A good file sharing website is hard to come by ever since drop.io was bought over by Facebook. I loved drop.io and my admiration for the design of their service goes without saying…but I’ll say it anyway.

There was a huge void for a short period, where I was struggling with things like dropbox, skydrive and even hosting my own file sharing server (here). Fortunately, for the file sharers among us there emerges from the midst a file sharing website worthy of being called drop.io’s replacement. It’s name is minus.com.

For those of you who don’t know, I host this blog on an awesome webhost called nearlyfreespeech. It’s a different kind of webhost because it doesn’t offer fixed price per month packages, but rather a pay-as-you-go model. Now what that means is that you can get your website fully operational for under 1 US dollar (and I’m not kidding), however as your blog grows and you utilize more space and use up more bandwidth you’re probably wondering what kind of charges you’d be looking at, and whether it would be better off forking money for unlimited packages from the regular godaddy type host. The answer is NO. Here’s my analysis on real-life data from my blog.

I’ve decided to start a separate Tuesday posting that has nothing to do with the web or tech, I call it Techless Tuesday, and the topic of todays Techless Tuesday is something I’ve been researching for about 3 weeks now…Stress.

So what is Stress and what can we do about it.

It’s all pretty standard question but what I’ve discovered about stress really amazed me , not just about how little I knew but also how dangerous it really is. I learnt how pervasive stress can become in our lives and how if left uncheck it would invade not just our health, but our relationships with our spouses as well. Stress wasn’t some concept, stress was something real that had a real impact.

Today is the first part of a series of post I intend to do about stress and I’d thought I clear up a misconception that most people have about stress namely that the stress is all in your mind something conjured up by your thoughts, and the way to avoid stress is to ’think happy thoughts’ and ’take it easy’. Research however points in a different direction, suggesting that stress isn’t just psychological (caused by the mind) but physiological (caused by the body)

My wife trolls deal sites everyday looking for deals to save us 50% on romantic dinners or 70% off on Hotel stays or even 90% off on skydiving. Deal sites like Groupon and Mydeals are popping up everywhere these days that you’d look like a fool if you bought a meal at …regular price (gasp!) .

However, if you’re not contented with just trolling the 10 deal sites you subscribe to, you might want to start your own groupon site. Think about it, it’s an easy business model, you require limited upfront capital and you’re more or less just a middle man, you’d think anyone can do it. Well it turns out everyone can do it, and a lot or people are. Here’s 3 ways to start your deal website and be on your way to Groupon like fame (or infamy)

I recently wrote about how excited I was to use fetch.io, but that turned out to be a bit disappointing. Recently I discovered torrific, a web based torrent download web page.  It’s as good (if not better) than fetch.io. The time taken to download the torrent may not be as super fast as fetch.io, but torrific works for most torrent files and is far more reliable than fetch.io

Overall great experience, and I haven’t even mentioned the best part….it’s FREE. As in free as advice from your mother-in-law free, absolutely. I loved it, and you should try it.

The interface is simple to use, and the downloads are reliable. Premium users get to bump up their torrents but overall free accounts also get you a good dose of downloads :)

So I’ve just moved into my new place and my wife and I wanted to convert our upstairs hall into a study area for the both of us.

Problem is that I wanted a standing desk and my wife was having none of it. So a comprimise was in order…in this case we’d have 2 desk one for each, mine would be a standing desk and hers a regular sit-down one. I’m no master carpenter so our greatest hope was to hack ikea. If you’re wondering what hacking ikea means, well the ‘original’ Ikea Hackers says:

The recent events in the UK while tragic have unveiled some new uses for crowdsourcing. Some time ago people used Google Wave (now called Apache Wave) to help find a criminal murder suspect, which was amazing news if you ask me, but it still didn’t save Google Wave. Now however, the guys over at a website called Zavilia had a brilliant idea of using crowdsourcing to solve the London rioting problem, the premise was simple, users would upload photos of the looters and rioters and those photos would then be posted online.  Each rioter would be labled with an alphabet, and finally other users could check out the pictures and begin identifying anyone they knew…brilliant solution.  Personally, I can’t imagine solving this problem without crowdsourcing, and it just goes to show that in the future we will solve problems together via collaboration on a massive scale rather than a few geniuses leading the way.

The guys over at zavilia have shutdown their website claiming:

The development of Zavilia: Identify UK Rioters has been temporarily paused due to a decrease in traffic and in user interactions. However, we fully intend to continue development at some point in the near future.

Amazing.

I’m going a bit off tangent today and focus on Malaysias latest 4G broadband. Recently I moved house and my new area didn’t yet have UniFi, so to avoid locking myself down to contracts I decided to go for a pre-paid wireless service offered by YTL called Yes.

Initially I was a bit skeptical on the performance of yes, but it did have some things going for it. Firstly it was prepaid meaning I could terminate the usage anytime without incurring any fines. Secondly it was wireless so no wiring for my new house, and finally it a usage based thing, so if I was bit-torrenting then I could get pretty high mileage from just RM30.

So you heard about Crowdsourcing from a TED talk you just watched online, and now you’re wondering what Crowdsourcing is. Well here’s the lowdown, Crowdsourcing is a phenomena where ultra rich companies rely on many lowly underpaid serfs to gather data, process it and then produce a result where the ultra rich companies can then use to make them richer…well in not so many words of course, but obviously I’m joking.

Jokes aside, Crowdsourcing is a pretty cool thing, it’s getting the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making process and relying on the fact that many people working together can produce much better results one single person or organization can. Think of crowdsourcing as brainstorming with an unlimited number of people, and where anyone can join (and leave) the group providing you the influx (and reflux) of ideas necessary to produce truly lateral thinking.

Pick&Zip is an amazing app that allows you to copy over your entire Facebook photo albums all at once in one zip file. The application even allows you to view ALL the photos you’re tagged in and download those as well, especially apt if you’re looking to migrate this stuff to Google+. It also act as a great picture viewer for all your photos on Facebook.