Friedbeef’s Tech

Below is a train of thought which goes on in my head more often than it really should.

I’m not a member, I just want to read ONE article from your site.

“Register for NYTimes.com.”

I really don’t want to sign up for anything

• “Breaking news and award winning multimedia
• New York Times newspaper articles
• Arts & Dining reviews
• Online Classifieds”

That’s great, but I just want to read that ONE article.

“It’s free and it only takes a minute!”

Can I please read that article now?

If the above is how you feel when you see a signup screen when all you want to do is read a story, read on.

If you love filling up forms, click here

Thankfully, the nice folks at bugmenot.com have created a community where like minded individuals can have access to the free logins that others have created and submitted to the site.

If you go to Bugmenot.com, you just tell it what website you want a login for, and it pulls up login details which users have submitted.

A faster alternative would be to use a Bookmarklet or the Firefox extension (which I personally use), which allows you to get the login details right away without having to visit the Bugmenot site. Both these tools can be found on their site.

All your questions on how legal (it is - paid content is not included on the site, only free content is available) and how ethical it may be (that’s up to you), and how you can remove your site from Bugmenot listing can be answered here

Technorati Tags: bugmenot, firefox, extensions, bookmarklet, free, news

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I hate file size limitations on email attachments.

Yes, I suppose they’re there to prevent abuse of email… but when I need to send something large right away - it can be downright annoying!

Thankfully, we live an age where abundant online storage for consumers is available for little or no cost - leading to a number of free solutions to address our issue for today. One of the services which clearly stands out in the crowd is a little service called YouSendIt.

How it works:

• Send an email from YouSendIt, and attach your very large file.
• What YouSendIt is doing is it offers up temporary storage space on the web and you are actually uploading your files to it when you attach the file.
• YouSendIt will send that email along with a link to the recipient, who can then download the file from the web.

If you do decide to try YouSendIt, you should register (free) for their enchanced beta version which includes new features, which includes a proper status bar, as well as contacts list, and a tracking system to see who picked up your file.

You have the option to use a stripped down version of the service where you don’t have to register, but the features there leave much to be desired.

Here’s the weird thing… Yousendit.com does not seem to provide a direct link to the registered version after you’ve signed up… so you may want to bookmark http://beta.yousendit.com for easy reference after you’ve registered.

Specifications:

At this point, it allows 25 downloads per file, up to 50 recipients in a single email, and you can send files of up to 1 Gig in size, and stores it for 7 days, which is pretty solid. You can also set emails to appear as if it came from your own email address, not a YouSendIt address so it does not confuse your recepient.

You can read more at techcrunch, which gave this service a good review.

Security:

Everyone of these services tell you they are secure, but if you’re paranoid concerned about security like me, you might want to zip up the files, and add a password. Of course, send the password to your recipient using your own email, not in the YouSendIt note!

Other services:
I’ve also tried Dropsend, which seems to be a bit more limited than YouSendIt, but I do consider it robust enough to be a backup solution. New services like these are popping up everywhere!

Here is a very good list of similliar services that you can try.

Bonus tip: You can also try this more conventional, but slightly more inconvenient workaround that works with Winzip.

Related Links:

YouSendIt
YouSendIt (enchanced) Beta
Dropsend
Collection Of Online Storage/Email Services
Winzip

Technorati Tags: yousendit, dropsend, online, storage, email, winzip

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130 MILLION Downloads can’t be wrong.

Firefox (Released for free by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation) is the safer, faster, and better alternative web browser to Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Ever since it’s release, it has been receiving rave reviews by taking the web experience to new heights, and today we’re going to take a closer look at it.

getfirefox.com already has simple beautiful explanations of what the Firefox browser can do for you, so I will be focusing on certain simple aspects of Firefox.

Inspired by the 5-minute Firefox Challenge, this post:

1. is going to concentrate on what you can do with Firefox with ONE click.
2. will provide a printable A4 sized flyer if you want to share how easy to use Firefox is with your friends.

So here it is…

I know it’s a bit hard to read due to image display limitations on this blog, but it’s basically saying that you only need :

• ONE CLICK to navigate the web faster using tabs
• ONE CLICK to access multiple search engines (Smart Search)
• ONE CLICK to instantly read your latest news (Livebookmarks)
• ONE CLICK to access your bookmarks from a toolbar

The text at the bottom of the flyer are a snippets of reviews of Firefox to lend credibility to the claim of Firefox’s great web experience.

As mentioned earlier in the post, what is highlighted here is just the simplest of functions. Firefox does much more than this, which is one of the great things about it - that it caters for both the novices and the power users with ease.

If you need more convincing about Firefox, see what others have to say:

• PCWorld Magazine voted it as the Best Product of the Year for 2005
• Cnet Editors rated it “Excellent” and gave it an Editor’s Choice Award

If you think IT publications are too techy and cannot be trusted:

• Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg said “Security, Cool Features of Firefox Web Browser Beat Microsoft’s IE”
• Forbes Magazine rated it as their favourite web browser in their best of the web section.

If you think business publications have all “sold-out” and cannot be trusted:

• Countless other personal testimonials can be found here

If you think people genrally cannot be trusted:

• This is a live counter of the number of Firefox downloads

(If this counter goes down, there are 131 Million and rising downloads as of the writing of this post)

If you think all this is baloney:

… at least try the Opera web browser before going back to Internet Explorer :)

Related Links:

If you are not a Firefox user - Click here
If you are already a Firefox user and want to help spread experience - Click here or here

[tags]firefox, mozilla, web browser [/tags]

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