Posted on 12/31/2010 9:23:49 PM PST by iowamark
Your gadgets and computers, your software and sites they are not working as well as they should. You need to make some tweaks.
But the tech industry has given you the impression that making adjustments is difficult and time-consuming. It is not.
And so below are 10 things to do to improve your technological life. They are easy and (mostly) free. Altogether, they should take about two hours; one involves calling your cable or phone company, so that figure is elastic. If you do them, those two hours will pay off handsomely in both increased free time and diminished anxiety and frustration. You can do it.
GET A SMARTPHONE Why: Because having immediate access to your e-mail, photos, calendars and address books, not to mention vast swaths of the Internet, makes life a little easier.
How: This does not have to be complicated. Upgrade your phone with your existing carrier; later, when you are an advanced beginner, you can start weighing the pluses and minuses of your carrier versus another. Using AT&T? Get a refurbished iPhone 3GS for $29. Verizon? Depending on whats announced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, get its version of the iPhone, or a refurbished Droid Incredible for $100. Sprint? Either the LG Optimus S or the Samsung Transform are decent Android phones that cost $50. T-Mobile users can get the free LG Optimus T.
STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER...
UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS TO THE CLOUD...
GET MUSIC OFF YOUR COMPUTER...
BACK UP YOUR DATA...
SET UP A FREE FILE-SHARING SERVICE Why: Because while e-mailing yourself files is a perfectly decent workaround, there are easier, more elegant ways to move files around and they do not cost anything, either...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yes, thats exactly what Dropbox is. Its a file hosting service. You can make files publicly available if you wish, but by default theyre private.
Sure, and when the cable goes out for weeks at a time you're up the proverbial creek. No, thanks. The same no thanks for online services for my personal information. I'd rather not have everyone and their cousin knowing my business or looking at my pictures.
Looked at it a few days ago. Could be very useful in some situations, but I'd not use it for anything sensitive.
I’m likely to try it.
If the topic doesn't have a political angle yet, I usually find their science writers to be very good. Their reliability is like Wikipedia is, it's OK if the topic is aploitical. Happy New Year!I always doubt the Times; but this looks thought-out.
What you said! And Happy New Year back at you!
Any thoughts here on how it compares to AVG antivirus software?
I use it to share files between my home and office computers and my Blackberry. Haven’t had any issues with it. Another product worth looking into is “Cortado Workplace”, it operates in a similar fashion as Dropbox, but their servers are in Germany, and there is some time lag.
I've been using Dropbox for a while and am quite pleased with it. It works and, contrary to what another poster said, I have found it to be low maintenance.
AVG has become shillware since the introduction of v8. Prior to that it would pop open a little window (behind active windows I believe if you had any open) update itself, and GO AWAY. Since v8 it blows this huge thing in front of whatever you’re working on, insists on dropping down an ad for the paid version, and when it’s done, takes like three or four clicks between the window and the systray to get it to go away. And as if that wasn’t enough, for the first couple months I couldn’t get v8 to update AT ALL! So I don’t know how the virus protection compares, but Avast is [a]vastly better for the blood pressure, I can tell you that much.
I still don’t trust my data to the “cloud.”
A while back some PHB decided they didn’t need to back up their SAN (high-end, high-volume file storage) before an upgrade. There was a problem with the upgrade for this SAN, which powered a “cloud” system. Then the contact data for millions of Sidekick users on T-Mobile went *poof*. If you had it on your phone, you now didn’t anymore.
It took them weeks to restore most of the data, and it was luck that they could do that at all.
If the above is newspeak for liking something, I suggest it needs to be reconsidered at what used to be called a drawing board. Otherwise, go forth and multiply.
HF
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