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Cloud storage: Terms of Service

David Barreda — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:23:42 +0000

The arrival of Google Drive to the Dropbox and Skydrive ecosystem is not a surprise since the rumor haves more than a year, and on the last weeks we seen lot of leaks about this Google’s service. I seen by a @koush tweet a link to The Verge article named “Cloud storage Terms of Service comparison: Avoid Google Drive” that takes parts of the ToC to mislead the most of people making Google look very bad, I mean, the editor took parts of the text to confuse the people; we know that this companies are not good, but all have almost equal Terms of Service, I am not a Google-fag but I don’t think that is correct to mislead the people. Before reading the full ToC’s I have read the comments on The Verge were PepperoniJack pasted an extended view of the ToC’s.

Dropbox

By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.
We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space (again, only to provide the Services).

Skydrive

Except for material that we license to you, we don’t claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don’t control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.
You control who may access your content. If you share content in public areas of the service or in shared areas available to others you’ve chosen, then you agree that anyone you’ve shared content with may use that content. When you give others access to your content on the service, you grant them free, nonexclusive permission to use, reproduce, distribute, display, transmit, and communicate to the public the content solely in connection with the service and other products and services made available by Microsoft. If you don’t want others to have those rights, don’t use the service to share your content.
You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.

Google Drive

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

Yeah, we give the companies many permissions about how to use our content, but take a look at what Opps_I_Broke_It wrote by first at here. However, this is a reminder of why we should read the Terms of Service before applying them, for example, I just use Google Drive and Dropbox for sharing files with colleagues and maybe for having some documents everywhere, and I have doing this for years at Google Docs (now Google Drive), I do not upload personal stuff that I dont want no one to haves it. I really do not see any future about having all the stuff on clouds like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Canonical want us to believe, I see future on bigger and safe hard drives at home, using this services as ways to get our archives everywhere, but not all, just the necessary ones, we can always have a SSH to move things that we need to those service instead of having all there by first.

How to activate Windows XP

David Barreda — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:13:21 +0000

This one is very easy, just we need to play around with the registry editor.

1. Click on Run and type regedit, click enter
2. Look for “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion”
3. Click on “WPAEvents” and search for OOBETimer, right click on it, and modify the value to ”FF D5 71 D6 8B 6A 8D 6F D5 33 93 FD”, without the quotation marks, click on Ok.
4. Now select the wpaevents folder, and deny all the permissions.

Enjoy your genuine Windows XP again. Btw, I don’t support piracy, is just for people that like me, got an old laptop and the serial got scratched.

My essential applications on Android

David Barreda — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:32:21 +0000

I’m not the kind of person with lots apps at the phone, so I’ll write a list of the essential applications for me and some others with their description

Gmail is my first must have, I still depend on reading my email for notifications from other sites, colleagues, coworkers. The application is the best I ever used for email, is fast, got lots of options for organizing the incoming messages. Before this one I used Blackberry BIS Mail Service which is quite faster but not this nice. Gmail is the best email-inbox provider available for free with a lot of storage space and hopefully this application comes by default on most of Android phones.

Google Talk is another must have, it is linked with your Google account and Gmail contacts. It comes installed by default on most of Android phones. My primary communication application on mobile phone and at desktop.

Whatsapp is a must have for every smartphone user, from Blackberries to Windows Phone. The application I used before this was the powerful Blackberry Messenger (BBM) offered by RIM at their BBs but since it just works there when I migrated I started to use Whatsapp, still lots of people doesn’t install it and prefer BBM which is quicker, robust and awesome but not multiplatform, sadly.

Not many time has passed since Google Currents came up and is already an application that I love, you can get in an awesome user interface, recommended!

Twitter is a service that we all know, you can follow friends, artists, company profiles, etc. Get promotions, read the news, ~~stalk your crush~~, follow the worldwide trends, etc.

Well, that are my essential apps and the most I use, just followed by Google Maps, Latitude, Foursquare and Instagram. As you can see I don’t have lots of stuff, but this is more than I need and have time for. Sometimes for school I get some extra apps like Cole’s Calculous Review, Electrodroid, etc or one-purpose apps like Kayak but them get deleted when I stop using them.

Installing NVidia proprietary drivers under Debian based distros

David Barreda — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:08:25 +0000

By first, you need to download the following packages with the following command

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc-4.4

Then download and give execution permissions to the NVIDIA binary driver — XServer must be down.

wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/275.28/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.28.run
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.28.run
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.28.run

Now just start the X server, enjoy!

Installing ROM’s at Droid X

David Barreda — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 21:42:59 +0000

This guide may apply for many other Android devices, but with different bootloaders. In this guide I will explain how to install the ROMs (without buying ROM Manager). First of all, you need to know if you are running Froyo or Gingerbread with Froyo Kernel or pure Gingerbread.

First of all, download ROM Manager (free version) and flash the recovery, selecting Droid X if you are running pure Froyo, if you are using Gingerbread use Droid2 Bootstrap, if you are running Cyanogenmod or MIUI (why are you reading this in first place?) select Droid X (2nd-init).

Then download the desired ROM to the sd-card of your phone.

The problem of installing the ROMs in this way is that you need to manually update them (and check the forums often if there are updates). Open ROM Manager, and click on Install ROM from SD Card, select the zip of the ROM you are going to install – select data/cache wipe if is your first time moving to Gingerbread, if is just an update rom ROM v1.1 to V1.2 probably doesn’t need that (but it may! check the forums).

I personally use MIUI because it goes fast, totally renewed UI, and great battery life!

Configure LIRC to work with Windows Media Remotes

David Barreda — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:51:58 +0000

Configuring LIRC with a Windows Media Center Remote to work at Linux is easy and if you like seeing movies while you are at bed is just awesome, here an easy setup (ripped from mine old blog )

sudo apt-get install lirc lirc-modules-source module-assistant

Now on configuration

Windows Media Center Transceivers/Remotes (all) -> None -> DONE!

To test out the controller, is

irw

while doing this, click the keys in your controller and they will appear if it was detected correctly. Here, all were detected.

If you want to make it work with KDE and KDE apps,

apt-get install kdelirc

And configure the keys in System Settings.

Configuring a NTFS partition to be mounted at boot

David Barreda — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:48:43 +0000

Note: This might work on other distributions just installing the packages on their package managers or from source, however you want. Root password and access is required.

I been helping a friend to move into Debian Squeeze although this guide work on any I think, first of all, installing the packages, hopefully way less than any tutorial that I wrote at here.

apt-get install libfuse2 ntfs-3g

The second step is know where the NTFS partition is located, for that we will use

fdisk -l | grep NTFS

And it will output something similar to this

/dev/hdc1 * 1 9728 78140128+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Now we know that the partition is located at /dev/hdc1, we will need to choose the path where we want it mounted, so we will create a nice folder on root ( /disk ) or on the home of an user ( /home/yourusernameathere/disk ), when we created the folder we will just add a line in /etc/fstab that will be like:

/dev/hdc1 /home/yourusernameathere ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

Was easy heh? Then just restart or do mount -a as root

Application alternatives

David Barreda — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:29:27 +0000

Often people just creates lists for replacing software from Windows to Linux or OS X, in this list I will write about Windows alternatives too! Enjoy!

Office suites
The most used is always Microsoft Office, why? Because it works actually very good! (and most of people use it, so we need to open it though the official suite to look it correctly). Although the licence costs are high and the pseudo-standards change way too much between versions, making impossible to look it correctly while not using the same version where it was made (or newer).

There are lot of alternatives, freeware, open source suites and other proprietary alternatives and the correct one for you depends on what you need, if you want a word processor, all of them will make the job correctly, if you want presentations probably you will like iWork and for spreadsheets Microsoft office is the only way.

Personally, I like Microsoft Office and KOffice (now Calligra both done by KDE.org guys). The freeware alternative is IBM Lotus Symphony, for open source is LibreOffice (based on the other open source OpenOffice.org) plus, this last is supported by the OpenDocument Foundation. If you want propietary software, Microsoft Office and iWorks (macfags will love) are the way, both are pretty nice BUT only works on OS X and Microsoft Windows. On Linux the way is LibreOffice if you need compatibility with Microsoft Office and you want a powerful office suite, and if you like Qt and KDE — i’m sure you want all your applications running under it, so KOffice (Calligra) is the way. If you want it to be multi-platform, plus cloud computing, Google Docs will do the job!

Music players
This part is the most conflicting to me. I love music, I need an equalizer but also I need that it works pretty fast with a very big music collection. The operating system that got lots of GREAT software for this is Linux. The selection of this will MOSTLY depends on that if you got an iPod or an iPhone. If you got one of this gadgets on Windows or OS X, the way is iTunes, if not, probably Foobar2000 (Windows) or Songbird (although both got iPod plugins, is not the same and we know that). If you’re running Linux, there are lot of options, but the better ones are Amarok, Banshee, Clementine (based on Amarok 1.6, works on OS X and Windows too) and Rhythmbox, all got iPod support.

Burning suites
Most of people uses Nero or Roxio software because always comes with the computer, the problem with this suites is that is pricey plus, bloated and slow. There are lot of superior alternatives, alike ImgBurn for Windows (which is very cheap), for OS X you don’t really need one if you know how to use Disk Utility, but there is SimplyBurns with is good and a BIG suite (alike Nero) that will do any kind of works with CDs, Toast. For Linux k3b is the only and best way!

Compressing software
Since lots of years ago (I think from Windows XP) Windows haves this feature already build-in, the same way on Mac OS X and unzip at Linux, but theres a lot of people that uses WinRAR to compress their stuff, for Windows theres a opensource alternative, 7z which (un)compresses RAR, Zip, plus 7z at Windows. For Linux and OS X you can install WinRAR command to the job, and for other kind of compressions there is tar!

Browser
This mostly is a personal election, just DO NOT USE INTERNET EXPLORER IF YOU ARE NOT USING IT TO DOWNLOAD ANOTHER BROWSER. Personally I like Opera and Chromium (Google Chrome). But there are other good alternatives like reKonq and Firefox. The final option will depend on the extensions you want.

Messaging and Videocalling
Sadly we need to use the protocol that other people use, and the most used ones nowadays are Windows Live Messenger and (worst thing ever) Facebook. But we can make our experience way more comfortable if you got the right applications. For Linux there are a lot of alternatives that got a plus, connecting with multiple accounts on different services at the very same time as Pidgin, Kopete and Emphaty and for the people that likes WLM-a-like GUI, there is KMess and Emesene. For Mac the best thing, and the one I use is Adium.

For videocalling there are not a lot of alternatives, the best one for me is Google Video Call which is way better than WLM. But if you want hi-res an application that lots of people uses, there is Skype. For conferences the best is Google+ Hangouts!

Mobile messaging and calling
I’m tired of Blackberry Messenger users! They thing that everyone needs an outdated phone with an outdated operating system (this is a personal opinion) but there are ways to communicate with other smartphones via messaging alike BBM. The one I use its Whatsapp which is multi-platform, but there is Google+ Huddle (Android and iOS), Pingchat (multi-platform).

Plus, for calling. There is Google Voice, Google Talk, Tango, Skype, Viber, this last one is the one I like. But just Tango, Google Talk and Skype got videocalling.

I think its all, if you want more just poke me at the commentaries and I’m writing other alternatives for different uses.

Setting up an Android environment at OS X

David Barreda — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:35:08 +0000

Hello, in this post I will explain how to setup an Android environment for developing-fun-curiosity-whateveryouwant at Mac OS X, with is quite VERY simple. This guide should work on the same in Windows and Linux but I am not sure.

By first you need to download the Android SDK for your platform: Mac OS X - Linux – Windows. (September 10, for newest click here)

After that you need to open the ‘tools’ executable (from the console) — this is only for OS X or Linux (not sure how at Windows). Then you get a window titled ‘Android SDK and AVD Manager‘.

Go to ‘Available packages’ to select the Android environment you will be using at Android Repository (Froyo 2.2, Gingerbread 2.3.3, Honeycomb 3.2, w/e). At this very same tab you can also install (at Third party Add-Ons) the Google APIs alike Maps and Admob.

Now that you downloaded the environment that you desire, go to ‘Virtual Devices‘ tab, click on “New” button and proceed to assign a name to the device, which OS you will use, CPU/ABI, etc… then “Create AVD“. Now you are done! Just click Start while you have the desired device selected with blue .

Enjoy! — Today is the SuperHappyDevHouse at Xalapa, Mexico. We will be here about 12 hours of programming/learning/geek stuff – I am doing guides for this site, this is the first one. More to come!.

SuperHappyDevHouse Xalapa

David Barreda — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 22:07:42 +0000

Para mas informacion | http://shdhxalapa.pbworks.com
Ubicación | Google Maps