minus

minus - A review by techlaze

Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.

Being Quiet and Successful

I recently read this excellent blog (partial quote follows):

The Quiet Theory of Influence | zen habits

When everyone yells “Look at me!”, become quiet.

When others seek attention, turn your attention inward.

When everyone wants pageviews and sales, be valuable.

When others try to pull visitors to their sites, let people find you themselves.

When most blogs have popups and drop-downs urging readers to subscribe to their newsletters, get out of your readers’ way.

When others brag of their success, let others laud you instead.

When others cling greedily to copyrights, give your work away.

When others use goals to drive themselves to change the world, learn to be content, and people will ask to learn your secrets.

My friend John Fay found this excellent demonstration:

xkcd: Marketing Interview

Peace, everyone!

Emails and attachments (my gripes)

Often, I receive emails asking me to open an attachment so that I can learn details about an event/fundraiser/etc. It seems to me that it would be just as easy for the sender to paste the details in the email body and save everyone the bother of having to open a document. It would also save our email servers from having to store documents that are not needed.

While I am at it, please consider not using PowerPoint to create a fancy-looking one-slide document. We need less "artistic" and more information, more simplification and less decoration.

And let me not forget this one: I will not support a fundraiser for a "health" cause that sells unhealthy products. Selling cookies, pies, and fried chicken to raise funds for the American Heart Association makes as much sense as selling guns to promote gun control, or selling joints in an anti-drug campaign.

Some excellent ideas for maintainig your PC in good shape

Free PC Maintenance Tools

Just like a car, your computer needs regular maintenance to continue performing at its best. Waiting until accumulated minor problems make your computer run intolerably slow is bad for it. A neglected PC works harder than it should and then hardware can start to fail. You may experience a sudden catastrophic crash similar to a car engine seizing up because you never changed the oil.

Education is critical to progress

Here is an opportunity to take college courses for free:

Free Online College Courses

There are two parts to this article. A link to the second part is at the bottom of part one (which this link points to).

Enjoy exploring the work of free college courses!

A new Linux distribution for the security minded

A new Linux distribution for the security minded | TechRepublic

The U.S. Department of Defense has released it’s own security-enhanced Linux distribution designed to protect remote workers who must access corporate and government networks from insecure locations.

Firefox 5

I was surprised to see that Firefox 5 came out so quickly after Firefox 4. And then all went wrong. Not earth-shattering wrong, but Firefox began crashing and could not stay running for more than a few seconds. I immediately suspected an add-on. I found how to get Firefox started in Safe Mode (hold the Shift key and then click the icon on your taskbar or double-click the icon on your desktop). That allowed me to disable all add-ons. But even after doing that it was the same problem. So I downloaded a fresh copy from the net and re-installed the program. Same problem. ran through the safe mode start again, disabled all add-ons and then it was OK. I re-started on add-on at a time and stopped when I had turned all essential add-ons. I suspect the Forecastfox Weather but I have not narrowed it down to that point yet. More to come.

Update: Forecastfox was not it. More digging needed.
Update #2: None of the add-ons seem to be causing the problem now. Maybe the original install did nto run properly.

So far, the new version is fast, even faster than version 4. Nice! :-)