Category Archives: Communication

Transferring Files To Others

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I’ve recently shown you how to share files among your various devices. But you probably will also want to share files to other people. While your first thought is probably to send them a file attached to an email, that is not always workable for several reasons, including:

  • the file is just too big for your or their email server’s limits (usually over 5 MB is problematic).
  • the file is of a type that their email server prohibits in order to avoid the delivery of a virus (usually files ending in .exe, and frequently in .zip)

If the intended recipient is someone you see in person, you can always put the files on a flash drive or burn to a CD or DVD and hand the device/disk to them. But in many cases the recipient is not local – what then?

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How To Avoid Being An Unintentional Jerk Online

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You probably think of yourself as a decent human being who doesn’t go around pissing off your friends. But because we are all human beings it is inevitable that you will make some assumption that is not true, or not shared by the other person, or just not think something through from the other’s perspective and thus come across as insensitive or worse.

Here are a few things to consider before, and after, you put your foot in your mouth in an online situation:

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Preserving Cell Phone Power During An Electrical Outage

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For better or worse Hurricane Sandy will be past us on the east coast in 48 hours. But winter is coming, bringing yet more opportunities for electrical service to be interrupted.

Cell phone towers have backup batteries that can last for some hours or longer, so keeping your cell phone available for emergency calls is a good idea. Here are some tips to maximize the juice in smartphones:

– Turn off your phone’s wifi side (since your cable modem isn’t on, so there’s no sense it letting the phone keep searching for a signal) and Bluetooth services.

– Turn off most of its location services. On an iPhone go to Settings-Privacy-Location Services. You can either turn it off altogether, or leave Location Services on but go in and turn it off for most individual apps – if you have emergency notification apps like Ping4Alerts and CodeRED leave those on to get warnings from your city/state emergency management).

– Adjust the screen illumination to be as dim as possible, and to turn off the screen with the shortest available idle time.

– If you don’t plan to use your laptop for offline work, charge your phone from its battery.

– If you have a car, get a 12V charger for your phone (and gas up the car before the storm!).

– Plan ahead: this 12V storage battery (designed for powering Celestron telescopes) has two 12V jacks plus built-in small and large lights. Also pick up a DC/AC inverter and you can charge your phone plus power some other gear (e.g., recharge a laptop).

Facebook Tip: Beware of Privacy Slippage

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Who can see what you post on Facebook is a tricky concept. After numerous complaints FB made a lot of changes to their privacy settings but it’s still complex, and not all of the settings are “sticky” – you may think you are fine but unknowingly did something that makes everything you subsequently post a LOT more visible than you thought.

The most dangerous privacy slippage I’ve seen recently is one that may be setting ALL your status updates to be publicly visible – including to job interviewers, co-workers, etc.

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