I logged into my Dropbox account and moments later a balloon pop-up in my System Tray informed me that I had another 250 MB space.  I hadn’t yet referred another friend, although I was thinking about doing it.  So assuming that Dropbox weren’t giving me extra space just for *thinking* about referring someone, I had a look around my account to find out why I had been given the extra space.

Once you have logged into your account there’s a Recent Events tab.  I clicked on that and the latest message informed me

You became a Dropbox Guru and earned 250MB of bonus space!

I had no idea how I had become a ‘Dropbox Guru’ so I did some digging and found out that if you click on the Getting Started tab, there’s a message at the top:

Welcome to Dropbox. Complete these steps to become a Dropbox guru!

It gives a list of things to do; after you’ve completed each one, you get an extra 250 MB!

I had managed to cross everything off the list without even realizing it!

Edit: If you’re interested in how secure files stored in a Dropbox are see Dropbox Security.

You can pay to increase this space to 50 GB ($9.99 per month) or 100 GB ($19.99 per month).

Another way to get an additional 3 GB (5 GB total space) is by accepting a referral, or by referring up to 12 people.

If someone refers you, and you use the link they sent when signing up, then you instantly get 2.25 GB on signup.  The person who referred you also gets an additional 250MB of space.

You can then refer other people, and for each person who signs up, you get an extra 250MB, up to a maximum of 3GB extra space (5GB in total) with a free account.

Here’s how to refer someone:

1. Sign into your dropbox account at www.getdropbox.com
2. On that page you should see:
   
3. Click on the ‘referring your friends’ link and you should then get a page with 3 options (A, B and C).
4. Options B and C involve you entering someone else’s email address into a website – not something I’m ever comfortable doing – so I would use option A:
   
5. If you copy the whole link then paste it into an email, you can then send it to whoever you like.
   If you have a Facebook or Twitter account you can click on the links provided to share your referral link that way, or you can just paste the link into a blog or MySpace page etc.  That’s what I did on my earlier blog post.

The link is unique to you, so when your friend uses it to sign up, Dropbox know you’ve referred them and will give both of you some extra space.  I haven’t got the maximum space yet so here’s a handy referral link for you to use: https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTE3MTg4ODM5

To find out how to share a folder with someone, see Sharing a Dropbox folder.

Yes, it reduces the irritation of having to email things to myself, or remembering to save onto USB key when I want to take a file somewhere, great

Possibly the best thing about it though, is being able to use it to send/share large files with others (https://www.getdropbox.com/tour#3).

My sister wanted a video she saw on my computer of one of the children the other day, and when I looked it was around 97 MB – too big to email.  Now, we could have found a USB key and copied it to that, but we decided to test out sharing on dropbox.  Here’s how we did it, and how you could too:

1. I created a new folder called “Aunty” inside my dropbox:



2. I right-clicked on the newly created folder and selected Dropbox > Share this folder…



3. This took me to the dropbox login page in my browser, where I entered my email address and password to log in.
4. After logging in I was presented with a page headed “Share Aunty” (the name of the folder) where I could enter the email address of the person I wanted to share the folder with.  So I entered my sister’s email address.

   

   Ideally the email address you type would be the one they used to sign up to dropbox.  However, I think you can use any email address that you know they’ll receive (I haven’t tested this yet).  In fact, I don’t think they even need to have signed up to dropbox yet, they will just receive an invitation to do so if they haven’t.  I’ll post a comment when I know for sure.

5. I then copied the file she wanted into the folder and after a few minutes uploading, we could see that it was synchronized on the dropbox server (the green checkmark shows that it’s synchronized).



6. As my sister had her dropbox set up already the “Aunty” folder just appeared in her dropbox.  Her computer downloaded (synchronized) the files in the folder automatically, so now we can just drag any file we want to share into that folder, and dropbox does the rest.

   As you can see this works with any type of file, large or small, so it’s great for sharing documents and photos too.If she’s using a different computer, without the dropbox client installed, she can just sign in to the website and download any files through the browser.

Try it out with your friends and family, and let me know how you get on!  If you register on this blog, you can post your comments below.

If you find that you need more space, see: Get more Dropbox space.

How can you enable them to use the Internet and explore subjects that interest them, without exposing them to danger; whether individuals who would do them harm, or information that is inappropriate for children?

Well, there are things that you can do, but you must consider these issues:

• How technically capable are your children?
• Are they likely to try to find ways around any “protection” you’ve put in place?
• How much effort are you prepared to invest to make sure they’re safe?

For instance, there are Firefox add-ons (more here) that give you control over the websites that your children can visit.

However, Firefox is only one of many Web browsers available, most of which you won’t have even heard of.

If you configure Firefox, but no other browsers, and if there are no restrictions over who can install programs on your computer, then a child with just a little initiative will use Internet Explorer (IE), or find and download a different Web browser.  Then whatever protection you’ve put in place on Firefox will have no effect.

So, what can you do?

• The very best thing is to spend time with your children, sit with them when they use the Internet and teach them how to recognize, and avoid, ‘dodgy’ sites.
• Put your computer in a room where everyone can see the screen.

But what about technical options, what can be done with the computer?

As with most things you have choices:

1. Learn about how to protect your children yourself
2. Pay for “Parental Control” software
3. Pay someone to configure your computer

Obviously there cannot be any guarantees, but the best way is to put the effort in to find out how to configure the computer yourself, and remain vigilant.  Technical ‘solutions’ aren’t a panacea.  It’s not a ‘set and forget’ situation.

The added incentive of protecting your children (rather than yourself, or your own information) may be what you need to put the effort in to understand more about your computer.  The added benefit is that you will probably prevent other computer problems like viruses.

More information, and links to resources I’ve researched will be in my next post on this subject.

Before I used to simply select the area with my mouse, which may or may not include a whole bunch of text I didn’t want or need.  Say for instance, I just wanted the column “Why not try” on this page:

Notice how, if I drag, I can’t avoid also selecting some of the text in the left hand column.

I used to work around this by pasting into another application first and deleting the text I didn’t want.

The other day I found that if you hold down the Ctrl key while clicking table cells, you can select any individual cells you want to copy:

Right-click > Copy (Ctrl + V) and the result:

I didn’t know this was possible, and on my system it looks as though it only works in Firefox (I tried Chrome and IE, but haven’t tested in other browsers yet).

Next, I want to be able to select text (not an image) by dragging a rectangle over it and getting the text (as with Block selection in OpenOffice.org).  Perhaps there’s an Add-on for doing this, but I haven’t found it yet.

1. The first thing to do is make notes.  Make a note of the name of any virus/malware infection you see in the result of any scans (or take screenshots).  They may help you when looking for tools to fix the problem, or they may help a computer expert if you end up taking the computer to them.  Even if the notes don’t help them, they will appreciate the fact that you’ve at least tried to be helpful!
2. Something else you could try is using System Restore (Start > Help and Support > Undo changes or restore software) to take your computer back to an earlier state without losing personal data.
   This might help, but it can’t be guaranteed that this will remove the infection.
3. You could look for software tools to fix the problem (some of them are listed on this site – but some are specific depending on the infection you have, so I can’t hope to keep an up-to-date list here), but you need to be very careful.  It may be best to physically disconnect your computer from the Internet, to prevent further damage, and if you just search and randomly download anything that promises to “clean your computer” you may find yourself in deeper trouble.  Most malware gets on to your computer by duping you into thinking it is something legitimate, whether an email attachment, a download or something else.
   There are genuine tools available that will scan for and remove malware.  Sometimes a specific tool has to be written to fight a specific infection.  If you’re confident running these tools, then you might try this, but only download from a site you trust or that you’re absolutely sure is genuine.
4. Finally, be prepared to pay someone to help you.  Cleaning a PC is a tedious and time-consuming job, and few people enjoy doing it.  Also, try to be patient, it may take a few days to diagnose and purge the system of any malware – particularly if you’ve asked for your files to be kept intact, or cleaned where possible.

• As I’ve written about before, there are other programs you should have installed too: a software firewall, anti-virus software, and an anti-spyware program being the minimum protection you should have.

• You also need to keep all of these products up to date.  Check for updates regularly.  Daily is best, weekly is OK, monthly at a bare minimum.  Write it on your calendar, put a reminder in your phone, or get yourself a desktop alarm clock to remind you to do it if the software doesn’t do it for you.

• Know the programs you have installed – and the date you installed them if possible.  Keep a list somewhere, or take screenshots of your Add or Remove Programs list (Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs).  This in itself may encourage you to uninstall programs you don’t need or use, which may help your computer to run faster and free up resources.
  Why keep a list of programs?  Well, sometimes Viruses or other Malware don’t hide, they “pretend” to be programs you want, such as “AntiVirus XP 2008″ or “AV 2009″ (see: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/malware-removal/remove-antivirus-xp-2008). These two are rogue Malware programs I’ve seen recently.
  • If you know the programs you have installed, then you’ll easily identify a rogue program that “pops up” unexpectedly – even if it seems genuine.
  • A list of the program you installed, or that you know are genuine, may also be useful if you take your computer to an expert to remove malware.

• Keep your Operating System up-to-date. Make sure you have downloaded all of the latest Windows Updates, to ensure that you don’t have any known vulnerabilities still on your computer.

• Use Firefox and Thunderbird, or other secure browsers or email clients.  These don’t prevent you from getting infected, but they may help you stay away from sites that are dangerous, or they may prevent pop-ups or other malware that targets Internet Explorer or Outlook/Outlook Express.

• If you receive any email containing an attachment that you weren’t expecting, don’t open it:
  • First, check that the email address of the sender looks “sensible” – often the email address will not match the “Sender” name.
  • Consider, most legitimate/genuine companies will not send you information in an attachment if it’s the first time they’ve contacted you, but rather in the body of the email itself.
  • Right-click on the file, save it to your desktop.
  • Then right-click on the file and successively run any “Scan with…” options presented to scan the file with your installed (and up-to-date) anti-virus and anti-spyware programs.
  • If these scans do not show any problems, you may consider opening the file.

These tips will help you to stay safe online. There are also other websites on this subject, so if you read something useful on one of them, please feel free to leave a comment below.

I’ve also read what some others have written on this subject and picked up a couple of interesting thoughts from this article:

The easiest and most inexpensive way to backup data such as pictures, home movies, or financial data is to burn the files to a DVD. [...] I can’t stress enough though, once the data is backed up please move the discs off site from your home. If there is a fire you will lose the data on both the computer and your backups. If you cannot find a place to put them away from home, buy a DATA fire safe. [... The] price is well worth the investment.

Another solution which makes it easy to save data offsite is by using an online backup solution. These sites can be found by searching for a remote offsite backup solution. They will charge you a monthly fee typically and can be very expensive depending on how much data you have. There is also the argument of them having access to your data [...]

Back to the idea of an automated backup, and why I haven’t yet sorted it out.  Apart from the usual excuse (time) I have been researching the software available for automated backup and wanted to be able to present some options with this article.  This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I have looked at a few programs that claim to backup data.  Here are my findings, which you may or may not agree with:

• Areca Backup

  This looks promising, perhaps for a future release.  At the moment, although everything appears to be in place, I felt that there wasn’t enough help for a new user.  I couldn’t find the simple information needed to set up a backup routine quickly.  I’m sure it’s possible, but I was trying to find something that would allow me to schedule backups with the minimum of fuss.

• Windows Backup

  • XP: Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup

    For a simple, scheduled backup, this will do the job.

    However, it doesn’t support ordinary compressed files, this would mean that you would have to use Windows restore to get your files back.  Although it appears that there is an option to compress, I couldn’t get it to work on my test computer (so the backup files would be bigger than necesssary).

    Some of the programs below let you get your files back using an ordinary archive program, on any computer.

  • Vista: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Maintenance > Backup and Restore Centre

    This is an easy to use way to schedule the backup of some specific data, but it does not allow you to configure files and complete folders to be backed up, and you can’t back up any executable files.

    If your Hard Disk isn’t very organized, it might be worth using this at least to do a one off backup of documents, photos, videos etc. as this should find them for you wherever they are on your computer.

• Backup and Shutdown

  This is “almost there”.  It uses standard compression methods and is very configurable.

  There are lots of features, including easy to read progress bars during backup and the facility to send an email with a log of a completed backup.

  The “schedule” works in a slightly different way to others I’ve seen.  Rather than set specific days/times to backup automatically, the program is configured to “expect” a backup every X days.  If you don’t run the backup within that time period an email reminder is sent (provided the program is opened).

  On the down side:

  Although it is highly configurable, and the controls are reasonably intuitive, some aspects of the program do appear to be overly complicated.

  There isn’t an automated schedule.  This isn’t a program you can “set up and forget” you have to run the backup yourself, although as mentioned above you can set it to remind you to run the backup (if you set the program to start when the computer is switched on).

  The program choices are: Backup and Shutdown, Backup and Restart, Backup and Log Off, Backup, Shutdown, Restart, Log Off.  This suggests to me this would be a good program to run instead of just shutting down your computer.

  It isn’t possible to set up an incremental – or differential – backup (as far as I can tell).

  When running the wizard the program encountered an error – it didn’t crash the program but I couldn’t get the wizard to complete.

• Cobian Backup

  This is the best program I could find and seems to do everything you could want from a backup utility.

  Features:

  • Supports Incremental and other types of backup
  • Fully configurable scheduler
  • Support for multiple backup profiles
  • Support for standard compression types (zip and 7zip)
  • Configurable emails e.g. on success or on failure
  • Configure events to run before and/or after the backup runs (e.g. shutdown, or stop a program and restart it)
  • Can be run as a service, or as an application
  • FTP support
  • More features…

  In short, I couldn’t think of anything I would want a backup program to do that this couldn’t!  I will be using it and will report if I encounter any programs.  The only thing that didn’t work for me was “drag and drop” of files/folders, but I don’t know if this was a problem with the program or something to do with Vista (which I was testing on).

Of course you must use whichever backup program you choose entirely at your own risk, and I’d still recommend doing a manual copy of data once in a while (as recommended in the quotes above).

The other thing you can do is synchronize data in 2 locations, which does give some protection to your data. I will cover this in another post in the future, as there are other programs that specialise in synchronization. However, synchronizing should never be used as an alternative to backup – if a problem occurs with one of your files, synchronizing would then duplicate the problem, and destroy the good copy!

If you know of any other backup programs, or have experience using any of those above, please post a comment.

vCard is a file format standard for electronic business cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard

Without going into too much detail here, a vCard attached to an email you send can include as much or as little information as you wish.  Generally, they include Contact Numbers, Postal Address and perhaps Job Title (if used in a work environment).

Here’s how to set one up in Thunderbird:

1. In Thunderbird, go to Tools > Account Settings…



2. Click in the box next to “Attach my vCard to messages” to put a check mark in the box
3. Click the Edit Card… button
4. Enter all the information you want to include in your vCard (remember that ALL of this information will be available to ANYONE you send emails to)
5. Click on OK to save your vCard
6. Click on OK to close the Account Settings box

That’s it. Every time you send an email using Thunderbird your vCard will be attached to the message.  This is how it will appear to someone also using Thunderbird who receives an email from you:

The above test vCard had information included in every field, to show what is displayed from vCards in Thunderbird.  To see the rest of the information the recipient can just click on the card and then either confirm adding you to their address book, or cancel if they just want to view the info.

Other email clients may process or display vCards differently.

Hopefully that covers all information regarding signatures and vCards.  If you have any comments or questions please register and add your comment below.

Sometimes, as in my previous post, I may suggest that you create a file or rename an existing file with a new extension.

file extension In DOS and some other operating systems, one or several letters at the end of a filename. Filename extensions usually follow a period (dot) and indicate the type of information stored in the file. For example, in the filename EDIT.DOC, the extension is DOC, which indicates that the file is a word processor file.
www.west.asu.edu/achristie/545/webgloss.htm

If you’re a Windows user, this could pose a difficulty for you if you have all the default settings, as many file extensions are hidden from you.

To make sure that you can see a file’s extension, follow these steps (Windows XP):

1. Click Start and open My Computer
2. Select Tools > Folder Options…
3. Click on the View tab
4. In Advanced settings: make sure that the option “Hide extensions for known file types” is deselected (no tick in the box)
5. Click OK

Now you will see file extensions for all of your files.