Why Should You Start Using Dropbox?

We often save our most important data and information on our computers without giving it a second thought due to the reliability they have provided recently. This is great until your hard disks fails or your PC / Laptop gets stolen. They can even burn up in a fire or we delete our stuff on our own by accident. All of that can happen and if it does we can only be thankful for a recent – up to date backup which will bring back your most valuable data.

 

Now you should use external hard drives for backups but they are not totally safe against damage or theft either. Any physical media is susceptible to failure. To resolve this issue, a very good and cheap method to backup your data online and in the cloud is Dropbox. There is a free basic plan with 2 GB space, and two pro plans with 50 GB for $9.99 per month or 100 GB for $19.99 per month. The free basic plan is more than enough for most users.

 

Why Dropbox?

 

Let's say you're editing a document at home. As soon as you click 'Save', Dropbox will sync this same file to all your other computers and your mobile devices (iPhone, Android and Blackberry coming soon!) instantly and automatically. It's as if you saved the document to all of your computers. This gives you the freedom to work on any of your computers and always have the files you need.

 

You can easily share entire folders or photo albums with Dropbox. You can also send people links to specific files within your Dropbox.

 

 

Any file you put into your Dropbox folder is automatically backed up to their servers. Even if your computer has a melt-down, your files are safe on Dropbox and can be restored at any time.

 

Dropbox Replaces:

• Emailing file attachments to yourself and other people
• Using USB drives to move files between computers
• Renaming files to keep a history of previous versions
• Complicated backup software and hardware

 

 

Setting Up Dropbox

Signup

In order to sign up with Dropbox go to Dropbox Signup (With this Referral you will receive a 250 MB bonus on top of your 2 GB free space automatically!)

 

Download

After the successful registration, the download of the Dropbox application should start automatically. Dropbox is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

 

Install

Double click the downloaded application and start the install by clicking “Install”

 

Now Dropbox should be installed and up and running. When prompted, fill in the same data you filled in for your registration and choose either the free plan with 2 GB or one of the pro plans. Again, go with the 2 GB plan unless you need more space.

 

Working with Dropbox

Dropbox has created a folder on your computer which will synchronize with the online backup on each change.You can double click the Dropbox icon in your task bar to open that folder, or just right click the icon to get more options.

 

Backup

You are now able to change, delete and then copy files and folders with your most important data in the Dropbox folder, these will be automatically uploaded to the online cloud. Should you ever delete something from that folder by accident then you got about a month worth of time after deletion to be able to un-delete those files – also all changes will be saved should you need a previous version of a file.

 

Dropbox can also be used for various other things like an image gallery, to make files publicly downloadable or to share files to your friends and family.

 

I have been using Dropbox for about 6 months and the reason why I like it so much is because it's so easy and seamless to use. It just works and is dead simple. Also having the ability to have my files on my Android phone makes life a lot easier.

 

If you are interested in Dropbox, I highly recommend this backup solution. Sign up for Dropbox here!  

 

Are you already using Dropbox? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Apple Is Not "Too Big to Fail"

Is the Apple juggernaut spinning out of control? By their recent response to “Antennagate”, this may be the start.

First, I have to say that I am no Apple Fanboy nor an Apple hater, but the last Apple product I purchased was an iPod Nano (1st Gen). I never had any problems with Apple products, it was really just their attitude towards marketing and the media. It seemed to me that their stance was, "Hey! We are Apple and you must buy our products. Without our products, who are you really?"

That being said, this whole "Antennagate" has turned out to be a very big problem for Apple. Many people have written articles, post, blogs etc about the subject so if you are reading this, you should be well aware of the reception issues. If not, my previous post on iPhone 4's issues will bring you up to speed.

Daniel Lyons for Newsweek wrote a great article about Apple's Rotten Response. In the article he wonders if panic has started to set in at Apple yet. He thinks it should have because of the hastily called news conference—ostensibly to discuss problems with iPhone 4 and how Apple intended to fix them—only did further damage to Apple’s reputation.

Apple called a small group of hand-picked journalists to the event to address mounting concerns about the antenna design in the new iPhone 4, which shipped in June. Earlier this week Consumer Reports declared it could not recommend the phone until Apple comes up with a fix for this problem.


Do you know what Apple's fix was?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs came up with a two-part solution:

Part 1: There is no problem.

Part 2: Even though there is no problem, we’re going to give everyone a free case, which should insulate the antenna and prevent the interference that we just told you isn’t actually occurring. But if you’re still not happy, you can give back the phone for a full refund

Lyons comments that Jobs’s snotty tone made it clear that he was pretty fed up with all the whining about a problem that he says doesn’t exist. Apple is so arrogant that it still won’t admit the obvious truth—that the design of the phone itself is the problem.

“No other phone has ever put an electrically active antenna on the exterior of the device,” says Richard Gaywood, a wireless-networking engineer. Gaywood says that as an outsider he can’t tell what the problem is, “but if I had to bet, I’d bet on it being a hardware problem they will never completely resolve for existing customers.”

But why would thousand of people complain about an issues that doesn't exist? Some in the blogosphere believe this "Antennagate" might have been manufactured by a recent new Apple foe: Gizmodo.

Blog The Pungoverse asks a simple question: Is Antennagate traceable directly back to Gizmodo?

Well, in my humble opinion I say no. But let's look at the reasoning behind Pungoverse's question:

I went searching for the earliest reporting of the iPhone 4 antenna issue, using the search term "iphone 4 antenna issue", and I found something I find interesting.  Before we get to that, let's establish a time line. Gizmodo first reported about the iPhone4 that they-ahem-acquired back in April.  Jason Chen of Gizmodo's home was raided on April 27th.

If you don't remember what happened two months ago between Gizmodo and Apple here is a quick synopsis:

Apple gave a prototype of the iPhone 4 to an engineer. This engineer either forgot or lost this prototype (dressed up to look like an iPhone 3GS) at his local bar. A person noticed this strange looking iPhone 3GS and discovered it was indeed a prototype iPhone 4. The engineer notified Apple of the lost prototype and the phone was remotely bricked.

The finder of the prototype first attempted to return to the phone to Apple, but his efforts went unnoticed, so he sold this phone to Gizmodo. Gizmodo reported the story about the iPhone 4 prototype and they also offered to give back the phone to Apple. Apple then requested that the police forcefully acquire the prototype from Gizmodo editor Jason Chen.

Pungoverse continues:

As a result of this case, Gizmodo was not invited to WWDC to cover the actual iPhone 4 announcement.
The iPhone launches to much fanfare on June 24th, though some pre orders were getting their phones early.  One such person was a poster on the MacRumors Forums, who first noted a problem with the antenna on June 23rd.  Gizmodo is all over it the next day...launch day.  Let me rephrase that: Gizmodo goes full goose bozo on launch day, updating that blog post 52 TIMES.

Now I do believe Gizmodo felt a little burned by Apple, but this was one of the largest product launches for 2010. How does one of the major tech blogs not report about iPhone 4?

Pungoverse asks "Why would they do that?  Simple.  When it comes to Apple Computer, the company that anyone and everyone in the tech media wants to cover, Giz has been shut out." also adding, " They threw a temper tantrum in the form of a blog post designed to take Apple down a few pegs.  The mainstream media was sure to pick up on the story, which it dutifully did, and you know the rest of the story."

Pungoverse does clarify that this is all just speculation and a fair amount of exaggeration on his part. But this post does point to the power of the tech blogsphere. During last April Gizmodo almost seem obsessed with Apple, so much so that many of their commenters complained about the Apple non-stop coverage.

But even if Gizmodo did a hit job on Apple starting “Antennagate”, we still have the real physical problem that iPhone 4 has a major flaw. By refusing to acknowledge the problem, Jobs just reinforced the image of Apple as a company that is in deep denial and unable to admit a mistake—a company that has for so long been able to bend reality to suit its needs that it now has lost touch with reality itself.



Daniel Lyons finishes his article stating that the real issue here is how the product is perceived. If you need to put a rubber case on a phone to make it work correctly, there must be something wrong with it, don’t you think? Jobs clearly doesn’t. He seems scornful of customers who have complained. Toward the end of the news conference, he blamed the media for blowing the problem out of proportion. Thanks Gizmodo!

Apple’s rivals will have a field day with this, because Apple looks weak here. They just need own up to the issue and fix it.They still do and for a long time have a massive loyal customer base. Apple could release brick and call it iPhone 5 (Builder Edition) and it would sell millions the first day. Probably not, but it makes you wonder sometimes...

What do you think of  “Antennagate”? Let me know in the comments!

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Science Friday - Why Are Clouds White?

Science Friday | July 16th, 2010 | Why Are Clouds White?

 

This is the fifth post for my Science Friday series . Enjoy! And as always, I welcome your comments!

 

Water is clear. The sky is blue. So why are clouds white? And if regular clouds are white, why are rain clouds gray?

 

On sunny days, we relax and look up at the clouds and wonder if they all look like people or animals. A better question to ponder would be why we can see them at all. Water droplets are clear, although en masse they do have a bluish tinge, and the sky above is blue. Whether or not there are clouds in the sky should be a mystery; they should be invisible.

 

Visible light comes at us in many different wavelengths, each corresponding to a slightly different color. When all the wavelengths combine, they show up as white light. White light may be a combination of wavelengths, but it's not a permanent combination of them. Under certain circumstances, wavelengths can be separated out.

 

For example, earth's atmosphere tends to scatter blue light, while letting the other wavelengths of light pass through in a straight line. Because of this, the sky is blue, made up of diffuse, scattered light while the sunlight that falls around us tends to be more golden, because the blue wavelengths of light have been filtered out. That's called Rayleigh scattering.

 

 

Clouds also scatter light. Unlike oxygen and nitrogen molecules, which are picky about which kind of light they scatter, larger water droplets scatter all kinds of light in all directions. This is called Mie Scattering. When we look up at clouds, we see red light, blue light, yellow and orange and green light, all coming at us. We can't see the individual colors, though, because since they're all coming at our eye from the same place. Together, they all combine to make white light. That's what hits our eyes, and makes us perceive clouds as white. It's all an illusion!

 

Or that's what doesn't hit our eyes, in the case of rainclouds.

 

While harmless, decorative clouds are glowing white, clouds that mean business slide down into the gray scale and even develop black streaks. This can be confusing. No matter how much white light is scattered, it's still white light.

 

There's one way to turn white, or any color, into black: turn off the lights. Mie Scattering scatters light in all directions. Rainclouds tend to be both wider and taller than regular clouds. The more layers of water droplets that light has to pass through, the more likely the droplets are to send that light right back. Instead of filtering out blue light, high, dense clouds filter out all light. That makes them darker and darker when they're seen from the ground.

 

Want more? See my previous Science Friday posts below:

Domesticated Cats
Fireworks
Why is the Sky Blue?
Flowers

 

Do you remember just staring at clouds all day as a child?

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Technorati: A Search Engine for Blogs

I recently purchased Social Media 101 by Chris Brogan and one tip he suggests to increase traffic to your blog is to join Technorati. So I did just that.

 

What is Technorati?

 

Here is a quick description:

Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

The leading blog search engine, Technorati.com indexes millions of blog posts in real time and surfaces them in seconds. The site has become the definitive source for the top stories, opinions, photos and videos emerging across news, entertainment, technology, lifestyle, sports, politics and business. Technorati.com tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the Blogosphere.

 

Hopefully Technorati helps with increasing traffic to my site.

 

Are you using Technorati? Let me know in the comments!

 

4G7ANBZYPTVW

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Are Traditional Media Outlets Flocking to Tumblr?

Chris Cameron from the Read Write Web Blog writes about how many traditional media companies are starting to use Tumblr.

 

Cameron starts off recapping about traditional media's first major adoption of Web 2.0 came with Facebook, as outlets syndicated their content on the popular social network by way of fan pages and official accounts. Then, Twitter went mainstream as writers, editors and the media organizations themselves signed up, sent out links, and chatted about related topics in 140 character bursts.

 

Now it seems traditional media outlets are flocking to another service - one that is almost a hybrid of the others, allowing for short-form posts, but with richer format.

 

What's the new trend among legacy media? Why it's none other than Tumblr.

 

For those unfamiliar with the service, Tumblr is a blogging platform that lets users curate images, videos, quotes, and other forms of media onto minimalistic personalized "tumblelogs." Much like Twitter, there is a one-way follow function that lets users view a stream of entries from others of their choice. The quick ability to comment, favorite and "reblog" others posts makes the service incredibly social.

 

 

Cameron continues mentions an article in Business Insider that several outlets of traditional print media (newspapers and magazines) are suddenly popping up all over Tumblr with their own pages. Newsweek seems to making great use of the platform by posting mainly photos, and quotes - two of the most shared forms of media on Tumblr. The New Yorker also recently joined the service, sharing mainly videos and photos, including high-resolution images of their popular artistic covers.

 

If anything, these new additions to the Tumblr ecosystem provide a human face through which the various outlets can communicate more freely with their readers.

 

So is Tumblr the next big thing for traditional media outlets? By Cameron's view, the large media outlets seem pleased with the service and the kinds of interactions it allows for. He says it would not be surprising to see Tumblr become the third common place aside Facebook and Twitter for media organizations and corporate brands to further reach their audiences.

 

I've been using Tumblr like a satellite blog for the past 2 months now and it's definitely grown on me. It's very easy to add a quick quote, video, or picture. Like Twitter and Facebook, it has it place to quickly post. If you been a little fearful to jump into the deep end of the blog "pool", try the Tumblr "kiddy pool" first.

 

Are you already using Tumblr? For those reading this on Tumblr I already know your answer, so tell me what you think of Tumblr in the comments!

 

Read the full post by Chris Cameron on Read Write Web.

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Droid X Hits Verizon Stores This Week

The Droid X, the next member of the Droid family, will be coming to Verizon Wireless stores on Thursday.

 

The Droid X is Motorola’s latest Google Android device, featuring a 4.3-inch screen, 8-megapixel camera, HDMI out put and more.

 

The Droid X looks like it will be shipping with Android 2.1 to start. Android 2.2 (Froyo) and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available via an over-the-air update before fall.

 

The original Droid was a massive hit for Verizon and has been the most successful Android device to-date. Since original Droid release last November, many high-end Android-based smartphones have showed up, including the Nexus One, HTC Incredible, HTC EVO 4G and the Dell Streak.

 

The Droid X will be available for $199 after a $100 mail-in-rebate and a new, two-year contract. So get your hands on one right now!

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Official XBMC Remote for Android

Test versions of the XBMC controller app have been floating around for some time – now it’s launched on the Android Market in public beta for everyone.

 

Obviously you need a build of XBMC to make it work, as without that it’s just some useless app on your phone. Here’s the description:

Besides using the app as pure remote control with the look of the famous Xbox DVD Dongle, you’ll be able to browse your music, movie and TV shows library. Browse through your albums by genre or artist, select or queue an album without even turning on your television? No problem. Make incoming calls automatically pause the film you’re watching? Go to settings and check the option. You can find a complete list of features on the project page. Also check out the screenshots gallery.

 

See the full gallery on posterous

 

You’ll need at least Android v1.5 (Cupcake) and XBMC v9.11 (Camelot) in order to run it correctly.

 

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Neville's Blog