My (achievable) tech resolutions for 2014 [Wayne]

As you’ll have noticed by now, the BetaNews writers have been making tech-based resolutions for the New Year. This is something I did last year, and revisiting my post for the first time since I originally wrote it, I discovered what I suspected would be the case -- I failed miserably across the board.

I said I would embrace Google+, but I haven’t. I’ve followed some people, and used Google’s social network slightly more, but embraced it? Nope. I said I’d change my passwords. I changed maybe two. I claimed I’d sort out my inbox. It was 79 percent full (8GB) then. It’s 74 percent full (11.19GB) now, so that’s a big fat fail. I said I’d learn to love Windows 8. I never did. I do really like Windows 8.1 though, so I'll claim that as a win. I stated I’d move my data to the cloud, and learn to program. I think you can guess how well those panned out. While a lot of my files are stored in the cloud, I still have multiple local copies of everything, and I haven’t programmed so much as a single line of code. So for this year’s list, I’m going to choose resolutions I believe I can actually achieve.

Download More Apps

I download crazy amounts of apps for iOS and my original idea was to resolve to only download apps I know I’ll use, rather than everything that catches my eye, but that will never happen. So instead I’m going to pledge to keep downloading apps. And in fact I’m going to download even more iOS apps, and write a weekly column celebrating the best new releases every week. Watch out for the first one soon.

I’ll download more Windows 8.x apps in 2014 too. But seeing as I probably only have five apps on my Win 8.1 computer that won’t be a major stretch.

Consolidate All My Storage

I bought a new NAS drive recently, and although I’ve set it up there’s still some way to go until all my tech (such as my Wi-Fi enabled video camera) makes proper use of it. I also use numerous cloud storage services (iCloud, SkyDrive, Google Drive and Amazon Cloud Drive to name the four main ones) and want to limit duplication where possible. I’m halfway through the process of sorting everything, so I’d like to think I can manage this one.

Upload ALL My Photos to Flickr

Flickr gives users 1TB of space for free, and although I use some of my quota, I could easily just upload all of my old photos to the site and forget about them until needed. I know that slightly contradicts my previous resolution, but I view it as a bonus backup, rather than yet another storage service. I should achieve this one as the first batch is already uploading as I write.

Digitize All My Old Media

I bought a new scanner in 2012 with the aim being to digitize all my old photographs, and although I did get through a batch of them I’ve still got hundreds, or maybe thousands more to scan. Similarly I added a couple of terabytes of storage to my PC to hold all the video I was going to digitize (all those home movies etc.) but it seems to be full of music files, new photos, and book drafts at the moment. I can’t guarantee I’ll manage to complete this resolution, but I will give it a try at least.

Other Resolutions

It’s unlikely I’ll use Google+ any more than I already am, but I will try to get back to using Twitter more. I stopped using it fully some years ago when I found it consuming too much of my life, but I will try to spend more time on there. I will also try to change more passwords than last time (I’m aiming for four or five), and thin out my inbox -- deleting just those emails with the largest, least important attachments should help me regain a fair amount of free space for the minimum of effort.

What about you? Do you have any achievable tech resolutions?

Photo Credit: bahri altay/Shutterstock

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