If you use cloud storage such as Amazon S3 and if you’re a Windows user, you may want to check out Gladinet, a tool which I regularly use and recommend. Basically Gladinet creates a virtual drive on your computer. Then, through the Gladinet Cloud Desktop Management Console you can mount cloud storage as folders on this drive. I use it almost exclusively for Amazon S3, but it supports Google Storage for Developers, Windows Azure, Windows Live Skydrive, box, custom FTP servers and many more. What I like about Gladinet is that you only need one software to access all of those providers and that it really works like a local drive (it has its own drive letter) from all applications, even from command line, unlike network paths or Windows Explorer extensions.
The basic version is free. There are premium versions with remote backup and other features.
What I would really like to see however is improved Picasa support (currently I can only access thumbnail-size pictures), support for Dropbox (because I’m looking for a good way to access files in Dropbox without syncing to my desktop) and also support for SSH File Transfer so I can get rid of WinSCP. Hopefully someone will read this and write a plugin :-)
Have you ever thought of turning your PC into a WiFi hotspot?! Why would anyone do this? Well, there a quite a few use cases for it. Imagine you have multiple WiFi devices, such as a smartphone, a tablet and, of course, your PC. If you’re at home or in office, no problem, you’ll most likely have your network configured in all of them. But what if you’re at a friend’s place, at an airport or workshifting from a café?! In the latter places, you sometimes have to pay for WiFi or at least get a limited access code. What if you only had to configure the network on one device, your PC, and simply share it with others?
Well, there’s an app for that, which I’m happy to recommend today. It’s called connectify and is available for your Windows 7 PC. It comes in two versions, lite and pro. Technically it is built on top of a Windows 7 feature which allows to “split” the WiFi hardware into multiple virtual adapters, which is kind of cool since it allows you to get Internet from a WiFi access point and run your own hotspot the same time without special hardware requirements. It works fine most of the time, however unfortunately I’m experiencing problems if the original network uses WPA-802.1X mode (in universities, for example).
The virtual hotspot comes with the things you’d expect in a router, such as a NAT, DHCP and private IPs; the connected devices are listed in the system tray of your PC with their IPs and you can quickly restrict or allow Internet and local network access. This is nice to e.g. test your own websites hosted on your PC with your phone or tablet, independent of what network you’re connected to or even if there’s no network at all.
You can not only share WiFi-to-Wifi (or 3G-to-WiFi, which I haven’t tested yet), but also ethernet-to-Wifi and vice versa. I learned to like this feature today when I connected a non-3G iPad to the Internet by having a friend plug her ethernet cable into my laptop.
This app is a must-have for road warrior geeks (or those who think of themselves as such), although I think to reach this audience they really should make a Mac OS X version available as well!
This is amazing! Install Windows 1.0 and go through upgrades (2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 98, 2000, XP, Vista and 7) and still you have a lot of your old settings like username, color schema and installed DOS applications. 23 years of upgrade compatibility! Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for sharing this.
LukasRos' Blog