Dropbox has become one of the favourite solutions to sync files between multiple devices due to its elegance and strong API. The free account offers 2GB of free space, but you can extend it up to 10.25GB. Basically you’re getting 8GB by creating referrals by yourself. I’ll explain an easy way to do this by yourself.

A word of warning: Using this method to enlarge your Dropbox might get you banned. In my opinion for a good reason. Dropbox needs to pay the bills for the S3-service they use too. I’m only posting this information because I think that the pro-accounts should become a lot cheaper. Don’t talk in the comments whether using this method is justified or not – it’s certainly NOT!

1. Login to your Dropbox-Account

2. Go to https://www.dropbox.com/referrals and write your Share Link or post it somewhere online where you can easily access it

3. Download VirtualBox and an Ubuntu Live-CD iso-image

4. Install VirtualBox and create an Virtual Machine for Ubuntu

5. Start the Virtual Machine and choose the Ubuntu.iso in the dialog-window

6. It will now boot the from the CD, once asked for it choose “Try Ubuntu….” as in the picture below

7. Once Ubuntu is up and running, start Firefox,go to the location where you stored the referral link or write it in the adress-bar

8. Create a new Dropbox-Account. The email-adress doesn’t have to exist

9. You get to a page where you’ll have to choose the Ubuntu-version of Dropbox you want to install, Click on ‘Ubuntu (x86 .deb)’

10. Open the file after the download and click on ‘Install Package’ in the new window

11. During the installation another window will open, click on ‘Start Dropbox’

12. Dropbox will finally open, check ‘I already have an account’ and insert the email-adress and password you registered with

13. If it was correct you just got another 250MB space on your Dropbox-account (I saw a notification on my host-pc which was also logged on in Dropbox)

14. Close the Virtual-Machine

15. Right-Click on the virtual-machine, click on change, go to the network, click on Advanced and click on the green button next to the Mac-adress field. This will generate a random mac-adress. Thats also the reason why using a virtual-machine is probably the fastest way to do this

16. To repeat the procedure go to Step 5

What about the last 250MB?

So, you really did this 32 times? You can get the last 250MB by going to https://www.dropbox.com/gs and completing 5 of the 6 six steps.

If you got an idea how to to make the procedure even easier, feel free to share it in the comments!

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I regard most of the new shiny web 2.0 stuff as a real pain. Sometimes it yields nice fruits though which even grabs my attention.

Money, money, money

Creating a blog-entry can take a lot of time. At least if you care about the quality of it. For an example writing the NS7-review from taking pictures to translating it took 12 hours.

Increasing the motivation

Most bloggers have fun doing it, but no one minds a well-meant back-slap. This can be a comment or a small donation. Donations showed to be not very effective in the past. People have to overcome their inhibitions of directly pay for something which is free.

Flattr tackles that problem by making its user pay a monthly amount you can adjust yourself starting at 2€ (in USA 2$ ?).

In the course of one week you click on all Flattr-buttons worth a contribution (besides your own one, which of course deserves the most clicks. At the end of the month your budget is spread across all clicked articles. That means if you only click on one button, one person gets the whole monthly budget. If you click two or more of them, it is spread among them. That takes away the aforementioned inhibitions because you have to for it either way.

You could ask yourself the question why you should become a member if you have to pay for it in the first place. Everyone who knows how hard blogging, programming, cutting videos etc. can be appreciates the hard work of the others and maybe wants to motivate them to continue.

That’s why a lot of people like me give that model a chance. All of my posts now contain a Flattr-Button. If you like a post and want to know more about that topic use the button.

Conclusion

You wont become rich using Flattr, but its definitely boost your motivation and that of others at a pretty low cost. Additionally it helps identifying whichof your content is regarded to be of high quality. The page impressions alone aren’t the best indicator because target groups have quite different sizes. If Flattr can assert itself is questionable but their on a good way with an own wordpress-plugin and an idiot-proof API.

I’ll toss out all AdSense out of my blog if it runs good.

Invite-Codes

Flattr has still beta-status. You can instantly register using one of these codes below:
Update: The codes have already been used. At least the three lucky guys could show their appreciation by clicking my Flattr-Button.

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This is another rather unusual post.

I created a design for the scratched display-backside of my girlfriends MacBook.
I’m posting this because its one of the few designs that incorporate the apple.

It has been printed by 123skins.de. The quality is pretty good.

If someone wants to print or edit the cover, you can download the png-file here:

In that case I would be glad to receive a comment containing a photo of the result.

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The slovenish producer Beltek recently put together quite some tunes.

One of them is Running Backwards. It drew some attention so it even got played in the Essential Mix of the Faithless Sound System. They put some hypnotizing vocals on top of it, which made the already great tune even better. Sadly, as Beltek told me, they didn’t give him their version.

That’s why I put together an own edit featuring the vocals. Although this is not my own idea, it is a very nice DJ tool. I tried to rearrange the song, but it destroyed its harmony so I just made it shorter.

Beltek – Running Backwards (Hedgehog’s Faithless Give Us Some Vocals Edit) by Hedgehog

This shall mark the start for own productions of myself coming soon.

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I’m still unsure why I woke up with the feeling that I have to prove my manfulness to my girlfriend by building something for her. She, as a prospective artist, always complains about the bad lighting conditions of her cave. I remembered the layout boxes Disneys drawing artists are sitting behind while being whipped by the warden.

This marks the start of short series of posts describing my adventure of building the light box.

I’m sorry for using metric measurements in my posts, but I’m from Europe

All beginnings are difficult

My software-engineering lessons taught me to define some requirements before working on something. The lightbox has to meet the following needs:

• it has to be big enough to put a sheet of paper in the format DIN A3 on it (297 mm × 420 mm)
• it should be rock-solid not decay to dust when touching it
• the brightness should adjustable
• equally bright all over the area
• pluggable into a regular jack

Size does matter

I decided to build a matrix of super-bright Ultraflux-LEDs with a high angle of radiation (90°) to assure the evenly spread lightening (see right picture).
The LEDs are on a plate between ceiling- and floorplate. It was supposed to be a wooden-plate, but something went wrong with that as I’ll show in the next post of the series. A friend had the better idea to fasten them on a acrylic glass plate.
He still had on of those plates over. That was the reason to build the box at a size of 480 mm x 400 mm. The plate was 460 mm x 380 mm. The box had to be 2 cm bigger so the plate can be fitted into a notch in the inner of the box.
Each LED requires 3,1 voltage. In Germany using 12 V is common so four had to be connected in series. The gap between them had to be big enough so their lightcones overlap a bit. I’l spare myself the calculation at this point.

Sourcing of materials

Alongside the LEDs a lot of resistors were needed to conntect the 4 LED-series parallely. To reduce the brightness a special (and expensive) LED-dimmer is needed. Don’t forget to add a power supply!

My shopping cart in the Lumitronix-Shop looked like this:

I got the wood-stuff (sides and bottom-plate) in the hardware store.

The ceiling-plate was a bit trickier. It had to be transparent, aid spreading the light more equally and be stable at the same time, so my girlfriend can lean on it. The company Evonik Röhm offers acrylic glass plates in different thicknesses(?) and light-transmissions. They even pre-cut the plates to your desired dimensions. I took a milky 6mm thin plate with 67% light-transmission and a dull surface. Dull because the sheets don’t slip on it.

Now that all materials are collected, I will explain in the next part of the series how to install all the LEDs.

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After creating a Wave for DJTechTools-member and posting in it for a while I noticed that the bigger the Wave gets, the harder it becomes to keep track of it.

Creating individual Wave’s for each topic is the way to go, but since there are no usergroups or wavegroups you can follow (as of yet), I had to come up with a different approach to realize this.

Here is a step-to-step guide of it:

Step 1: Tag your Wave

1. Start by creating a new Wave
2. Add a tag to it (located at the bottom of Wave), in this example ‘djtechtools

Step 2: Add public to your contact list (only needed once)

Currently only the persons in the participant list (only you so far) can see this Wave. That’s why we need to add ‘public’ to it so anyone can see it.

1. Click on the + next to Manage contacts in your contact list
2. Type in ‘public@a.gwave.com’ in the adress-field
3. Click on Submit

Step 3: Add public to the participant list of the Wave

1. Click on the + next to the participants of your Wave
2. A window pops up with a list of people in your contact list
   Look for public and click on it

Step 4: Add a custom search

This step needs to be done by everyone who wants to follow your “group”. We add a custom search for the tag.

1. Click on the + next to Searches in your Navigation pane
2. Choose a title for the Search and a query like ‘tag: djtechtools’

Whenever you click on that Search now all Waves with the chosen tag will be listed.

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