Tech | The Joy of Germany

Dropbox Tips and Tricks

Feb 252012

I honestly don’t know how I would survive without Dropbox. I literally use my Dropbox at least 4 or 5 times a day. In this post, I am going to share my favorite tips and tricks for getting the most out of your Dropbox.

1. Sync Files between Computers

This is the most basic function. When you install Dropbox, you automatically get 2 GB of free space. This means that you can automatically sync up to 2 GB of files between your computers for free. And this isn’t only the case for desktop computers and laptops. If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can also download the Dropbox application for Android or iOS, and you will also be able to sync your files between your mobile device and your desktop computer. This is such a handy app because hardly anybody nowadays uses only one operating system (I personally sync all my files between 6 different operating systems). It is even useful if you only have one operating system, because if you have it installed on your computer, you can access those files on the Dropbox website from anywhere that has internet access.

Is 2 GB not enough space for you? Don’t worry! You can often get free space when you participate in various promotions that Dropbox offers. Lifehacker has also published a great post on how to get free space on Dropbox.

2. Share Files with Family and Friends

Sharing files over Dropbox is very easy. Just create a file in your Dropbox that you want to share with somebody. Then go to the Dropbox website and select the Sharing option. Here you will see all the folders that you are currently sharing. Just hit the New Shared Folder option and select the file that you have already created and add the email addresses of the people with whom you want to share the file. One thing to pay attention to, however, is that after you have shared your file with someone, they have full access to all the files that it contains. Any changes that they make to the files will change in your file as well. So don’t put your only copy of something in a folder and share it with somebody. It is probably better to make a backup copy of the file somewhere on your desktop computer before you share it with somebody.

3. Automatically Upload Photos to Dropbox

I am not a photographer by ANY means, but I do have a Smartphone which has a decent camera. As in, the photos that I take on the camera of my smartphone are more than sufficient to post on my blog. And I don’t need to take pictures for anything else. But I find it really annoying to have to plug my Smartphone into my computer and move them manually. Samsung phones are especially annoying, because you need to install special drivers to be able to access your phone. Last year in Venice, I discovered that I didn’t have the drivers that I needed to load my pictures onto my laptop. So I decided to try sending them to my laptop via dropbox. It turned out to be extremely easy. If you have Dropbox installed on your phone, just view the picture you want to add to your Dropbox. Then select the share option and select Dropbox in the menu that pops up (these instructions are for Android, but I assume that iOS uses a similar system). Then you can select the folder that you want to upload to and you are good to go!

After figuring this out, I decided that I wanted to upload them automatically. I used an app I found in the appstore (Dropsync) to upload automatically, but the good news is that there is now an official Dropbox app for syncing your photos automatically! And you can even get free space for trying it out! So now, you don’t even have to remember to upload your photos. Instead, as soon as your phone finds an internet connection, it will automatically upload them into your Dropbox and you can view them anywhere!

4. Sync Your Music Over Several Computers

I love this function of Dropbox, but it does require you to have a bit more space than just 2 GB (unless you only have 2 GB of music). I have over the past couple of years or so, acquired around 16 GB of space (I just got 5 by testing out the photo upload software), so for me, space isn’t that much of an issue. If you do have the space, it is actually really easy to set this up. Just create a folder in your dropbox for storing all of your music. Then just drag and drop your music library over to this folder. If you have a really big music library and a really slow internet connection (like I do), it could take a while for the Dropbox on your different computers to upload and download all the files (it usually takes a day or so for me to sync a couple of gigabytes of information. But that is because my internet connection is HORRIBLE. It doesn’t actually reflect badly on Dropbox at all. On my work computer, which has a really nice wired connection, my Dropbox can download a couple of gigabytes of information in around 10 minutes or so).

Once your music has been uploaded to the Dropbox server and downloaded to all of your computers, all you need to do is reset the default location that your preferred music player uses for its library. Usually, you just have to go to some location like File > Import Media… and select the file in your Dropbox where your music is saved. This is really cool, because now when you just want to add a song to you music player on one computer, you can just throw it in your Dropbox folder and it will automatically sync and you will be able to listen to it on all of your computers.

5. Use ifttt.com to Upload Your Internet Activity Into Dropbox

This is one of those cool little tricks that I decided to try out just because I can! The web application ifttt.com allows you to connect a whole bunch of your web “channels” (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and interact between them. One of the channels is Dropbox, and there are a whole bunch of cool things you can do using ifttt.com to interact between your Dropbox and your other web “channels”. Here are a couple of cool “recipes” that I found on the site:

Those are just a couple of the options. Playing around is really fun!

6. Use Your Dropbox as Your Desktop

By this I mean that instead of saving everything that you do on your Desktop or your Documents folder, use your Dropbox folder. When you download your homework for the week, instead of saving it to a homework directory on your harddrive, you save it to the homework directory in your Dropbox. Then, when you want to look at the .pdf file that you downloaded two weeks ago on your laptop, you can just open the Dropbox that you have installed on your tablet and view the .pdf from there without having to worry about anything. This is the main way that I use my Dropbox, and this is the reason that having to use a computer without Dropbox would irritate me to the extreme. I’ve gotten so used to saving everything that I am currently working on to Dropbox, so I never have to worry about not having the file that I need for school. This is especially useful for me because for university I always have to download lots of .pdf files every week (the class script files and homework sheets), and now, when I get a minute, I can just spend 10 minutes or so and download all the files and upload them into my Dropbox. Sometimes, I do this from my work computer, sometimes from my home computer, sometimes from my tablet, etc. But the point is, that as soon as I have downloaded them, I can access them from all of my computers.

But the problem with having so many folders in your Dropbox is that it can often get very unorganized. I thought that I would post a screenshot and a short description of how I organize my Dropbox folder (it works for me!):

The apps Directory

In the apps directory, I save some different programs that I use on different computers. I don’t use this directory very much, but it is nice to have. In one of the subdirectories, I have saved my favorite GNOME theme packages and my desktop picture of choice so that as soon as I have installed a version of Ubuntu (as long as it is one of the Ubuntu distributions that still includes GNOME 2). Then, as soon as Dropbox has uploaded everything for my new installation, I can immediately customize the appearance of the desktop so that I feel right at home.

I also uploaded the executables for a couple of old games like Rodents Revenge, Ski Free, and Chip’s Challenge. If there is some information that I might need to run a certain program, I also save this in here. For instance, I found a cool command line program that I use to check my ink, but I don’t actually use it often enough to remember the command that I have to enter, so I created a text document called “checkInk.txt” and wrote out some quick instructions for myself.

The Camera Uploads Directory

The Camera Uploads directory is the default directory that is generated by Dropbox when you use the official Dropbox uploader app. I hope that by the time that the official version comes out, I will somehow be able to change the name or move the directory into another directory. I would really like to move it into my uploads directory. Maybe this feature is already available. I’m just going to have to play around with it.

The media Directory

I took a quick screenshot of my media directory. This is where I save, surprise surprise, my media! I have separated it into four different subdirectories. In the ebooks subdirectory, I save the ebooks that I have found somewhere online (i.e. the ebooks that I didn’t buy on Amazon). This includes yet another subdirectory where I save the ebooks that I have found at Project Gutenberg as well as the complete collection of Asterix and Tintin comics. In the music subdirectory, I save my music as I described above. In the pics subdirectory I save some various pictures that I have picked up in various places (I’m really not much of a photographer). The torrents subdirectory is a directory that I created so that when I have my torrent client up and running on my home computer and watching this subdirectory, I can just save a torrent into the torrents folder and, once it syncs, my torrent client (Transmission) will start downloading the desired file.

The personal Directory

I consider my personal directory to be the “junk drawer” of my virtual life. I throw anything in this file that doesn’t really fit in any of the other folders. I have just a few comments on the subdirectories listed above. The names of my subdirectories are pretty self-explanatory. I save my recipes in the recipes folder, my doodles in my doodles folder, etc. I don’t really use the todo directory any more, because I discovered how awesome Evernote is (and it has completely taken over all of my todo list needs). I use my writing directory to save all of the rough drafts of the various pieces that I am currently working on. I also save a list with my telephone contacts (“contacts.txt”) in case I happen to lose the address book in my phone (which has actually happened 4 or 5 times in the past year). And I also save a list of addresses (“Addresses.txt”) of people that I like to send postcards to when I go on vacation.

The shared Directory

After you have been using Dropbox for a while, you begin to collect a large number of files that you are sharing with different people. I don’t actually use the files very often, but they somehow just sit there and clutter everything up. Therefore, I’ve created a shared directory where I have dragged all of the files that I share with different people. This puts them all in one place and I can find them easily if I need them, but they aren’t in the way.

The uni Directory

The uni directory is where I save all of the different files for my different classes. As you can see from the screenshot above, I have divided it further into subdirectories s1, s2, s3, and s4. These save the files from my first, second, third, and fourth semesters respectively (s4 is still quite empty because I haven’t started my fourth semester yet). For each of these directories, I create separate subdirectories for each of the courses that I am taking (I illustrated this by expanding s3). Both BasisIII-Literature (my Lit course) and Sprachpraxismodule (language skills course for English) were separated into 4 different sub-modules, so if you were to expand them further, you would see subdirectories for all of the sub-modules. This is how I organize all of my course work, and it is extremely easy for me to find everything. I also keep a list of the different websites for each course (“Websites.txt”) in each of the semester directories.

The uploads Directory

I am still uncertain if uploads is the best name for this directory. It pretty much contains all of the stuff that I upload to Dropbox from my Kindle Fire or Smartphone. It also contains a couple of folders for the experiments that I have done with ifttt.com. So there isn’t that much going on there.

The work Directory

Since I actually use Git or Subversion for most of the work that I actually do (and those files just stay on my work computer), the work directory doesn’t have that much in it either. I mainly keep copies of a lot of the articles that I had to find and read to try and learn what formal modelling is. I also keep my timesheets here.

There is SO much more!

There are so many lists of different things that you can do with Dropbox, that I don’t think it is necessary to go into any more detail. I have pretty much described everything that I use Dropbox for on a regular (daily, hourly) basis. Just google “Dropbox tips” and you will get thousands of articles on customizing and using your Dropbox. When I did this, I found a great article here. My all-time favorite blog Lifehacker also has a lot of great articles about Dropbox (check out the ones here and here).

Don’t have Dropbox yet? Try it now and get 250 MB of free space!

UPDATE: I just found out recently that if you are a student, you can use your university email address to get 500 MB of free space for each referral.

Curled up in bed with my Computer Science textbook.

Tech 6 Responses »

Apr 162011

After one glance at the worksheet for CS this week, I realised that there was no way I could do the homework without reading the text book. This might seem like a revolutionary concept, but in reality I hardly ever touch a textbook (although I probably should have for Calculus last semester. I read the book as an afterthought in order to prepare for the final and found that the book was about 10x easier to understand than the lectures that my professor gave). But it was obvious that these problems required some serious reading and analysis. So I put it off. This was not only because procrastinating gives one a sort of thrill (although this is true. Running has a whole other meaning if you are running away from an angry troll with a bloody axe who has murder on his mind). In my case, I preferred to put off my CS homework so that I could do my math homework. And I preferred to do math instead of reading my text book because math is something that can be done while doing something else that is more interesting (although I freely admit that the quality of your math homework decreases when multi-tasking, and the time it takes you to finish the assignment actually increases…so in hindsight I totally should stop multi-tasking when I do my math homework). But in any case, the fact remains: I did not do my CS homework or read my text book.

Today my plan was to read the relevant chapters and get the homework over with. But we had a visitor from out of town, so I decided to put it off until afternoon. We had a delicious breakfast and then I took her around and showed her everything of interest that there is to see in Düsseldorf (hint: it took around 2 hours. Interesting city huh?). But the day was so beautiful and the sun was shining so brightly that I really didn’t want to get down to work reading and analysing. But when I opened the cover of the book to the table of contents something happened. I thought, “Wow. This stuff actually looks interesting.” And so I got into bed and started reading my Computer Science textbook.

It was the coolest feeling. I didn’t feel like I was reading a textbook. I wasn’t going out of my head because it didn’t keep talking about taking the fifth derivative of a four variable function or something (thank goodness. We are only doing second derivatives with two variable functions and believe me…it is enough). But instead I felt like I was in bed reading a good book like…The Count of Monte Cristo or something. No…that isn’t a good example. I’ll try to think of a book that I have not described as “so intriguing and awesome that I can’t put it down.” Although I was thinking this week that it is really quite a stretch to imagine that Edmond Dantes was able to learn four languages fluently IN PRISON. And then when he got out, he was able to speak all of them with such a good accent that all of the natives of the land automatically assumed he was one of them. Especially since he supposedly learned the languages from an Italian monk. Good one Alexandre Dumas! I am laughing on the inside. My German is decent, but I am surrounded by GERMANS all the time. And I still have an accent. But even with that major flaw to the story, The Count of Monte Cristo is in another league. Hmm…let’s compare my textbook to The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Good book. Interesting story line. Won some prizes. But most importantly, I’d read it again. Yes my friends, I have an awesome textbook. One thing, at least, is abundantly clear: I did indeed choose the right major.

We get to learn about how computers are structured and the different levels that make up the computer and how they all function together and…blah blah blah. If you are a computer science major (or some other geek-inclined person) then you are currently nodding your head and admitting the sheer awesomeness of the complexity of the entity that is the computer. If not, then you probably don’t care one way or the other. Suffice it to say, I was forced to literally declare “that is awesome!” at least once while I was reading.

But that one time it WAS totally awesome. It was talking about disposable computer chips that could be attached to clothing to tell a washing machine the temperature at which the piece of clothing could be washed! A whole system immediately flashed into my mind. I could build a laundry shoot that would send my clothes to the washing machine and, after recognizing the specific article of clothing, it could sort it into its correct pile and then wash all of the clothes automatically once a week. Of course, the machine would also automatically dry the clothes as well, and because it would know what each piece of clothing is, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to add a folding machine to fold each article and place it on the conveyor belt which would then bring it back up to my room and place it in my closet in its designated spot. At that point, it would really be no stretch at all to imagine that I could have an menu of clothes. I could order my “outfit for the day” (like in Clueless but a little more hi-tech) and then it could be delivered to me without my having to always go rummaging through the drawers looking for something specific to wear. It would totally be worth it and with technology the way it is today, it is actually feasible too. They will probably come out with their own “automatic laundry system” one of these days. Probably already have them. And so I promised myself, that when I have the skills and the resources, I am totally getting one of those systems. Because let’s face it: my closet wishes it was as well organized as my file system and my clothes wish they were washed once a week. My future husband will probably not object either…

Of course, I haven’t actually got around to reading chapter two, which has all of the relevant information for my assignment. Probably should get on that.

UPDATE: A request: If you EVER hear of such an automated laundry system that is actually available to the common consumer at an affordable price, will you PLEASE not hesitate to let me know about it?

Vamping up an old Computer

Tech 3 Responses »

Mar 172011

Technically it is day 15 of my trip, but I didn’t do anything worthy of the travel tag or the travel category. Instead I spent the majority of today tweaking my Aunt and Uncle’s five year old Compaq laptop. It was actually quite a nice break from my vacation. Here are some of the tools that I used:

1. Revo Uninstaller

Download here

It is an excellent piece of software that removes unwanted programs as well as all of the registry files that are stored deep down inside your c: drive. You can also change the start up programs.

2. Disk Space Fan

Download here

It is a really nice piece of software that displays all of the files in a fan shape to show you which files large. It was really helpful in this case, because I was able to see right away exactly which files were very large and could be removed.

3. Malwarebytes

Download here

One of the first things I did when I started was to try to download Google Chrome because I hate to have to access the Internet with Internet Explorer. But when I clicked on the Google Chrome shortcut, it didn’t open up the browser, but instead opened up an Internet Explorer window. I used my second favorite trick to solving any computer related problem (right after reboot):

GOOGLE IT! The chances of you having a problem that is completely unique to you is slim to none, and chances are that there will be a nice solution waiting there for you.

Sure enough, the forums that Google led me to informed me that the problem I was experiencing was most likely caused by malware. They recommended Malwarebytes which worked a charm in identifying the malware and removing it.

4. Soluto

Download here

Soluto is a program that boots up with your computer. It times how long it takes for your computer to boot up, as well as analyzing all of the programs that started up and allowing you to remove a lot of them from start-up. I managed to get this computer from having a 12 minute boot-up to having a 5 minute boot-up. And yes. I am very proud of that.

5. CCleaner

Download here

CCleaner is an excellent tool for system cleaning. It cleans out all of the temporary files on the computer, as well as clearing your preferred browser of its history, cookies, and other information that is stored and gets old easily.

6. Everything

Download here

Everything is an awesome Windows search program, which is extremely fast and finds everything that you might want or need.

7. Defraggler

Download here

For this job, I actually used the build in XP program Disk Defragmenter. But normally I would have used Defraggler for the job.

A shout out to Lifehacker, who introduced me to almost all of these helpful programs!

Tomorrow I am taking a bike tour through Berlin, so stay tuned!

Day 14: Computerspielemuseum

Tech, Travel 6 Responses »

Mar 162011

Today, I had the opportunity to visit one of the best museums that I have ever visited. The Computerspielemuseum (Computer Game Museum) in Berlin definitely got full marks. There wasn’t too little information on any subject, nor was there so much information that went into information overload. It was simply a great experience.

The outside of the building is not remarkable:

However, inside the information is cleverly displayed in walls of cubes stacked on top of each other. The bright yellows, greens, and blues are very pleasing to the eye:

The first display that I looked at were four computers playing Sorry with each other (the German name for the game is Mensch Ärger dich Nicht). I actually stood there for a while and watched the pieces move around the board. I was trying to figure out if each separate computer had it’s own strategy:

The other game I got pretty excited about was the Game of Life. I had actually already programmed a similar program in my Intro to Programming and Software Development course, so I was excited to see what the original version looked like.

My favorite exhibition was about Pong. There was a video interview of the creator of Pong, Nolan Bushnell, who told the story of how they first came up with the idea and how they marketed the idea in order to make it profitable. The stories of the beginning of the manufacture of the Pong machines and the difficulties of trying to create the machines with mini 8-bit computers were very interesting. One of the original Pong machines was on display:

My second favorite exhibit was about the preservation of computer and video games. There have been so many different types of media used in order to store the games. But the main problem is that the technology to run the different types of games becomes obsolete in half a decade. That essentially means that the game is lost forever, unless someone can retrieve the game files and figure out a way to build an emulator for the games so that they can be played on a computer. Here are some of the different medias used:

Including a CD, a 3.5" floppy disk, a 5.25" floppy disk, a 3" floppy disk, and even a cassette

But the museum did not just display old obsolete technology. They also showcased a lot of games that are still used today. You can even try a lot of the games out! My advice to all those interested in visiting? Go in the afternoon. I went at 10, when it opened, and students on a field trip were underfoot for almost two hours. But after they all left, I got a couple of turns on the Wii tennis and nobody was there to kick me off Dance Dance Revolution (and also nobody to watch me be really bad at it)!

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The Joy of Germany

Curled up in bed with my Computer Science textbook.

Vamping up an old Computer

1. Revo Uninstaller

2. Disk Space Fan

3. Malwarebytes

4. Soluto

5. CCleaner

6. Everything

7. Defraggler

Day 14: Computerspielemuseum

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