Natalie Portman can center my Karmic flow any day of the week.

Apparently Devendra Barnhart, extreme flower-child folk rocker and all around long-haired parent-disappointer has joined forces with Natalie Portman for his latest video clip. Witness!

Portman's got a long, long history of doing this kind of niche cameo work, and she picks her targets well. Saturday Night Live, Sesame Street, hell there must be a stack more but YouTube refuses to cooperate. This is some seriously smart branding on her part. The classic anti-Portman sledge is that she's pretty but there's nothing happening backstage, but these little cameos, scripted as they may be, show us a canny, ironic Portman who doesn't just earnestly beleive in peace or whatever. That shit's important.

Start blog with Natalie Portman fanboyism: check.

Excellent.

Dropbox. Cloud computing the way you actually want it.

As a rabid apple fanboy and continuous victim of the RDF I'm a mobileMe  (previously .mac ) user. Basically it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I feel that I'm paying $120AUD a year to sync my ical. The problem with mobileMe is that its all or nothing. I just want my ical and address book to sync. Stuff bokmark syncing, I dont want the same bookmarcs on all my browsers anyway. Also, del.icio.us exists. And I don't really want this "cloud storage" idea. 

Well I thought I didn't.

Enter Dropbox. Not only is it everything that mobileMe's web storage should be, its made me realized that I'm getting ripped off paying for this largely useless part of the service.

Drop box has the incredibly useful approach of intergrating the shared space into your finder. When you install it, a new folder called 'dropbox' is added to your home folder. Any file you put in this folder is synced to the net. Simple as that. If you have more than one computer set up with dropbox a local copy is made on that other computers 'dropbox' folder. This is more important that you'd think (and its actually a feature that is does have in common with mobileMe) It means that once your file has been copied locally (automatically remember) you don't have to be connected to the net to use it. Sorry S3.

Not only can you sync many computers (PC and mac I believe, but I haven't tested it on a PC), but you can then access those same files through a web interface from any computer. The service also allows to you to automatically generate gallery pages from special 'photo' folders you can make inside your drop box. They look like this.

The killer feature for me though is the way you can share files form you public folder. without going to the web or a browser you can right click on any file in your 'public' folder and select "copy public link" which will copy a live URL to your clipboard which you can post in a email or IM. Amazingly useful when you couldn't be bothered trying to share FTP details with people.

Obviously, dropbox does share a lot of features with mobileMe, but its the integration and execution that make it a game changer as far as I'm concerned. Presumably they're going to be releasing a premium version of the service, and pending pricing information, I think ill be a loyal customer.

I still have a few invites to the service, so the first people to ask in the comments are welcome to them.

Yogalates

Yogalates. Yogalates. Yogalates.