Attune Magazine/July 2012 July. 2012 | Page 33

I was unable to download the full size pictures unless I bought a premium account for $15. I didn't like that. Also using sites like facebook to store your pictures isn't recommended because their terms of service say that anything you upload belongs to them. That probably won't affect most of us, but your pictures of your kids at the beach might end up as an advertisement for Ocean City, New Jersey if facebook decides to sell them.

Moving files between computers is easy with the cloud. Go to www.dropbox.com and sign up for a free account. If you have a big file (or files) to move, just put it in your dropbox. Now go to the other computer and get the file out of your dropbox. Simple. No more emailing files to yourself or burning cds. Just use dropbox.

Oh, and one more thing. Passwords. As everything we do and save is now on the cloud, we have lots of different accounts and passwords. My password list grew from a few sticky notes, to a sheet of paper, to a small notebook. The problem was that it was at home, or I left it somewhere else (bad). Here is my solution: I went to Walmart and bought a small USB thumb drive (1 GB, I think). It was under $10. I made a file in Notepad and put all my web site accounts, login names and passwords in that file and saved it on my thumb drive. Then I put the thumb drive on my keychain. Now it's always with me, I can easily look at it or change it from any computer or device I am using and I also can carry an ebook on the thumb drive too.

I copy the file to another thumb drive about once a month and put it in my safe, so I have a copy. And if you really want to be tricky you can use a program like TruCrypt to encrypt the password file so only you can read it.