DropBox — I really need to use it more

I came across this great Lifehacker post today which details how much you can get out of DropBox — and a lot of it can be done for free — at least up to 2GB

That corresponds to 500 high quality jpeg’s or 20 typical music albums. Might be a bit tight, though, if you intend to drop some full-length movies into your box as you’re unlikely to stuff in more than three unless you want to fork out.

I use it primarily for photos and documents for which it is ideal.

The Public folder is a great way to share stuff with whoever you want without giving away your DropBox password. See my earlier post on how to directly download music and movies from a Public DropBox folder.

Google Talk Guru

I came across this “potentially exciting” announcement in Mashable today.  After all, anything from Google is worth at least a look, particularly as it was seen (in the comments) as akin to Aardvark.

So, I tried it.

But, it only works through Google Talk which only works in Windows. As the title of this blog suggests, I’m not a big Windows user.

However, I do have it on one computer. So, I installed Google Talk which is very easy. Then I sent a chat invitation to guru@googlelabs.com and got set up to use Google Talk Guru.

After about 10 minutes using it, I knew I was never going to use this. First, there’s basically no new information available here. Nearly everything can be more conveniently obtained by simply typing a query in the Google Search Bar.

I also tried the translate command but found it to be very limited, in the Portuguese language at least which is what I used. About half the words I tried to translate from English gave me “Sorry, no results”.

In summary, I would have expected something better from Google but maybe it’ll be expanded.

Linux CLI shortcuts

If you’re an ardent command line user in Linux (or any other *nix OS for that matter), you may want to take a look at a great and ongoing thread on this subject in Quora.

There are a huge amount of tips and tricks included.

Google Chrome error: Your profile cannot be read

I’ve had this happen quite a few times to me using the Chromium browser in Ubuntu. Fixing it is easy — once you know how.

I found out how after I stumbled upon this thread.

All it involves is:

1. Using the chown command to reclaim ownership (to yourself from root) of the file /home/user/.config/chromium/Local State.

2. Doing the same with the file /home/user/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences.

Then reboot and everything should be fine. It was for me. Details in the link.

Enable all cpu cores during Windows boot

As most modern computers now have processors with more than one core, it’s surprising that Windows 7 boots without enabling all of them. Only one is used.

However, it’s very easy to reconfigure matters to get all of your cores to work during the boot as explained in this post from Lockergnome.

Actually, right now the only version of Windows I have on any of my computers is Windows XP which 10 years after its launch still works very well. However, no option to enable more than one processor core during boot is available for this ancient OS.

I might have a chance to try this out on a Windows 7 machine tomorrow. If so, I’ll add an edit to this post to let you know if my boot became faster or not.

Back up your Gmail

There was a scare a week or so ago where a number of Gmail losers (temporarily) lost all of their stored emails. OK, it was only a short-term issue but maybe the next time it’ll be permanent.

Rather than waiting to find out if this prediction is true or not, it’s probably better to prevent this problem dumping your archived emails by doing a backup.

Lifehacker posted this article about backup apps for any type of email (web-based and programmed) which is useful. However, for sheer simplicity MailStore has got to be the choice app.

Unfortunately, it only works in Windows but it still free. I used it today to backup to my HDD the 2 GB of 5000 emails I’ve amassed over the 5 years I’ve been using Gmail. This took about one hour and a very through job was done.

I’m impressed and relieved that I got that done.

Recover files you didn’t mean to delete

Here’s a post from SimpleHelp that you probably will use very infrequently but when you do need it, it may jut turn out to be invaluable.

The Recuva app only works in Windows but it does work exceptionally well. I tried it in Windows XP some time ago and, indeed, I thought that I had already posted about it but, apparently, not.

New Cairo Dock

I like docks. I use one in every OS on every computer I own. In Linux I invariably use AWN and also in FreeBSD. Of course, I use the OS X dock on my MacBook and in Haiku, I make do with LaunchBox which isn’t strictly a dock but if configured appropriately serves very nicely as one. Even in Windows I use the Nexus dock.

In the past I used to like the Kiba dock a lot as it’s quite spectacular in how it works. However, I’m not sure if it’s at all being supported these days.

Now, Cairo dock has been upgraded, so I’m going to try it out somewhere soon. I had looked at it before but discarded it as it was quite featureless at the time. Now, this new souped-up model shows quite some promise.

Area of a triangle — a 2000 year old algorithm

I was amazed to learn about Heron’s formula for measuring the area of any triangle, irrespective of the angles, knowing only the length of each side. The method is very simple and can be done in minutes by any kid with a cheap calculator.

Here’s how it works:

1. So, if the side lengths are a, b and c, add them together (a+b+c) and divide this number by two to get s= (a+b+c)/2

2. Subtract each side length in turn from s to get (s-a), (s-b) and (s-c).

3. Calculate the product of s*(s-a)*(s-b)*(s-c) = p

4. The square root of p is the area of the triangle.

This guy Heron was able to prove the validity of this formula for ALL triangles about 2,000 years ago. That was before computers and calculators or even slide rules. Possibly, he didn’t even have paper and pencil to write with. This is truly amazing.

Analyze what’s filling up the HD space on your Mac

Just came across a great free tool called OmniDiskSweeper which is very easy to use. Basically, it outlines exactly what files fo what size you have in what folders on your drive.

I recovered 10 GB without much trouble that I wasn’t even aware I was “wasting”.

Incidentally, on my Mac which has just 2GB of RAM, this tool discovered a 2GB file called sleepimage which I didn’t know I had. Well, it’s what’s used to save all the stuff you have in RAM when the computer goes to sleep. If you lose power, your work will be retrievable through the sleepimage. There’s no point in trashing it as it’ll be remade on the next boot. It can be discarded, however, if you decide to change from sleep mode 3 to the older sleep mode thus saving a lot of space. Read about it here.