Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Dropbox, the must have service for backup in the cloud, has a time limited offer for anyone becoming a tester of their latest beta version – up to 4.5GB of additional free space.

This is what you should do:
1. If you don’t have a Dropbox account yet, you will first need to signup for a free account

2. After you’ve signed up and installed the latest Dropbox client on your PC or Mac, you will need to download and install beta 1.3.13. You can find the links to the different versions (Windows, Mac, Linux) in this post.

BTW, for those who typically don’t install betas – I’ve been using the beta for a few days without any issues.

And now the free stuff – During the beta period, Dropbox is offering additional free space to test automatic uploading of photos and videos. Meaning, as soon as you plug your iPhone or digital camera, Dropbox upload wizard will pop and offer you to backup the photos & videos to Dropbox. For every 500MB of photos and videos automatically uploaded, you’ll receive another 500MB space bonus, up to 5GB total. Just start uploading the first batch of photos and check the size of your dropbox.

This is a sweet deal. Don’t miss it.

 
2. Resize any window from anywhere

Yesterday Apple released the much anticipated iOS4 and I decided to upgrade my iPhone 3G to it.

The upgrade process is managed by iTunes and has three steps:
1. Backup existing data files
2. Download the ~350MB OS file
3. Copy & install files to the iPhone

For some unknown reason, the backup process takes a long longer than a typical backups that happen whenever you sync your phone. It could even take 2-3 hours (!) if you have lots of data on your device.

While I was doing it, the progress bar moved very very slow and gives the feeling that the process is hung. In addition, whenever you get a phone call the process terminates and you have to restart it.

After spending about 3-4 hours on 2-3 failed tries I tried a work-around that worked well and cut up the backup process time by 90%. If you are one of the many
who are experiencing the same issue, you might want to give it a try:

Before backup & upgrade, sync your iPhone one more time with minimal amount of data one it. This means that you have to delete all music, video, photos and apps that are on it (but leave mail, calendar, notes and other important settings). The steps for doing that are:

1. Connect your iPhone to your computer but DO NOT start the upgrade process
2. Select the Apps, Music, Videos, Photos tabs and uncheck the main Sync checkbox
3. Then sync your one more time iPhone. This will free up most of the disk space on your iPhone. Once this sync is completed you should see it in the Capacity bar that is displayed on the Summary tab
4. Finally, start the Upgrade process by clicking on “Check for Update” button in iTunes’s iPhone’s Summary tab
5. Backup should take about 5 minutes and the entire upgrade process should be over within 20 minutes.

Welcome to iOS4. Enjoy.

Earlier today Net tweeted that he bought a new MacBook and looking for recommended applications. My first reaction was to reply using twitter. However, 140 chars are not enough to list all the apps I have on my MacBook Pro and that I recommend.

So, here is the list, created in the easiest way I know, a screenshot: My Mac Apps

BTW, I did that using  my favorite, the must have app, Jing.

Update (1/26/2010):
There is a new iPhone app that eliminates the need to configure FStream. Read about it here.

Original post starts here:
According to Google Analytics this old post of mine is one of the most popular on this blog. It is time to refresh the list, add new Israeli radio stations streams and fix the broken ones.

The updated list below uses a stream url structure from fm1.co.il. Simply launch FStream on your iPhone / iPod Touch and configure it to use the following streams. Enjoy.

Galaz -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/glz.asx

GalGalaz -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/glgltz.asx

88fm -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/88fm.asx

Kol Hamusica (classical music) -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/kol-hamusica.asx

Reshet Aleph -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/reshet-aleph.asx

Reshet Bet -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/reshet-bet.asx

Reshet Gimel -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/reshet-gimel.asx

Regional stations

Kol Hacampus (one of my favorites, run by students, plays plenty of alternative music) – http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/campus.asx
Radius 100fm -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/100fm.asx

Radio Tel Aviv 102fm -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/102fm.asx

Radio Lelo Hafsaka 103fm -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/103fm.asx

Radio Lev Hamedina -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/91fm.asx

Radio Emza Haderech -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/90fm.asx

Radio Kol Rega -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/96fm.asx

Radio Jerusalem -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/101fm.asx

Radio Haifa  -  http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/radio-haifa.asx

Kol Ramat Hasharon – http://www.fm1.co.il/playnow/kol-ramat-hasharon.asx

If you don’t read Engadget or other gadget reviews websites you might find this helpful.

Here is how you could save a few hundred dollars per year on your home phone bill. It is called MagicJack, a VOIP service that requires a computer (PC or Mac) and an internet connection to provide extremely cheap local and long distance phone calls using a very small device that looks like a disk on key.

To get started you need to sign up for the free trail on the company’s website (or you could buy it at RadioShack). Once you have the device, simply plug it into the PC/Mac USB port and connect a regular phone to the jack on the other side (as in the photo below). Once plugged, your computer will automatically start running the dialer software and take you through a simple sign-up process, where you will be asked to select a phone number (currently they don’t support number portability). That’s it.

The service costs only $20 per year (no taxes, tolls and other hidden fees). The device itself costs $20 so your first payment (after the 30 days free trial is over) will actually be $40, but any subsequent year will be $20. And if you really want a great deal and lock the price for the next few years, you can prepay $60 for 5 years. That’s a pretty sweet alternative to AT&T’s $45/month + tolls and taxes, or Vonage’s $25/month.

Couple of side benefits some people might not be aware of:

1. MagicJack makes your home home phone portable while you are traveling  (assuming you travel with a laptop).
2. MagicJack gives you other features for free including call forwarding, voice mail and voicemail to email as attachment notifications
3. If you have relatives/friends who live abroad (like I do) and you & them spend a decent amount of money every month on international calls, you might want to buy a MagicJack for them. This way they will have a US number and all calls done between them and you will be completely free.

I have been using it for a few weeks now and very happy with the overall experience. The call quality is excellent. Rarely I had any echos problem and disconnects. And when those happen, I simply unplug the device from the USB port, reconnect and restart the dialer program. This “hassle” is worth $550/year in savings.

A few months ago Google officially released Google Suggest to be a primary feature on Google’s home page. In a blog post that announced this, the product managers in charge of the feature explained the different improvements including personalized suggestions, navigational suggestions (link to official site) and sponsored suggestions (very similar to the Israeli PredictAd).

Today I discovered another hidden feature that I was not aware of – suggestion of the right spelling for a query that contains a misspelling. For example, start typing the the query “waist of t” and Google will suggest terms such as “waste of time” or “waste of space”. Pretty cool as it saves you the extra “Did you mean?” search.

By the way, when comparing this feature of Google Suggest to the other search engines, I would rank them in the following order:

1. Google – variety of offers and misspelling correction
2. Ask – misspelling correction but small variety of suggestions
3. Yahoo – strong bias towards suggesting misspelling
4. Bing – No variety, no misspelling correction. Still needs to do major improvements in that area.