Category Archives: Technology

Posting Your Music Samples

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I’ve shown you how to share files with individuals via YouSendIt. I’ve also talked about using Dropbox and Carbonite to share files among your own devices. But suppose you want to share (legal original) music or sound files to a group of people, e.g., your band, or with the general public?

If you have your own website you can stream MP3s from there – but that could quickly use up your monthly data transfer allotment if the tracks are popular or large. If you are selling the tracks you could set up a Bandcamp account and post them there.

But if these are files like band practice recordings, rough drafts, non-music audio samples, etc. you may prefer to use SoundCloud.

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Quick Tip – Buying Coin Batteries

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I went to Walgreens last weekend to buy two LR44 batteries (the ones about the size of a thick aspirin) for a cat laser toy. Looking through the wall o’ batteries I found them – at $5.29 each!

I thought that was rather excessive, so instead I looked around to find the display of cheap book lights that run on LR44s. And since it was stocking stuffer time, I found a whole endcap of such items. So for $5 I bought TWO new keychain lasers that ran on three LR44s AND came with three more spares, a total of twelve batteries for $5!

For future reference, American Science and Surpus sells 10 LR44s (AKA AG13) for $1.95, plus other coin batteries (e.g., CR2016 and CR2032).

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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Sharing Files Across Multiple Devices Part 2: Carbonite

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In Part 1 I discussed using Dropbox as a cloud storage solution for sharing files among your devices. Today I want to discuss using Carbonite, which is advertised as a backup solution but can also be used to retrieve files.

You ARE backing up your computer, aren’t you? Unless you are only using it to read Facebook and your Gmail account, you really ought to be doing so. If you are a Mac owner, all you need for basic local backup is an external hard drive and the built-in Time Machine software (you do not need to buy a special Time Machine Capsule from Apple). If you have a PC, you need an external drive and either Windows built-in backup application or another one.

But even if you do perform regular backups to a local hard drive, that does you no good if your home is damaged due to flood or fire, or someone breaks in to seal all of your electronics. To cover you in those instances, or if you don’t want to need to remember to connect to something to back up, a cloud backup service like Carbonite can save your data bacon, as it is constantly updating its copy of your files in little bits every time you are connected to the internet.

But there is another trick you can perform with Carbonite once it has backed up your files:

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