The following list of the Most Popular Websites was updated on Monday, May 30th 2011...
Use Yahoo! for 7 Days to Win Free Coffee for a Year
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computer tricks,
internet,
tech facts
Yahoo! was the most visited website on the Internet a few years ago but they’ve slipped to the third place courtesy Facebook and Google. Almost everyone has an email account with Yahoo! Mail but many don’t use it as their primary email address anymore.
Thus, in a possible bid to entice old users to check the various properties again, Yahoo! has launched a unique promotion in the U.S. where you may win a year of coffee if you are willing to sign-in to your Yahoo! account for seven consecutive days.
For every 7 consecutive days you sign-in to the Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, or Yahoo! Mobile we’ll give you one entry to win a year of premium coffee.
To participate, all you need a valid Yahoo! email address and you should be a U.S. citizen. You can even snail mail your entries to Yahoo as mentioned in the rules book.
The big question is – will an year of free coffee be enough to pull you back to Yahoo?
Monitor your Computer Remotely with Dropbox
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cloud space,
computer tricks,
internet
There are quite a few software tools that let you access your home or work computer from any another computer simply over the Internet. Some of the these tools even provide mobile apps so you can control your remote desktop using an iPhone or a BlackBerry.Remote Monitoring, not Remote Access
Now consider a slightly different scenario where you don’t want to remotely access the computer but simply monitor it from another location. For example:
Case 1. You make it a point to lock your workstation every time you leave the office. How do you confirm that no one else is using your computer while you’re at home sleeping.
Case 2. Your kids want to use your computer while you are out shopping. They are pretty young so you really want to know what they are doing on the computer in your absence.
Case 3. You are running some task on your computer and want to track the progress from another computer remotely.
Remote Desktop Monitoring with Dropbox
The idea behind using Dropbox for remote monitoring is fairly simple.
If you take a screen capture of your desktop screen and place that image in one of the Dropbox folders on your computer, the image will automatically get uploaded to the Dropbox website.
Repeat the screen capture process at regular intervals and you’ll get a time-lapse like recording of your desktop screen that you can view from any Internet connected computer or mobile phone since everything is now on dropbox.com.
Let’s see how we can implement this idea. First, you need to download Screen Grabber – a free screen capture utility that will save the screenshots directly in your Dropbox folder. If you have SnagIt, you can use it instead.
Next we need a mechanism that will capture screenshots at regular intervals. For that, you can use the following Autohotkey script* that runs in the background and will press the hotkey for you at set intervals.
Loop {
Send, {SHIFTDOWN}{F10}{SHIFTUP}
Sleep, 300000
}[*] If you have never used Autohotkey before, simply download and run this executable -dropbox-capture.zip – it’s a compiled version of the above script.
The default hotkey for Screen Grabber is Shift+F10. This script will press that hotkey and then wait for 5 minutes (5x60x1000) in a cycle. As new images get captured, they are simultaneously uploaded online.
Run this utility on any desktop that you want to monitor remotely and you’ll soon have a stream of screenshots in your Dropbox account as shown below. Everything runs quietly in the background so most people won’t notice any activity.
When you lock your workstation, the screen capture process is suspended but it resumes automatically as soon as you log in. You can run this tool on your office desktop and lock the workstation - if you find any screenshots in your Dropbox stream the next day, someone else probably used that machine.
Amazon Gives You 5 GB of Storage Space for Free
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cloud space,
cloud storage,
computer tricks,
internet,
tech facts
Amazon today unveiled a new storage service called Amazon Cloud Drive that gives you 5 GB of free online storage space to store your documents, photos, music and other files securely in the cloud. All you need is a free Amazon.com account to upload your files which you can then access from anywhere using a web browser.
Amazon Cloud Drive is purely an online file storage solution and the only client that you can use to upload or download files from your Cloud Drive account is your web browser.
Thus, for example, if you plan to copy your entire My Documents folder from the computer to Amazon’s cloud, you’ll have to upload files manually from the browser, one by one. Or, to save time, you could zip the entire folder into a single file and upload it in one go as Cloud Drive supports files as large as 2 GB in size. (Dropbox has a file size limit of 300 MB).
Amazon offers a handy desktop client that will scan your hard drive for music related files and will automatically put them to Cloud Drive - you then listen to your music from anywhere using the browser itself without having to download anything to that computer. Other than that, I think the Cloud Drive service is also good for manually backing up some of your really bulky files online - like those Outlook PSTs.
Amazon S3 vs Amazon Cloud Drive
There’s however one part about Cloud Drive that has surprised me a bit – the pricing structure. The service internally uses Amazon S3 for storage but if you compare the storage cost of these two services, you’ll find that Amazon S3 is nearly 80% more expensive than Cloud Drive.
Amazon charges 14¢ per month per GB for S3 which converts to around $1.78 per year (including the 10¢ data transfer fee) while Cloud Drive is available for a flat $1 per GB per year with no transfer-in or transfer-out fees. S3 is one of the popular choices for online backup but going forward, Cloud Drive could be a more cost-efficient option.
Bonus Tip – Upgrade to 20 GB for less than $1
All Amazon Cloud Drive users get 5 GB of free online storage space or you can pay $20 to upgrade to the 20 GB plan.
There’s another option as well. Amazon will upgrade your storage to 20 GB if you buy any MP3 Album from them. Now there are quite a few music albums on Amazon.com that are available for less than $1 – buy any one and you’ll be upgraded to 20 GB.
The only downside is that while Cloud Drive is available to everyone worldwide, Amazon’s music store is only for residents of the United States with a U.S. billing address
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