Kiwiian Biz

Like many people, I use SkyDrive as an offsite back up solution. Sure, there are other good backup solutions such as Dropbox, Mozy, etc., but SkyDrive gives you 25GB of storage for free! However, a major downside to SkyDrive is the 50MB file size limit. Perhaps Microsoft will increase this in the future, but many of the files that we deal with today are over 50MB. So how would you back up or share these files using SkyDrive? The solution is to use a file splitter. A file splitter takes a file and then splits it into multiple files with a set file size. In the case of SkyDrive, you would set the file size to be 50MB since that is the maximum size allowed for one file. Once you’ve split up your large file, you can then upload these 50MB file “chunks” to SkyDrive (these files usually retain the file name of the original file, with the sequence number appended to them, such as .001, .002, etc.). So which file splitter software should you use? There are many free ones available for download, but I would recommend GSplit if you want just a simple file splitting utility, or 7-Zip, the ultimate utility in manipulating archives. To put these files back together, with GSplit, you can add the Self-Uniting functionality to your file “chunks”. What this does is that it will create a small Windows executable file that will enable you to join the file “chunks” back together as one large file. With file “chunks” created using 7-Zip, you will need to have a copy of 7-Zip to merge them in recreating the original file.

Hotmail is a wonderful webmail service. It loads fast, provides tons of storage, and offers great spam protection. One thing I don’t like about it is the annoying, unprofessional way that an ad tagline is added to every email you send out using the Hotmail web interface. Of course, you can workaround that by using an email client such as Windows Live Mail or Outlook, but being able to do that from within Hotmail is the ultimate solution. Here’s how you can do it too:

1. In the upper-right corner of Hotmail, click on Options->More Options.
   
   
   
2. Under Customize your mail, click on i’m making a difference.
   
   
   
3. Select a charity that you would like to help out (click here to read about the i’m program) and click on Save.
   
    
   
4. Compose a new email. You’ll noticed that a new signature is now inserted into the body of the email. The signature is a link to the i’m program information page.
   
   
   
5. Because you have joined the i’m program and it inserts a signature in your email body automatically, when you send out the email, Hotmail will no longer append its own ad tagline to it. The beauty of this workaround is that you can actually delete the i’m signature. Doing so will enable you to send out the email without the i’m signature and prevent Hotmail from appending its standard ad tagline to it. It’s as if you had composed and sent the email using Windows Live Mail or Outlook!