Early last year, I decided that my tired old HP laptop wanted to retire, and I started shopping for a new one. However, before I could find a suitable replacement, I discovered the Asus Eee PC, and I knew that I had to have one.

It did not make a lot of sense to buy a new laptop and a new Eee PC as well, so I held off buying a laptop. Over time, the Eee PC became my primary machine. Sometimes, I would plug in an external monitor and mouse and keyboard. And other times, I would just use it by itself. After a while, I migrated all of my old stuff off of the laptop and onto a mini- file server, and I eventually left the tired old laptop powered off.

I started using the HP laptop again when I started working from home, but I never really installed anything other than NX. On a whim, I installed the latest Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and that really breathed new life into the tired old laptop.

So now I find myself strattling the fence, sometimes using the tired old (but rejuvinated) HP laptop, and sometimes using the Eee PC. Since I keep most of my important stuff on an encrypted thumb drive, it was pretty easy to switch back and forth.

But there was one thing missing… my Firefox bookmarks.

I don’t like the idea of storing my stuff (tax records, email, bookmarks, or anything else) on a site like Google or xmarks (formerly foxmarks). So I went looking for a plug-in that would allow me to synchronize my bookmarks among multiple machines, but use my own server for storage.

SyncPlaces does a pretty good job of that.

It can sync using FTP (yuck) or https (yay) to a WebDAV-enabled server. It only took a few minutes to figure out WebDAV, and pretty soon I had the same bookmarks on the HP laptop and on the Eee PC.