and then setting up your iPhone to get the contents of that account instead (again, it could be just temporarily). Any misfiltered mail would be accessible to you, still, but for all intents and purposes you should be just fine.
All that said, when I'm away at school most of the PCs at my house are still powered up for me to access remotely, but for obviously different reasons from yours. In your case, I see little reason why the iMac can't take a holiday as well.