136 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age Ron. Angie maintained her drama club web pages just on her own machine, but they were backed up in the media centre, and so on. Nobody would touch her brother’s gaming machine for fear of getting infected. Dad insisted that Adam use virus scanners, which he did, but Angie suspected that he sometimes switched that off to avoid trouble with game installations. Now her dad had the idea of collecting all their family content on one server that would then allow universal access from the Macs and the PCs via fi le systems and local WWW browsing. That sounded overly complicated, but Dad explained that would give access to any fi le from any machine at any time. The individual machines would not have been on all the time, and so on. Oh, and Granny could hook into the server too through her browser. Angie was not so sure about that . . . She just let Dad rant on about his plans. She didn’t care so much about it after all. As long as she could keep her own MP3s to herself and not let Adam hack them. A backup in its most simple form is just a copy of the piece of content, preferably stored separately from the original. Alternatives include online services that take care of backups for a monthly fee, such as Carbonite,8 or distributed peer-to-peer systems where the content is stored redundantly in several computers around a serverless network (Dingledine et al. 2001). 5.2.5 Content Adaptation Personal content can be enjoyed on a myriad of different devices. Some are equipped with large screens, whereas some do not have a screen. Some are able to reproduce music in its fi nest detail, whereas some are practically mute. In order to cope with devices with such a huge capability range, one must consider how each content object can best be enjoyed with a certain device. Reacting to such changes by altering the content itself is referred to as content adaptation (Mohan et al. 1999; Katz 2002). The fi rst aspect to consider is device capability. Does it have a point- ing device? Can it output sound? It is the responsibility of the device to inform its capabilities to the content provider. The content provider, then, can determine what content and in which form can be trans- ferred to the requesting device. When the device capabilities allow, say, displaying images, but only contains 64 000 pixels, it is usually not a good idea to transfer a four-megapixel image to this device for mere viewing purposes. Rather, the content should be adapted to the capa- bilities of the receiving device. This process may include reducing reso- lution or bitrate, or increasing the compression ratio, for instance. 8 http://www.carbonite.com/default.aspx?