Author: Nate

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 4 – Dropbox

A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles describing “Cloud Services” that offered some great functionality like Offsite Backups, Password Storage with LastPass, and Note taking with Evernote for little to no money and showed how you could use the Internet for more than web browsing.  Today I’ll describe a service called Dropbox that was mentioned briefly in the backups article, but which deserves an article of its own.


At it’s core, Dropbox allows you to put all your commonly used files on your computer but also have them instantly and automatically copied to the dropbox website and to any of your other computers!  Together, the Dropbox website and all of your computers make up your Dropbox Cloud. Let’s say you have a work laptop and a  desktop at home.  When you save something on your laptop, the changes will be copied to your desktop and to the Dropbox website (protected by a login and password of course), all automatically.  One of the best things about Dropbox is that you don’t have to have Internet access all the time to use it.  It can’t update your Dropbox Cloud until you get back online, but once you do reconnect, any changes you’ve made in the meantime are sent immediatly.

Macintosh Menu Bar
Mac Menu Bar
Windows System Tray
Windows System Tray

Dropbox does all this by installing a small program on your computer.  To have a file included in your Dropbox Cloud, simply save them into your Dropbox folder. This is usually inside your Documents folder, but you can put it anywhere.  Anything that you put in this folder, pictures, movies, Word docs, other folders, all of these things will be automatically synced to your cloud.

One way we use this in our house is for the kids’ computer work.  The kids are constantly moving between my computer, my wife’s computer, and the family machine.  By creating a folder for each of the kids in Dropbox and sharing that folder between my account and my wife’s account, anything the kids save will be automatically copied to every computer in the house.

File History

Speaking of kids, you may have experienced the heartbreak of losing changes when someone overwrites your novel or the family budget spreadsheet.  Dropbox stores the last 8 versions of every file in the Dropbox folder.  When you realize that your file has mysteriously changed to a bunch of gibberish, just go to the Dropbox website, right click the file and choose Previous versions.  You’ll see the last 8 versions and the date they were last saved.  Then you can choose the version you want.  A great way to recover work you thought was gone forever!  You can even restore deleted files!

Sharing

I mentioned my wife and I share the kids folder between our accounts, and sharing is a great feature of Dropbox.  There are two ways to go about this.  Send them a link to a file, or Share with them.  In the first case, you can make files and/or folders in your Dropbox downloadable by others, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.  Just right click and choose share a link to get a URL you can give to anyone who can then see those files.  This allows for a simple way to let someone see a group of photos or get around email attachment issues.
When you share a folder or file, the other person will need to have a Dropbox account, or signup for one.  You right click and choose Share This Folder and then add the email address you want to share with.  They’ll get a message to agree to the share or create an account, and from then on you can both edit the files and changes will be synced between both accounts.  Full collaboration details are on the Dropbox site.

Photos and Videos

Recently, Dropbox has been adding a bunch of Photo and Video features.  They now include a central place to view all the pictures in your Dropbox Cloud, photo album creation, and you can upload pictures straight from your mobile phone or tablet.  More on the mobile tools later, but selecting a few photos or folders you can add them to an album and easily share the album with anyone you choose.  When it comes to letting people see the photos from your vacation or trip, this is about as easy as it gets.

Mobile

If you have a smart phone, Dropbox is a great way to get to the files you’ve been working with from anywhere.  Install the app and browse your files, when you need a file click it and it will download to your phone.  To make sure that you can get to it even when you don’t have a connection, mark it as a favorite.  A special feature of the mobile app is Camera Upload. This will allow you to automatically upload all the pictures you take on your phone to Dropbox where you can move them wherever you want.  Much simpler than some of the photo management tools on smart phones.

Get Free Space

Dropbox comes with 2 GB of free space, which you can stretch a long way, but there are ways to get more.  You can purchase extra space if you want or get free space by going through their tutorial and referring others to Dropbox.  You can also get extra free space if you are a student and have a “.edu” email address.  In full disclosure, the links to Dropbox in this article are referral links and we get extra free space when you signup through those links.  It doesn’t change our enthusiasm for Dropbox, and thanks for helping us out!  Dropbox has truly become a central part of how our family works on the computer.  We don’t worry about lost work, schlepping files around on thumb drives, or collaborating together on projects.

Health Care Crisis Redux

I recently made a post on Facebook about my frustration with the 45% rise in my family’s health insurance premiums which I blame in part on the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) legislation called Obamacare by many including President Obama.  I was surprised at the number of people who chided me about it either in the comments or privately.  Since many of them apparently didn’t want to discuss their points openly, I’ll respect that and post here a response based on what I sent to them directly.  I certainly understand their decision to support Obamacare, and many of them had very well laid out reasons why it was the best option.  I have much less problem with the particulars of the bill we’re now feeling the effect of and more problem with the entire approach that was taken to the health care situation.  I had similar thoughts way back in 2008, but I wasn’t called to Washington 🙂  I have two big issues with these new health insurance legislations.
Continue reading “Health Care Crisis Redux”

How to choose a Presidential Candidate


First: If you’ve never seen the movie The Princess Bride, you haven’t lived.  Plus, if you haven’t seen it, this article will make a lot more sense if you watch this clip from the movie first.

All right, who is the best candidate to become president?  The battle of wits has begun.  It ends when you decide and we all vote and find out if we made the right decision or if we will regret it for the next 4 years. Continue reading “How to choose a Presidential Candidate”

Censoring Sermons

Bishop JenkyThe bishop of my diocese, Peoria Illinois, recently gave a rousing sermon at a Men’s March that I attended.  The March is a chance for Catholic men to express their faith in a public way and show their support of Catholic values.  We march through the streets of Peoria in silent contemplation and then celebrate mass at the cathedral with the bishop.  Based on the sermon that he gave, he has been called upon to make an apology to President Obama, and has been reported to the IRS for violating the terms that limit political action by 501(c)(3) organizations.

It is ironic how the bishop’s sermon began with a discussion of the readings for that day which were about the boldness and bravery of the apostles when they defied the Sanhedrin who were trying to silence them.  The bishop was urging his audience to vote against politicians that would subdue the church’s mission of ministry in places outside the church proper by forcing schools, hospitals and charities to support abortions by paying for health insurance plans that cover the procedure.  He was doing so in the context of the persecution that the church has faced since the early days discussed in the reading.  He walked us through the trials we faced under Bismarck, Clemenceau, Hitler, and Stalin.  He mentioned that we have survived barbarian invasions and “wave after wave of Jihads”.  He also named President Obama by name, and rightly so as he is the primary politician pushing the current agenda which forces churches to support things that are at exact opposites to our long held beliefs.  The Bishop came right out and said that Catholics should “vote their Catholic consciences” in the fall.  So I suppose that yes, he was preaching a political message, and I think he should have every right to.

It is no recent “liberal conspiracy” that created the rules that could potentially censor speech from the pulpit.  It was an amendment to the 501(c)(3) rules by Lyndon Johnson in 1954 that added this restriction, which some refer to as the “Johnson Amendment”.  It was a clear violation of church and state then and it is still one today.  The government should not be allowed to commend the church for it’s mission of charity with one hand, and then condemn them with the other when that mission supports values that don’t fit with the current administration’s views.

We can look to the Bible readings of the day for some direction.  The Sanhedrin says of the message the apostles were preaching, “But so that it may not be spread any further among the people, let us give them a stern warning …”.  Peter and John the perfect response, and one that should guide us when deciding whether we should allow the government to control what our pastors preach about when they responded

“Whether it is right in the sight of God
for us to obey you rather than God, you be the judges.
It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.”

We must listen to the gospels and we must go out and vote with our Catholic consciences.  It is the only thing to do and still hold to the values that make our faith real!  And we must support the bishop and all pastors who speak out from their pulpits and do not allow the government to silence them.  Show your support to your local priests and pastors, and show support to Bishop Jenky.  Show your representatives that you are not afraid and will not allow this.  Push for the repeal of the Johnson Amendment in regards to churches and do not let it continue!

Relationship Half-LIfe

My wife and I have now been dating or married for half my life.  Calculate your relationship half-life with “The Relationship Half-Life Calculator”.  It seems like just a moment hon 😉

Your birthday:

Date your relationship started:

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud

In our 3 part series on using the cloud for everyday things you need, we’ve covered backups and passwords, now we’ll cover the simple act of note taking.  The service I’m talking about is a tool/service called Evernote. Evernote is both a web service and a piece of software.  In brief it is a place to take notes that will automatically back them up and make them available through a website and a local client, but it’s much more than that.  It can change the way you keep track of everything from Meeting notes and magazine articles to your bills.

Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud”

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords

In Part 1 of this three part series, we talked about using Cloud Services for backups.  In Part 2, we’ll talk about how you can use the cloud to keep track of the myriad passwords you end up collecting and how you can start creating better passwords to protect you from attacks.  All this without risking storing your passwords in the open on someone else’s server, and always giving you a secure way to download a local backup.

Most of us have accounts all over the Internet, and most of them use some kind of username and password to let us access our account.  It may seem that the only way to keep track of them is to use the same password for most of the accounts.  Maybe you use a different one for your bank and a few other places, but it just becomes impossible to remember a different password for each site.  You could keep them all on Post-Its along your monitor, but hopefully you know that’s not a good idea.  So using a tool of some sort is a great way to get around this.  Several years ago I started using the password manager built into my browser to track passwords, and it was a great burden lifted.  I still used the same username and password on many sites, simply because I was lazy and didn’t want to create a new one.  But I used harder passwords more often and they were all remembered for me.  About a year ago, I started using a free service call LastPass to keep track of my passwords, and it has changed the way I work with passwords forever.

Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords”

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups

Last year, I wrote an article about using the cloud for backups and doing it securely.  There have been some big changes in the area since then, and I wanted to return to it and update some of my recommendations and add some new tools to the mix as well.  This is part 1 of a three part series on using Cloud Services.  Part 1 will revisit backups, Part 2 will cover storing passwords securely in the cloud, and Part 3 will show you how to keep track of every thought that crosses your mind and make it available anywhere, all through the cloud. Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups”