HMAUS Signal » file sharing

iChat Theater from Paris 9/11 9 a.m.

joanmats — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:47:41 +0000

Joe Kissell, presents iChat theater for sharing presentations, videos, pictures and even computer screens, from his home half way around the world in Paris, France! Free. Saturday 9/11 9 a.m. – 10 a.m. ING Direct Cafe Ali’i Room 1958 Kalakaua Avenue. Joe is Senior Editor for TidBITS,, Senior Contributor for Macworld Magazine and ebook author.

drop.io: Simple, fast, free file sharing

markmcmahon — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:22:03 +0000

drop.io has to be one of the simplest sites I’ve ever seen. It’s gotten more bells and whistles over time, but still, it’s dead simple to set up a place on the Internet to share your files. And it’s FREE! Here’s how it works:

Visit their site
Either accept the random drop site name they give you, something like drop.io/38sdjs or create your own new name
Start uploading your files
Tell your friends the location and they can grab your files
DONE! That’s it!

But it doesn’t stop there. Let’s say you want to add a little security so that the entire world can’t easily access your files. drop.io allows for a guest password to get into folder. Want to lock it down further and customize what your guests are able to do? Set up an admin account. You can then specify things like guests can (or can’t) upload files on their own. Hmmm… Guests can upload files — that sounds like something a group could use: interactivity and collaboration…

Yes, drop.io also turns out to make a great, simple group web site. Set up a guest password for your drop, tell the group, and then let them share files; photos, pdfs, comments, videos, whatever. Free accounts are limited to 100MB, but you can upgrade to more space if it turns out you really need it. ($10 for 1GB/year for example.)

Here’s an example of how I’ve used it; I work for a large non-profit organization in town that sets up conferences all the time. These conferences often need to share readings or agendas with their attendees. The files are larger than some people’s email server limits, and they want to have all the files in one place. Boom — drop.io site; upload the files, share with the attendees, and it’s all done in minutes, for FREE! (Being the web guy and not having to build and maintain those site — THANK YOU DROP.IO!!)

But you could use drop.io to share with other groups; your family, your friends, even the Board of Directors at HMAUS has a drop.io site!

So, head over to drop.io right now and see how simple it is to build a web site — start sharing and collaborating today

Dropbox: Easy, Free File Syncing Between PC/Mac

markmcmahon — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:14:31 +0000

I’m someone who works in both the PC and Mac worlds. My home machine is a Mac. But at work I (have to) use a PC. There are plenty of times when I need to share files easily between machines. Not only share, but SYNC the files.

Dropbox allows you to easily set up a “cloud” storage space that can sync between your computers. That’s 2GB of FREE storage that you can share, backup, or sync files with.

I’ve tried many solutions and found that Dropbox is one of the easiest. Once you’ve signed up for a free account, you download the install and run it on each machine you want to sync up. It installs on PC, Mac, even Linux. You can set up hidden or public folders, even share your photos with others through it.

I’ve used Dropbox since it was in beta, with only one problem — I was running an older version on one of my computers; upgraded and all synced again!

How does it compare to some other solutions? It’s similar to both Syncplicity and Microsoft’s livemesh, though for me, both of those solutions were more difficult to get set up (and for livemesh, a pain on updates).

If you are looking for a fast, easy, CROSS-PLATFORM and FREE solution to file storage and syncing, check out Dropbox.