Tweak Master's House Of Useful Tricks: 2011

Thursday, December 15, 2011

The best free cloud storage services

I wanted to write a quick post with an overview of free cloud storage services for some time now, but the things kept changing at such speed I decided to postpone it for a bit. Now I'm finally bringing you my thoughts and quick review of free cloud storage providers. I quite well aware of the fact there are a lot of reviews of this type, but I'm not going to list all of them rather I'm going to present you with my narrowest choices of free cloud storage providers regarding offered space, file size limitations, security and supported paltforms (operating systems).

If you found this post to be useful please consider encouraging me to keep up the good work. You can easily do it by signing up with Copy.com cloud storage provider. Just click here and you will get 15GB + 5GB for following my link absolutely FREE. This way I'll get 5GB too.

Quick review of free encrypted online storage/sync services

I know that in my (so far few) published posts I've only wrote about different operating system (Windows) tweaks and utilities, but, as once upon a time Microsoft also perceived how Internet is the real thing and will not go away overnight, and therefore implemented certain Internet related services into Windows, it made me think about stepping out-of-my-box. Therefore, driven by my constant need to expand my horizons I went out and sailed on Internets vast space searching for eternal truth. But, hey, before this voyage ends up in some dead-end alley, let me get back on track.

For certain reasons I needed to find a good and free online storage provider. At first I wasn't thinking too much about synchronization possibilities of such a provider since I wasn't in a need for one, but as it will later come up, now it seems like it is a good idea to keep an eye for this feature as well while evaluating all the options. My first concern whenever I think of any online service is just one - SECURITY. This term is also including several other terms like PRIVACY and ENCRYPTION, and each of those also include some very important facts I'll get back to later, when the time will come for it. I don't share nor spread around any data anyone could find very useful, but even such data is important only to me, I want to keep thinking of myself as a VIP and therefore keep off all the prying eyes away from my data.
I think you get the point so I won't go any deeper and I'll just state what I do care about the most and how are they ranked on my internal scale of importance:

Data encryption - any data leaving your local computer/storage should be encrypted before it actually leaves anywhere. I'll get back to it later in more detail, motivated by some rumors which turned to be true regarding some providers still being able to decrypt stored user's data, which is or at least should be very bad thing at least for a normal security aware user.
Secure connection - it is always a good idea to insist on secure HTTP or HTTPS connections between your local computer/storage and online storage provider, even your data is encrypted prior to leaving your local computer/storage.
Amount of online storage space which provider is willing to give for free - the more they give the merrier you should be.
Transfer limits - obviously you and I can't get just about all for free, therefore some online storage providers came with an idea of limiting maximum file size you can upload, number of simultaneous uploads and finally monthly bandwidth you have as a free user. Some very "nasty" limits are mentioned here, and to make things more "interesting" for us free users, online storage providers often like to combine more than one of them at the same time. So I'll do my best to filter all the online storage providers which don't have some or all of the mentioned limitations on free accounts (at least didn't have them in the moment I was writing this).
Transfer management process - how easy (convenient) is way of sending/receiving/syncing data. By this I mean if you can access your shared storage directly form Windows Explorer, can/need to use some kind of storage provider's specific desktop manager (and level of it's operating system integration) or are you left to struggle with pure web browser (maybe Java, not that it's bad) oriented management tool.
Decent connection speed - it is very likely that you will never ever even come close to provider's transfer peek speed, but still since I'm talking about free storage plans very often some providers do limit data transfer speeds for free accounts.

Just out of curiosity, I will mention two more online storage services so called "Social Storage" I've came across in my Internet wandering and which are a bit different than previously mentioned ones. The main difference is they are based on concept of users (which are always online I hope) sharing their spare free storage space and in return getting more or less the same (service dependent) amount of online storage space. If you feel keen for this type of concept, have spare free space on your local storage media and quality 24/7 internet connection feel free to try Onemo or Symform. There are some concerns related to this kind of storage concept primary regarding varying users quality (speed) of Internet connections. Another issue might be regarding data reliability (redundancy) which I hold for a minor or non existent issue since my guess is this kind of service is more like data block based (data dispersion) along with certain level of encryption rather then one user holding all of the data from another user. My personal attitude is not to like this kind of concept, but you're for sure invited not to share my point of view and to try it out. One is for sure - this way you'll get way more storage space than on any other existent storage service.

Since I've started to write this blog post some time but never actually got to publish it I'll do it now. One of the reasons why I decided to wait is the fact a lot of services entered the scene my thinking was pretty simple - what goes up must come down. In other words I've decided to wait and see which services will become popular and which will disappear and which will pop up on the scene after the standards have been set. And I think I've made a good decision as you still should very seriously take into consideration above mentioned fact to look for. So this post will remain strictly informative while you can check out this post and see which free cloud services I like.

CopyPath - Another usefult Windows shell extension

Another small and free Windows shell extension I've came across and found to be useful is named CopyPath. As it's name says it is quite obvious what it does (should do!?) - it simplifies copying of you current browsing folder path by adding this option to Windows shell menu (the one you get when you press right mouse button while using Windows Explorer). Nothing revolutionary, but definitely very useful and if statistically analyzed it will save you 50% (without it you normally need 3 mouse clicks to carry out this action while with this extension installed only 2 clicks are needed) of all the clicks needed to carry out this simple action. This extension is so simple that you will need to install it manually (don't worry installation is quite simple and instructions are provided) and before you do that you need to choose which version you need - x32, x64 or Unicode version. Anyway this little utility can be downloaded here.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Why doesn't my super-turbo-mega-ultra expensive notebook/laptop have a HDD activity indicator?

So, you've finally bought a new notebook/laptop? And of course, before you've actually bought it, you quadchecked all of it's features googl'd out every single review and user comment, right? And you've just unpacked it and stared using it, maybe even connected on external display? But, you just feel like something is missing ... and you finally noticed - your laptop doesn't have a HDD indicator LED! Or even better if it does have one, but manufacturer (I will deliberately not mention which one it is - all of you who have it will know, all other take a guess!) decided to place it on such a "wonderful" place that you at least will need a mirror to see what it's showing.
For all of you reading this and still not quite getting it, ore even better all of you with HDD activity indicator built in your laptops, just keep reading on or just switch to some more interesting topic as this one will not become more interesting that it actually is! The rest of you will know where I'm heading to ...

Windows 7 Network Activity Indicator - Can You Animate It Please?

So, you're a Windows 7 user which knows it's way through Windows 7, right? But as Windows 7 might be by now most advanced Microsoft's operating system, it is just (to keep it low profile) funny how few (more or less) important things feel like unfinished in Windows 7. And I'm talking about things which have been implemented much earlier in previous versions like XP! By now you must be asking what I'm blabbering about, right? OK ...

reCAPTCHA solving methods - Update

This post became obsolete, please refer to this post for more informations.

There has been some time since I've last time updated my blog, but hey it was summer time, right? OK, this will be just a quick update of my previous post about how to automatize reCAPTCHA solving.

How to automate input of Google reCAPTCHA codes on free file hosts

This post became obsolete, please refer to this post for more informations.

If you, for any reason, have a need to download from various free file hosts which have implemented Google's reCAPTCHA method of verification before allowing you to start free download, you probably know how annoying this can become if you need to download more than one file. Not to mention you have to be present and you simply cannot automate downloading process no matter what you try. It is quite obvious why various hosts decided to implement this method - they simply want to force as many people as they can to purchase their commercial and unlimited version of service. But, not all of you have a need to do so, even free service provides much lower download speeds than paid one.

Better way to perform file/folder operations in Windows

File and folder operations are unavoidable thing for every single computer user today. But, along with this fact, my subjective guess is that there are really few Windows users that can actually say this kind of operations couldn't be better handled in all Windows versions produced until now. No matter if you ever had a need to copy/move large amount of files/folders from one storage media to another, locally or over network, you probably know how painful this process can become.

How to 'undo' closed Windows Explorer windows

The first thing I want to share with you is something that has bothered me for a long time, and even took me quite some time to find available solution. But hey, what am I talking about you must be wondering? OK, so let me start with a question to you. How many times have you accidentally deleted some file or folder on your computer? Often or less often there is always a way to restore them - that's why they invented Recycle Bin, right? Even if you use famous Shift + Delete combination which bypasses sending files/folders to Recycle Bin there are still a lot of utilities to help you restore your data. But, what is happening when we come to question/functionality to restore closed Windows Explorer (WE) windows? Can we restore them too? Some of advanced file manager software solved this problem, but they can't help you out when you are using WE, so I will not talk about them here.

It's me ...

After a lot of time I figured out it would be just fine for me to return to this kind of web activity and start my own blog. It's been more than 10 years from my last web publishing activity, which by the way last time happened back in the good old days of y2k bug and era of .com companies. So I figured out I could just wipe some dust off my shoulders and finally give myself a little web boost again. I wasn't sleeping in the meantime, but rather just waiting for web technologies to mature a bit - just like a good wine or whiskey. ;-)

Despite mentioned facts are true (you can trust me or not), one of the main reasons why I've decided to start my own blog is that I'm kind of techie in eternal search for useful things that could ease my everyday use of my computer as well as some other things too. At first I started filling up my bookmarks or favorites as some might call them, but I decided time has come to start sharing my findings with other people as well. But, at the same time I decided the time has come to start keeping a clean reference to all of those useful findings online for my own use. In other words, even if my blog never gets popular it will still be very useful to myself.

If you're still reading this, well good news are that I'm done with explaining my web re-appearance and just starting to make contributions which hopefully you will find just as useful as I do.

Tweak Master's House Of Useful Tricks