Adding a solid-state drive (SSD) to your computer is simply the best upgrade at your disposal, capable of speeding up your computer in ways you hadn’t thought possible. The even better news: A good SSD is now cheaper than ever. But as with any new technology, there’s plenty to learn. Here’s everything you should know about your SSD, whether you’re interested in upgrading or just like to know the ins and outs of your hardware.

What Is a Solid-State Drive (SSD)?

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device for your computer. In everyday use, it provides the same functionality as a traditional hard disk drive (HDD)—the standard for computer storage for many years. In fact, you wouldn’t even know whether you’re using an SSD or HDD if it wasn’t for the differences in how they operate. HDDs store their data on spinning metal platters, and whenever your computer wants to access some of that data a little needle-like component (called the “head”) moves to the data’s position and provides it to the computer. Writing data to a HDD works in a similar fashion, where parts are constantly moving. SSDs, on the other hand, don’t move at all. They store their data in blocks. When the computer wants some of that data, the SSD just says “okay, here it is.” This is a simplified explanation, of course, but you might have noticed that the SSD’s process seems a bit more direct and efficient. It is, and speed is the primary advantage of an SSD over a traditional HDD. This makes an SSD the single best upgrade for your computer if you’re looking for a way to make it operate faster.

A new SSD can speed up your computer in several ways:

• Boot times will be significantly reduced.
• Launching applications will occur in a near-instant.
• Saving and opening documents won’t lag.
• File copying and duplication speeds will improve.
• Overall, your system will feel much snappier.

SSDs have their downsides, however. For starters, an SSD won’t hold as much data per dollar as an HDD. For the same $100, you could buy either a 120GB SSD or a 2TB HDD. That means you’re paying about 83 cents for every gigabyte on an SSD versus five cents for every gigabyte on your HDD. That’s a huge difference in cost, and the gap only grows as you compare larger drives. Luckily, it’s not an all or nothing proposition. In the days of cloud storage and streaming media, SSDs provide plenty of space for most people. For those who need more storage than is affordable with an SSD, SSDs and HDDs can coexist on the same system (and we’ll discuss those in depth a bit later), so you can enjoy the speed benefits of an SSD without sacrificing on storage.

In this post, we’re going to walk you through everything you need to know about getting started with your first solid-state drive, from buying the one that suits you best to getting it set up and running most efficiently in your computer. We’ll even take a look at a few advanced techniques for those of you who are ready to do even more with your super-fast storage device.

Choosing the Right SSD to Buy

Choosing the right solid-state drive for you isn’t difficult, but the process can be a little overwhelming with so many brands available. In this section, we’ll show you what you want to look for when choosing a drive and offer up a few recommendations that have worked well for us.

All SSDs are fast, and will feel like a great upgrade from a HDD, but when you’re spending significantly more money on a drive that provides less storage you want it to be one of the best. You also want a reliably piece of hardware, and these are both fairly hard to gauge if you have little experience with the technology. Here are the qualities you want to look for in an SSD when you’re shopping around:

• High maximum speeds: Max read speeds are around 400MB/second, and max write speeds are around 300MB/sec (note: that’s megabytes per second). These numbers do not have to be exact. A little faster or slower won’t make a significant difference.
• Good real-world speeds: The SSD manufacturers generally will not provide real-world read and write speeds, as they’re guaranteed to be slower than the maximums. Fortunately, many online reviews contain speed test results. On Amazon, you can often find users who’ve posted screenshots of their test results (here’s an example). Seeing this data can often be discouraging because the real-world rates are quite a bit lower. If the test results reveal read and write speeds of about 2/3 of the maximum (in the sequential and 512KB block tests) you’re good to go. If you apply this to our maximum speeds above, that comes out to read speeds of about 265MB/sec and write speeds of about 200MB/sec. If you want to figure out if a more expensive SSD is worth the money, its real-world test speeds will be higher than 2/3 of its reported maximum capabilities.
• Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash memory: When shopping for SSDs, you’ll run into two kind of memory: multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC). The primary difference is that MLC memory can store more information on each cell. The primary advantage is that this results in fewer error rates in your SSD. Basically, only buy an SSD if it uses MLC. At this point, most do. (You can read more about MLC here.)
• SATA III Support: Most SSDs use the Serial ATA (SATA) interface, but not all use the latest version and this can limit the performance of your SSD. This is because SATA I can transfer data at 1.5 Gbps, SATA II at 3.0 Gbps, and SATA III at 6 Gbps. To ensure your SSD has enough bandwidth to transfer data as quickly as possible, you want it to be compatible with SATA III. You’ll also want to make sure your computer is SATA III compatible as well. If not, SATA III-capable drives will still work as all versions of SATA are backwards-compatible. Just know that you may not get the most out of your SSD if your computer doesn’t support the most recent SATA specification.
• ECC memory: Error-correcting code (ECC) memory does what the name implies: it provides your SSD with the ability to detect and correct common types of data corruption so you don’t end up with unusable data on your drive. An SSD with ECC memory is more reliable. (You can read more about ECC memory here.)
• A history of reliability: Reliability is a very hard thing to gauge, but there are a few tricks you can employ to get a good idea. First, look for an SSD that is made by a manufacturer who has been in the business for a while (I like OCZ and Crucial). The technology is fairly new, so you don’t want to go with just any company who has recently decided to jump on the solid-state bandwagon. Additionally, look at the rating each SSD receives in online shopping reviews. If it is rated a 3.5 out of 5.0 or higher, this is often points to a reliable drive. When the ratings are lower, you may want to look elsewhere. Even reliable companies make unreliable SSDs sometimes, so keep an eye on reviews to avoid buying a lemon.

Which SSDs meet these criteria? We’ve had a positive experience with the OCZ Vertex and Agility series of SSDs. Currently, you can find a OCZ 120GB SSD for $100 and a 240GB SSD for $180. But OCZ isn’t the only company who makes fast and affordable drives. Crucial recently released a more budget-conscious set of SSDs in its m4 series, offering a 128GB SSD for $105 and a 256GB SSD for $210. You’ll pay a few dollars more, but you’ll also get a few gigabytes as well. Going above 256GB on an SSD used to be a very expensive endeavor. While certainly not cheap, prices have dropped dramatically. OCZ now offers a 512GB SSD for $322. Even earlier this year you’d be lucky to find an SSD of that capacity for twice the cost.

These are the drives we can recommend from our own experience, but there are many other brands of SSDs available. If you want to shop around and weigh your options, keeping the criteria mentioned in this section in mind will help you find a good, reliable drive.

Dealing with the Limitations of Your SSD

One of the most common problems new SSD owners face is adapting their current systems to run on a much smaller drive. Most HDD owners are accustomed to having at least 500GB of storage, if not upwards of 2TB. Downsizing to 120GB or 240GB—the most affordable and popular SSD sizes—can be a tough job. Sacrifices will be necessary, but there are a ways you can make the process a little easier. Often times, you can even use a HDD as your secondary drive for additional storage. Let’s take a look at your options.

Option One: Start Fresh and Copy the Essentials

When upgrading to an SSD, the most obvious option is starting fresh with a new install of your operating system. While this might require a little more of your time, you’ll have everything configured perfectly when you’re done. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Install your operating system of choice on the new SSD.
2. Copy the contents of your home folder from your previous HDD to your new SSD. If you can’t fit everything, start with the essential system files and settings, then migrate the media you have room for.
3. Go through the list of applications on your old HDD and install them on your new SSD. Run any updates, or save yourself some time by downloading the latest versions from their respective sources. Windows and Linux users can employ Ninite to get the latest versions of popular free software titles for their machines. OS X users can head to the Mac App Store to download the latest versions of their previous purchases.
4. Copy any important documents (or other files) you have room for on your SSD.
5. Put the old HDD in an external enclosure (like these), if you haven’t already, and keep it handy for a month or two. This will help you see what files you use often and which ones you don’t. If you find you’re using something often, copy it to the SSD. If not, leave it on the external HDD for occasional access.

Again, this method requires more work but also handles the task of cleaning up your system at the same time. It may be more tedious, but it is an efficient way to solve two problems at once.

Option Two: Migrate Your Data from Your Old Hard Drive

If you don’t want to start with a fresh installation of your operating system, you can always migrate your OS (and other data) to your new SSD. Chances are, however, that you’re not going to be able to fit everything. That means you’re going to have to start deleting files on your main drive until it is small enough to fit on your SSD. Because you don’t want to lose that data forever, start by making a backup of your drive. Once you have a complete backup, you’re ready to get started.

Windows users can follow our SSD migration guide for the complete instructions. It comes across as a complex process, but shouldn’t take too much time. You also won’t have to reinstall Windows. Mac users can follow our MacBook SSD installation guide. While the guide focuses on installing an SSD in a MacBook Pro’s optical disc drive bay, if you skip to the second half you’ll find instructions on performing a data migration as well.

Bonus: Use an External Drive and the Cloud to Combat Storage Constraints

Regardless of the size of your SSD, it’s never going to beat the storage capacity of a HDD. If you don’t have a secondary hard drive installed in your computer, you’re going to need to store your excess data elsewhere. An external HDD and the cloud are two of the best ways to get around the storage limitations of your SSD.

Unless you have enormous collections, an SSD with a 240GB (or higher) capacity should be able house your operating system, documents, music, and photos without issue. It’s when you get into the business of music creation, video editing, professional photography, and other work that produces large files will you regularly run into a storage ceiling. An external drive is often the easiest solution, so you’ll want to pick up one with a large-enough capacity to suit your needs. If you’re looking for a portable drive, the Seagate GoFlex series is worth a look as it not only works with USB 3.0, but can be connected to other ports like Firewire 800 and Thunderbolt by way of adapter. This also provides you with some assurance of compatibility with future technology.

When an external drive won’t do the trick, and you really need to downsize your space-hungry media collection, the cloud can come to the rescue. Most of the best solutions come from Google because they’re both simple and free. Google Play Music allows you to upload your entire audio collection, and doing so will allow you to delete any songs you rarely listen to (or at least move them to an archival hard drive) while still maintaining direct access to them from anywhere you have an internet connection. Picasa can do the same thing for your photos. (Personally, I prefer Flickr, but it isn’t free.) When it comes to other data, you have plenty of options. Google Drive is great for various files, Simplenote for text, and Evernote for rich text and PDFs. It doesn’t matter so much which services you use, but rather that you start making regular use of the cloud if you have heavy data needs that can’t be adequately served by an external or secondary internal drive.

Optimize Your SSD for Optimal Performance

For the most part, there isn’t much you have to do to optimize your SSD. It’s already really fast and should do it’s job without any adjustment. That said, you can achieve better performance and longevity with a few adjustments.

Enable TRIM

The very first thing you should do after installing and setting up your SSD is enable TRIM. What is TRIM, exactly? Wikipedia offers a concise explanation:

TRIM is a command [that] allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.

Basically, it prevents your SSD from being overused. Just like any component, SSDs have limited lifespans. TRIM helps keep your solid-state disk alive a bit longer, so you want to have it enabled if your drive supports it. Here are instructions on how to find out and enable TRIM in Windows and OS X.

Enable or Disable Hibernation Mode

Mac users can skip this section, but Windows users will want to decide between enabling or disabling hibernation. Both choices offer distinct advantages and disadvantages. When enabled, your computer will resume from hibernation almost as fast as it does from sleep thanks to the speediness of your SSD. On top of that, you won’t use any power when in hibernation mode (which is especially useful for laptop users). The downside is that hibernating will eat up some of your SSD’s limited space and require additional writes to the drive (which shortens its lifespan a tiny bit). If you favor power savings, turn it on. If you want a little extra longevity and storage, turn it off.

Don’t Defragment Your SSD

When data is stored on a drive, it often ends up in various parts that aren’t all in the same place. This is called data fragmentation. It slows down HDDs because the drive’s head needs to move from place to place to read all the little bits of information. This can be fixed using a process called defragmentation, which is built into recent versions of Windows (7 and higher) and OS X. Because the location of data on an SSD is pretty much irrelevant, as it can quickly access any of it regardless of where it is, defragging a SSD is not only unnecessary but bad for the drive as well. SSDs have a limited lifespan that’s determined by how much they’re used. While most will last as long as you’d ever need, defragmenting the disk involves reading and writing data unnecessarily and those actions will shorten your SSD’s lifespan. OS X and Windows should know when you’re using an SSD and turn off defragmenation automatically. That said, it’s important to remember not to defragment your solid-state drive. It provides no real benefit and can shorten its life.

Photos by Z-River (Shutterstock), Friedrichan (Shutterstock), Amazon, .

You’ve heard the word “server” thrown around a lot, but usually in the context of web sites or big companies that have a lot of data to store. In reality, a server can be just as useful in your home. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to create your own server at home that you can put in the closet and leave on 24/7, ready to do any streaming, downloading, or backup you might need at a moment’s notice.

Why Do I Want a Server in My House?

A server, for those that don’t know, is just a computer that stores data and “serves” it to other computers on a network, and it can be immensely useful in your house. It’s a great place to store your backups, store your media for streaming to all your devices, or even act as an always-on, low-powered computer for seeding torrents and downloading other files.

We’ve shown you how to create your own network attaached storage device with FreeNAS before, but while FreeNAS is perfect for tiny, low-powered machines, and it doesn’t come with a lot of customizability. If you want to do anything beyond what’s included, you have to go through a lot of complicated steps. Ubuntu, on the other hand, gives you the freedom to install a ton of different apps, which means you can use your server for just about anything. Plus, it’s dead simple to set up, even if you’ve never used Linux before.

Here, we’ll show you how to put together an Ubuntu-based server, connect it to the other computers in your home, and then go through a few examples of how you can use it as a backup machine, a media server for your music, movies and TV shows, and as a dedicated BitTorrent box.

What You’ll Need

You can install many different versions of Ubuntu using many different methods, but for today, we’re going to go the easiest route possible. All you need is:

• A PC with a minimum of 512MB of RAM and a 700MHz processor to act as your server (1.6GHz if you want to stream videos). You’ll probably want to use ethernet instead of Wi-Fi, too, since it’s much faster. An old computer will work fine for this, though you can also build a dedicated, cheap system if you don’t have an old PC lying around. Note that an old PC will use up more power, and may cost you more in the long run—but it’s a good way to test everything out and see if a home server is right for you.
• The Ubuntu live CD, available here.
• Enough storage space to hold whatever files you want on your server. Again, you might be able to get by with whatever old hard drives you have lying around, though if you’re storing a lot of media you may need to go buy some new drives with a lot of space. I, for example, have a 2 TB drive dedicated to movies and TV shows, a 1 TB drive dedicated to backups, and a 500GB drive dedicated to music.
• A router with DHCP reservations or static IP addresses (almost every router has this capability). This isn’t required, but it’s definitely preferred. If you don’t have this, managing your server can get pretty annoying, since its IP address will change when you reboot it.
• A spare monitor to set up your server. You’ll only need this in the initial building stages to set up your drives and apps. When you’re done, you can just stick your computer in a closet without a monitor, but for the setup, just use one of your existing monitors or just hook it up to your TV with a spare VGA cable.

We’re going to just use the regular Desktop version of Ubuntu for this as opposed to the Server version. It’s much easier to set up, and should still run fine on any remotely recent computer. We’ll also be installing Ubuntu to one of our storage drives, so you’ll need to set aside 5GB or so of space for it. If you wanted to, you could install it on a persistent flash drive, but that’s only really useful if you’re going to swap out drives often, so most people shouldn’t have to worry about it.

Once you’ve gathered up all your materials and installed your hard drives, read on to see how to set everything up.

Install Ubuntu and Prepare Your Drives

We’re going to install Ubuntu on one of the hard drives storing our data. It should only take up about 5GB, so it doesn’t particularly matter which one—but you’ll probably need the drive to be empty before you install Ubuntu. You can copy all your data back afterwards. Grab the Ubuntu live CD here, and either burn it to disc or, if your server-to-be doesn’t have a disc drive, burn it to a flash drive instead.

When it’s done, insert the CD or flash drive into your server and boot it up. If it isn’t set to boot from CD or USB automatically, you may have to go into your BIOS and change yout boot disk priority to include USB drives at the top of the list. You may need to refer to your computer’s instructions for how to do this, but you can usually get to the BIOS by holding the Delete key as it starts up, or whatever key is listed on your computer’s startup screen.

Once you’re booted into Ubuntu, just choose “Install Ubuntu” from the menu, and choose your desired hard drive from the list when prompted. Remember, you want the drive to be empty before you install Ubuntu, so it doesn’t overwrite your data. Also, when you create your user, make sure you set Ubuntu to automatically log you in. You don’t want to have to type your password every time you reboot your server.

Once Ubuntu is done installing, we’ll set up our hard drives. We’re going to want to format these drives as ext4 to make Linux compatibility easy, so if they have any data on them right now, you’ll want to copy that data somewhere else. We’re going to erase them and start from scratch.

Start up your server and open a terminal. Run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gparted pysdm

These are the tools we’ll need to work with our drives. Next, click on the Dash (the purple button at the top of Ubuntu’s dock), and search for GParted. Click on it to start it up. You should see a list of your drives in the dropdown at the top-right corner of the screen. Choose one of your other drives (not the one that has Ubuntu installed), and then go to Device > Create Partition Table. Click OK, and then select the “unallocated” partition. Press the “New Partition” button in the upper right-hand corner, and format it as ext4. Label it whatever you want (like “Media” or “WindowsBackup”), and click Add. Then, click the green check mark in GParted’s toolbar. It will format your drive. Note which drive it is on your system (e.g., /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc) and repeat this process for your other drives.

Lastly, before you share your drives, you’ll want to make sure they mount automatically every time you start up your server—otherwise, if you ever reboot, you won’t be able to access them. To do this, open up the dash and search for Storage Device Manager. Start it up and find your drives in the left sidebar. For each one, click on it and choose “OK” when prompted to configure the drive. Give it a name (again, like “Media” or “WindowsBackup”) and click Apply. Repeat this process for each drive. They should now automatically mount at startup. Reboot your server to make sure they do what they’re supposed to—if they’re mounted at startup, you should see little “eject” icons next to them in your file browser as soon as you start it up. If they don’t have eject icons without you clicking on them first, go back to the Storage Device Manager and make sure you did everything correctly before continuing.

Share Your Server’s Drives with Your Network

Your new server can do a lot of things, but first and foremost, it’s going to “serve” files to your other computers. So, once we have our data on the server, the first thing we’ll want to do is share those drives with the rest of our network.

To share a folder or drive, open up a terminal and run the following command:

gksudo nautilus

This will start up Nautilus (Ubuntu’s file manager) with root permissions, which we’ll need to share our drives. Next, right-click the drive in the left sidebar, and choose Properties. Go to the Share tab, and check the “Share this Folder” box. The first time you do this, Ubuntu will probably prompt you to install the Windows file sharing service. Install anything it asks you to, and then restart your session when prompted. This won’t restart your computer, it’ll just turn on the sharing feature. Remember to go back and check the “Allow others to create and delete files” and “Guest access” checkboxes after Windows installs these services.

Then, give your share a name (like “Media” or “WindowsBackup”) and check the “Allow others to create and delete files in this folder”. When prompted, click “Add the permissions automatically” checkbox at the bottom. This will make it easy to access that folder from other computers on your network. Click “Create Share” and say yes when it asks you to automatically add the necessary permissions. Repeat this process for your other drives.

Lastly, you’ll need to create a password for all of those shared drives, so you can access them from any computer (and so other people can’t). To do this, just open up a terminal and type the following, replacing whitsongordon with your own username:

sudo smbpasswd -a whitsongordon

Then type and re-type a password of your choice when prompted.

Now, head over to your main computer and check to see if the folder was shared properly. On Windows, open up Windows Explorer and click on “Network” in the left sidebar. Your server should show up in the list, and if you double click on it, you’ll be asked for a username and password. Use the ones you just created, and it should give you access to your folder, with all the data inside. If you’re on a Mac, just open up Finder and go to Go > Connect to Server and type in smb:\\192.168.0.11, where 192.168.0.11 is the IP address of your server. Remember, you’ll make your life a lot easier by setting up DHCP reservations or a static IP for your server. Then you can type in your username and password to connect to your files.

Windows users can also mount these shared folders as network drives on their computer and give them their own drive letters for easy access. To do so, just right-click on the share you want to mount. Then click “Map Network Drive” to give it its own drive letter. It’ll sit in the left sidebar of Windows Explorer, perfect for quick and easy access.

Repeat this process for every folder or drive you want to share from your server. In my case, I’ve shared the two drives I listed above, named “Media” and “Backup”. Your drives will obviously vary, but read on for some cool ideas of what you can do with your new server.

Three Cool Ways You Can Use Your Server

Sharing your drives is fine if all you need is a place to store your files, but your server can do so much more. Here are some ideas.

Back Up Data From Your Main Computer

If you aren’t already backing up your main computer, you should. We recommend using a program like Crashplan to back your data up to the cloud, but your server can be a great backup location too—provided you have your really essential files stored somewhere else online, like Dropbox.

You have a number of options for backing data up to your server, but they should all be pretty simple: just share your backup drive as described above, and then set up Crashplan as described here to back up to that network drive. It works on any platform, and only takes a few minutes to set up. It couldn’t be simpler. Alternatively, you could use Windows’ built in Windows Backup tool, but you’ll need to have Windows 7 Professional or higher to back up to a network drives. See our FreeNAS guide for more info on how it works.

Stream Media to All Your Devices

If you have a sizeable collection of movies and TV shows, your server is a great place to stash them. Not only does it free up space on your other computers, but with a bit of magic, you can stream those videos to your computers and mobile devices with almost no effort, so your media is with you wherever you go. The easiest way to do this is with the Plex media server.

To set it up, just run the following commands in a terminal:

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plex.list

Add the following line to the text file:

deb http://bit.ly/Mbgug3 lucid main

And then run the following two commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install plexmediaserver

When it’s done installing, the media server will start running. You can add or remove media from your library from any computer, which means your work with the server is done. Just head to any computer and type 192.168.0.11:32400/manage, where 192.168.0.11 is the IP address of your server. To add movies, just click on “Movies” and navigate to the drive or folder on your server where your movies are stored. If they’re stored on another drive, you’ll find them under /Media/[Name of Drive].

Once you’ve added your media, Plex should automatically organize it into a library for you. The easiest way to stream it to your other devices is to go to Preferences > MyPlex and set up an account from the Media Manager interface. Then, download the Plex app for iOS, Android, Google TV, or your other computers and sign in with your MyPlex account there. You should see your whole library, available for streaming wherever you are. And, any time you want to edit your Plex library, you can do so by going back to the Media Manager web interface from any computer—no need to futz with your server.

Plex is our favorite media streaming app, but it isn’t your only choice. If you just want to share your media with the computers in your house, you can easily add your server’s shared media folders to XBMC on another computer, or set up a music streaming service like Audiogalaxy or Subsonic for a more music-focused experience.

Set Up BitTorrent for Constant File Sharing

BitTorrent is great, but it’s far more useful when it’s always on. Maybe you want new movies and TV shows as soon as they’re available, or perhaps you’re part of a private tracker that requires you to seed all the time. Whatever your needs, you can use your server to run BitTorrent 24/7 and monitor it from any computer in your house.

We’re going to use our favorite BitTorrent client, Deluge, to get this done. To install Deluge, just open up a terminal window and run:

sudo apt-get install deluge deluge-web deluged

When it’s done installing, fire it up by going to the Dash and typing in “Deluge”. Once it starts, to to Edit > Preferences > Plugins, and check the WebUI box. The “WebUI” option should show up in the left sidebar; click it and check “Enable Web Interface” and “Enable SSL”. You can change the listening port to whatever you want, but we’ll leave it at 8112 for this tutorial. This is how we’re going to monitor our torrents from other computers.

To access the web UI from another computer, type the following in your browser’s address bar:

http://bit.ly/Mbguwv

Where 192.168.0.11 is your server’s IP address. It’ll ask you for a password. The default is deluge, though it’ll prompt you to change it to something new right away, which you should do. From then on, you can add new torrents, monitor existing ones, and change any torrent-related preferences right from this web UI—no need to dig out your server. Just be sure to set Deluge to download torrents to one of your shared folders, so you can access those downloads when they finish.

Lastly, click on the Dash and search for “Startup Applications”. Click on it, and press the “Add” button. Name it “Deluge Daemon” and enter deluged for the command. Click Add and close the window. This will ensure that Deluge starts up every time you reboot your server.

Don’t forget to anonymize that BitTorrent traffic with a proxy service like BTGuard, or a VPN like one of these. You also set up programs to automatically download TV shows and movies, or even install a Usenet client on your server too.

This isn’t the only way to set up a home server with Ubuntu, but it’s certainly the easiest. These instructions should get you started, but once you’re set up, the world is your oyster. If you’ve already put together a home server before, let us know what you use it for in the comments.

The concept of craftsmanship fascinates and drives me. There are many definitions of craftsmanship. Some silo the term to physical trades like carpentry, while others pigeonhole it to artistic endeavors. My understanding of craftsmanship is much more fundamental. Craftsmanship is doing what you love and doing it right.

No matter what you do—designer, baker, electrician, architect, author—your job is your craft. Learn to think of your work as practice towards becoming an absolute expert at what you do. Craftsmanship is not a destination; it’s a life-long discipline.

What Makes a Craftsman

It’s near impossible to capture all the nuances “craftsmanship” carries, but when you see it, feel it, experience it—you know it. My dad loves to fix and rebuild homes, so it was unsurprising when he demolished the bathroom in our family home 2 months ago. His entire life is about making things better. I visited home a few weeks ago for Thanksgiving and saw the new bathroom. It’s beautiful. A tangible testament to my dad’s incredible skill as a builder. What about the bathroom made it remarkable though? What about it stirred a newfound respect for the man who made it?

It’s the quality of the work. Not only is the tile flooring a tasteful slate, absolutely level, and evenly spaced, but underneath it there are meticulously coiled heating elements to keep the icy stone heated for my mom at night. Those electrically heated coils are wired into a breaker box hidden from sight, but easily accesible for future use. I know, without question, that the plywood that sits below those heated coils has been protected from the threat of combustion and is probably a 150% thicker than is “code” in our county.

It’s a passion for betterment. Our previous bathroom was acceptable by all standards. It had a functional sink, toilet, shower, and plenty of storage, but it wasn’t exceptional or delightful. He wanted to make it better. To date, he’s built a deck around the house, laid hundreds of square feet of concrete, rebuilt the roof, rewired the electrical, installed a car lift in the garage, and assembled a hot tub on the patio (I’d say I’m covering about 25% of his home improvements).

It’s experience. He knows everything there is to know about that bathroom, whether it’s about the 1.25″ diameter pipes that channel water to the shower, or the acrylic, semi-gloss “Swiss Coffee” paint that’s 3 coats thick on the walls. Even more importantly though, he knows why to use those from years of doing.

That’s a whole lot about a single bathroom, but it illustrates a point. Craftsmanship is about quality, passion and, experience. Make things that you want to show to others. Build things that will make you proud 10 years from now. Sweat the details and the final product will be something to be admired.

Craftsmanship In Design

Craftsmanship is universal. Designing a product (or site) shares the same core values as any other craft. Quality, passion and experience are still the ingredients, the difference is the outcome. Instead of painstakingly positioning a few dozen tiles, we arrange thousands of pixels. Rather than double-check that floors are level and that walls are square, we double-check a design’s alignment against a grid.

Craftsmanship on the web presents an interesting challenge. How we build for the web is changing every day, so the practice of perfecting it is never ending—but that’s what I love about it. Designing for the web requires a passion for learning and the measure of quality is in constant flux. Three years ago, most mobile web experiences were afterthoughts, but today they are rapidly becoming the focus (and with good reason). Thinking mobile first and responsive design have changed the craft of designing for the web.

Love your craft everyday. Designing a product, web site, or workflow shares the same core values as any other craft. So design the simplest, most delightful product you can. Write organized, performant, and readable code. Watch people use your product and make it better for them. Improve your work by learning from others and from your own experiences. Help create a better web for its 2 billion users.

Craftsmanship | Dave Gamache

Dave Gamache is a designer at Twitter. Follow him @dhg.

Photo remixed from Shutterstock and psdGraphics.

The team behind Readability has released Readlists, a new webapp that can easily turn a set of articles into an Ebook and send it directly to Kindle, iPhone, iPad, or over email with just a few simple clicks.

Readlists is meant as a more permanent solution to gathering together articles and reading materials than a bookmarking service. You can use Readlist to piece together your favorite internet posts and save them in a handy Ebook format so they never disappear, but one of the coolest features is the ability to send out a public link to your friends and collaborators so they can add sources as well. The books Readlists creates are simple, but it filters out unnecessary content the same way Readability does. On top of viewing your own reading lists you can also check out other popular lists directly from the main page.

Readlists is a free webapp and you can use the service anonymously or with your Readability account. If you’ve been wanting to start a more permanent catalog of your favorite articles it seems like the easiest way to do it even if software like Calibre has offered a similar feature for a while.

Readlists | via The Verge

Your education doesn’t have to stop once you get out of school—being free of the classroom just means you have more control over what you learn and when you learn it. We’ve put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this summer for our second term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Let’s get started.

Orientation: What Is Lifehacker U?

Whether you’re just finishing the spring semester, or you’re out of school and just want to keep learning and growing, there are an incredible amount of free, university-level courses that become available on the web every school year, and anyone with a little time and a passion for self-growth can audit, read, and “enroll” in these courses for their own personal benefit. Schools like Yale University, MIT, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, and many more are all offering free online classes that you can audit and participate in from the comfort of your office chair, couch, or computing chair-of-choice.

If you’ll remember from our Spring 2012 semester, some of these classes are available year-round, but many of them are only available during the a specific term or semester, and because we’re all about helping you improve your life at Lifehacker, we put together a list of courses available this summer that will inspire you, challenge you, open the door to something new, and give you the tools to improve your life. Grab your pen and paper and make sure your battery is charged—class is in session!

• Computer Science and Technology
• Finance and Economics
• Science and Medicine
• Mathematics
• Social Sciences, Classics, and Humanities
• Law
• Cross-Disciplinary Courses and Seminars
• Extra Credit: How to Find Your Own Online Courses

Computer Science and Technology

• Codecademy - Codecademy made waves by offering great free development tutorials, but saw a surge at the beginning of the year with its Learn to Code in 2012 promotion. We can’t think of a better way to spend a chunk of your summer than learning a valuable skill like programming, and Codecademy is willing to teach you at your own pace, entirely for free. If you can get your friends to participate, you can even work with them, or compete with them for badges and awards.
• Stanford University - Introduction to Computer Science | Programming Methodology - Professor Mehran Sahami - If you’re looking to spend some of your summer learning how to code, you’ll want to pick up some of the fundamentals and theory to bolster whatever language you choose to learn. Dr. Sahami walks students through one of the largest introductory computer science courses at Stanford all online, and will show you how understanding the basics of computer science can be useful in all disciplines, whether you plan to be a developer or you’re a social scientist looking for easier ways to manage data. Designed for a lightly technical audience with no previous programming experience.
• UC Berkeley - Computer Science 10 - Professor Dan Garcia - Updated for a new term and a new audience, Dr. Garcia’s classic introduction to computer science and computing in our society takes students through topics like algorithms and how businesses around the globe use them to predict almost everything, 3D graphics and video games and how they’re developed, social media and communications, social implications of computing, and what the future of computing holds. Designed for lightly-technical audiences.
• Udacity - CS 101: Building a Search Engine - Professor David Evans and Sarah Norell - Designed for audiences with no prior programming experience, this course will walk you through the fundamentals of computer science, how search engines like Google work, how they were developed and built, and finally walk you through the process of building your own search engine, complete with a web crawler and index of highly ranked web pages.
• University of California, Irvine - Computer Science 171: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - Professor Max Welling - A primer on how artificial intelligences work, and not in the sci-fi sense (although there’s more on that later in the class.) You’ll study informed and uninformed search, logic, probability, learning, and other programmable characteristics in self-improving systems in this course. Designed for somewhat technical audiences.
• Stanford University - iPad and iPhone App Development (iTunes U) - Professor Paul Hegarty - If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to build an iOS app, now’s your chance. The entire course is a set of free lessons and lectures you can subscribe to in iTunes U, download, and follow at your own pace, complete with exercises and reference materials to help you build your own app from start to finish. You’ll need some prior programming experience to make the most of the course though.

Finance and Economics

• Extension.org/University of Minnesota - The Road to Financial Security - A web-based, self-taught course from the University of Minnesota that cover critical topics in financial planning for the future, including planning for retirement, adapting your retirement plan to changes at work or unemployment, changing health care needs, and specific financial issues that face parents.
• Utah State University - Family Finance - Professor Alena Johnson - You don’t have to have a growing family or children to appreciate the importance of budgeting for your needs, those of your partner, and whatever common expenses you share. This course from Utah State University will help you set and work towards financial goals set by everyone in the household, based on shared values and priorities. Plus, you’ll get retirement tips that will help make sure your whole family is happy as you collectively get older.
• Extension.org/Multiple Universities - Preparing Your Finances for Times of Disaster - A collection of articles and self-study one-session web courses that will help you prepare your finances to disasters, including natural disasters, unexpected expenses, and changes in your health or wellness. The course walks you through organizing your legal documents so your family is protected, making sure you have the right insurance to cover natural disasters that may take place in your area, and making sure to budget for emergencies.
• University of California, San Diego - ECON 101: International Trade - Professor James Rauch - Distributed in weekly podcast form, this primer to international trade comes without tests, quizzes, or documentation, but it makes for an amazing listen as you learn about how products move across borders, how governments react to price and currency pressures, and both the political and social implications of multinational companies, their growth, and their expanding reach.
• MIT - Economic History of Financial Crises - Professor Peter Temin - The financial crisis that started in 2008 and 2009 has been a long slog, but looking at it through the eyes of economic history is a great way to make sure similar mistakes don’t happen again. This course offers a historical perspective on financial panics through history, including the Great Depression, the Japanese stagnation, the first oil crisis, and of course, the economic downturn of 2008.

Science and Medicine

• Tufts University - Physics for Humanists - Professor Gary R. Goldstein - If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about physics—the science that seeks to understand and explain the very mechanisms behind the universe—but you’ve been daunted by all of the mathematics required, this course is for you. Physics for humanists will walk you through the history of modern physics, major players in physical science over the past hundred years, what their discoveries mean in a big-picture sense, how far we have to go. The course is designed for people intellectually curious about physics, and covers topics like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger’s Cat, General and Special Relativity, and even the interaction between physics and society, like nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.
• Imperial College of London - Physics - A collection of lectures from multiple professors, this series of free courses will walk you through recent discoveries, research, and progress made by physicists around the world. Topics include the search for the Higgs Boson, the now-famous study that posited Neutrinos may be faster than light (later discovered to be mechanical error in the experiment), new testing methods in environmental science, the future of fusion-based nuclear energy, and solar effects on climate.
• HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College - Astronomy 103: Introduction to Planetary Astronomy/Astronomy 104: Introduction to Stellar Astronomy - Professor Robert Wagner - These two courses will definitely take up some time, but as someone who has a physics degree and an astronomy degree, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t offer you both. The Planetary Astronomy course will walk you through the solar system, form the sun all the way out to the Kuiper Belt, current research being done close to home, and the new things we’re learning about the planets in our own solar system every day. The Stellar Astronomy course will take you thousands or millions of light years away to learn about some of the mysteries of the universe, like dark matter, black holes, and even tackle Astrobiology and Earth-like planets elsewhere in the cosmos.
• Johns Hopkins University - Principles of Human Nutrition - Professor Benjamin Caballero - Before you sign on with the latest diet craze, take some time to develop an understanding of human nutrition from start to finish. Topics in the course include where to get the essential nutrients for the body to remain healthy, how daily recommended intake levels are calculated, why proper nutrition is so important, and the varying signs of malnutrition, and how diet plays a role in the development of long-term illnesses and other chronic conditions.
• University of California, Irvine - Regulatory Requirements for Pharmaceutical Products - This self-study course walks you through the rigorous requirements by government agencies before a new pharmaceutical product goes from research lab to store shelves or doctor’s offices. The course discusses the changing rules over the years, but serves as an exceptional educational tool for those who are either uncertain how rigorous the process is, or are ill-informed as to how the process works, all the way from pre-commercial development through clinical trials, FDA inspections, proper labeling, and acceptable advertising and marketing.
• University of California, San Diego - BIMM 134: The Biology of Cancer - Dr. Jean Wang - Professor Wang walks through the biological underpinnings of cancer, the various types of cancer, the various treatments and wide array of research being done into even the most specific types of cancer, and why cancer is so tough to beat. The course is distributed as a podcast you can subscribe to, and while some prior knowledge of biology will be extremely helpful, you’ll be able to pick up a lot without it.
• Johns Hopkins University - Sexual Health, HIV/STI, and Human Rights - Professor Chris Beyrer - Dr. Beyrer’s course walks through the delicate intersection between human rights, sexual health, sexually transmitted disease, and how public policy and governments around the world attempt to influence all of those conditions. For example, he discusses how global improvements in human rights at home and abroad can make significant inroads to fighting sexually transmitted infections, and how repressive governments and communities may be doing more harm than good by stigmatizing sexual health, education, and medicine.

Mathematics

• The Open University - Math Everywhere - If you’re daunted by mathematics, or don’t see the value in studying it, this course is for you. You’ll learn to see the applications of mathematics all around us, from simple arithmetic and natural law to complicated calculus and advanced statistics that help entire societies make decisions about population growth and where to spend billions of dollars. The course also gets you familiar with your old friend, the graphic calculator—so drag it out of the closet and put some fresh batteries in!
• MIT - Problem Solving Seminar - Professors Hartley Rogers, Kiran Kedlaya, and Richard Stanley - One of the greatest benefits you get from studying mathematics is the ability to look at a problem and come up with a solution. If you find yourself pleasantly challenged by number puzzles and other mathematical problems, or just curious how to bolster your own problem solving and critical thinking skills, this course will help you get reacquainted with them. Students who complete the course can even enter a national mathematics contest to test their skills.
• The Open University - All of the Fun of The Fair - Designed for iOS devices (but not strictly required), this course walks you through an average fair or theme park and helps you understand the underlying mathematics behind four popular carnival rides. This short course details the forces at work so you can begin to see the mathematics under the surface of everyday objects and activities.

Social Sciences, Classics, and Humanities

• MIT - Computer Games and Simulations for Investigations and Education - Professor Eric Klopfer - We’ve discussed how video games can be helpful in the past, but this course takes the topic to a whole new level. You’ll learn how we learn from interactive simulations and exercises, how effective those learning methods can be, current research into the issue, and you’ll have the opportunity to design your own interactive games, with an emphasis on learning and engagement.
• The Open University - Identity in Question - How is identity formed? What does it mean to be “me?” What influences go into establishing an individual’s identity and what they consider to be intrinsic to the “self?” This short course dives into the topic, starting from child-like perceptions of identity, self, and gender, and moving through issues of race, ethnicity, tribe, and how we draw identity from the places that we spend time or grow up in. The course also examines how a person can feel they have multiple identities, often in conflict.
• University of California, Irvine - Anthropology 135A: Religion and Social Order - Dr. Sheila O’Rourke - Religion has played a significant role in social growth, development, conflict, and change since the dawn of civilization. This course walks through the ages, addressing topics of social change, disorder, gender, political and social power, and how all of those elements have changed with the influences of various religions throughout history. The course tackles both classical canon and the theologies of old, and contemporary religions and their applicability to modern conflicts and geopolitical changes.
• MIT - Classics in Western Philosophy - Prof. Rae Langton - Designed for individuals interested in philosophy but without prior training in it, this course looks back to the “founding fathers” of modern philosophy and their work, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Students will tackle the same philosophical questions and challenges they did—the existence of god, where consciousness comes from, what it means to be sentient, and more—and students will use logic and reasoning to come to their own conclusions. The course also examines how the prism of time, society, and external influences change the way we apply that logic.
• University of California, Irvine - Criminology, Law, and Society 219: Hate Crimes - Dr. Valerie Jenness - What exactly is a hate crime, and how is one defined? Depending on who you ask—and their political opinions—you’ll get different answers, but there are actually very specific guidelines for what constitutes a hate crime. The course examines those definitions, the social and political contexts in which many hate crimes occur, and the social policies designed to fight bigotry and discrimination in general.
• MIT - How to Stage a Revolution - Professors Jeffrey S. Ravel, Meg Jacobs, Peter C. Perdue, and William Broadhead - Everyone talks about revolution, and how there’s desperate need for change in politics and government, including local, regional, national, and global. But how do you go about making that change reality? This course walks through how revolutions across the ages got their start, what caused people to take action, and what took entire nations from talking about change to actually making it happen. Students will study the writings, art, and memoirs of revolutionaries from nations come and gone to understand their motivations, and what made them succeed—or fail.

Law

• University of Oxford - Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict - A series of seminars by various professors and visiting dignitaries, this political science course approaches conflicts in recent history and attempts to answer the question: Was this an ethical conflict? From the international intervention in Libya to the possibility of preventative cyber-warfare, the course asks when a preemptive strike is considered ethical, when an armed conflict can be called a success (if ever), and wrangles with tough topics like whether or not targeted killing and assassinations are ever ethically sound or within the bounds of international law.
• Duke Law School - Theft: A History of Music - Professor Jennifer Jenkins - Dr. Jenkins sees current legal issues around music and technology as not new at all—and neither should you. At the end of this one hour lecture, you’ll understand how these problems have persisted for thousands of years. During the renaissance, music publishers were granted monopolies to keep anyone else from printing and distributing music, and even Plato argued once that mixing types of music was disharmonious and should be banned by the state. And yet, even today we struggle with issues of ownership, distribution, and sharing of music. It’s a battle that seems to reappear with every new technology and every new generation.
• University of California, Irvine - Immigration Law Symposium - Everyone has an opinion on immigration law, but few actually understand immigration law as it stands. This series of lectures tackles the issue from both sides and features engaging discussions and debates by legal experts with different opinions. The lectures include topics like managing immigration and immigrant populations through criminal law versus outreach, how race and discrimination come into play, our society’s institutional values and historical perceptions of immigration, and how immigrants work and find jobs in their host country—whether they’re welcome or not.

Cross-Disciplinary Courses and Seminars

• Udacity - CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car - Professor Sebastian Thrun and Gundega Dekena - Google’s self-driving car is headline fodder for tech blogs around the web, but how exactly does it—and other self-driving systems in development by automakers worldwide—actually work? Dr. Thrun, an AI researcher, will explain how a vehicle can learn and adapt to its surroundings, and how designers and developers integrate tracking and control systems, localization utilities, and other robotic systems into the vehicle. You’ll need programming knowledge to make the most of this course, but you can still watch and be fascinated without it.
• MIT - Inventions and Patents - Dr. Robert Rines - This course will walk you through the history of public and private rights when it comes to engineering, inventions, gadgets, solutions, and even software. The focus is on patent law in the United States, and how individuals can apply for patents for their inventions, how patents are handled in a legal context, and more. Technology isn’t the only application either—the course discusses the role of discovery and patenting in a medical and pharmaceutical context, and even in terms of genetic engineering and whether a company or person can “own” a gene sequence or modification technique.
• Carnegie Mellon University - Logic and Proofs - This self-guided course will teach you the basics of using symbolic logic to develop and support arguments and positions. The course’s focus is on strategic argumentation, and while you can’t be there in person to demonstrate, you can still practice your deductive skills and how to present arguments at home.
• Emory University - Emory Looks at Mad Men - Emory professors discuss the racial, social, and historical aspects of the popular television show. How accurate is the historical portrayal of advertising, or of society? The course is currently on-going, and available to subscribe to via iTunes U.
• University of South Florida - Social Media - Most of us use social media to tell our friends what we’re up to and stay close to people who are far away from us, but businesses are using it to make big bucks. What is social media exactly, how do people gauge trends in social media, and what role does social media play in politics, government, and even political rebellion? This course tackles all of those topics, as well as how you can use social media for your personal and professional life.

Extra Credit: How To Find Your Own Online Classes

The curriculum at Lifehacker U is rich and deep, but it may not reflect all of your areas of interests or expertise. If you’re looking for more or more varied course material, here are some resources to help you find great, university-level online classes that you can take from the comfort of your desk, at any time of day.

• Academic Earth curates an amazing list of video seminars and classes from some of the world’s smartest minds, innovators, and leaders on a variety of topics including science, mathematics, politics, public policy, art, history, and more.
• TED talks are well known for being thought provoking, interesting, intelligent, and in many cases, inspiring and informative. We’ve featured TED talks at Lifehacker before, and if you’re looking for seminars on the web worth watching, TED is worth perusing.
• Education-Portal.com has a list of universities offering free and for-credit online classes to students and the public at large.
• Open Culture’s list of free online courses is broken down by subject matter and includes classes available on YouTube, iTunes U, and direct from the University or School’s website.
• The Open Courseware Consortium is a collection of colleges and universities that have all agreed to use a similar platform to offer seminars and full classes—complete with notes, memos, examinations, and other documentation free on the web. They also maintain a great list of member schools around the world, so you can visit universities anywhere in the world and take the online classes they make available.
• The Khan Academy offers free YouTube-based video classes in math, science, technology, the humanities, and test preparation and study skills. If you’re looking to augment your education or just take a couple video classes in your spare time, it’s a great place to start and has a lot of interesting topics to offer.
• The University of Reddit is a crowd-built set of classes and seminars by Reddit users who have expertise to share. Topics range from computer science and programming to paleontology, narrative poetry, and Latin. Individuals interested in teaching classes regularly post to the University of Reddit subthread to gauge interest in future courses and announce when new modules are available.
• iTunes U hosts podcasts, seminars, lectures, and full collections of entire courses from universities around the globe, including many of the ones listed above. Enjoy courses from Stanford, Duke, Harvard, and more, all from the comfort of your desktop, or on the go with the iTunes U app for iOS.
• The Lifehacker Night School is our own set of tutorials and classes that help you out with deep and intricate subjects like becoming a better photographer, building your own computer, or getting to know your network, among others.

The beautiful thing about taking classes online is that you can pick and choose the classes you want to attend, skip lectures and come back to them later, and do examinations and exercises on your own time. You can load up with as many classes as you choose, or take a light course load and come back to some of the classes you meant to take at another time that’s more convenient for you.

With Lifehacker U, you’re free to take as many or as few classes as you like, and we’ll update this course guide every term with a fresh list of courses on new and interesting topics, some of which are only available during that academic term.

If you have online course resources or your university offers classes that are available for free online that you know would be a great fit for Lifehacker U, don’t keep them to yourself! Send them in to us at tips+lifehackeru@lifehacker.com so we can include them in the next semester!

Title photo remixed from an original by Jorge Salcedo (Shutterstock).

Google’s new file syncing service, Google Drive, is finally available and looking pretty great. But how does it stack up against the current king of file syncing, Dropbox? Here’s where each app shines (and falls short).

Each service has a lot of features, and each excels in different areas. Here, we’ll compare the desktop client, webapp, sharing features, speed, and other characteristics of each service.

Very Similar Desktop Clients, with a Few Important Differences

Google’s desktop client is very similar to Dropbox’s—in fact, certain parts just seem copied exactly from Dropbox’s interface. When you install it, you can choose where to put your Google Drive folder, as well as choose which folders you actually want synced to your desktop. You can choose to sync Google Docs files or not sync them, your choice.

Once it downloads all your files, you’ll see them in your Google Drive folder, just like Dropbox. Each has a green checkmark if it’s synced, or a blue refresh icon if it’s currently syncing. Items created in Google Docs have their own special icons, and can only be opened in Google Docs. If you double-click on them, they’ll open up in a new browser tab. This is fine if you want to use Google Docs, and it works well with Google Docs’ offline viewing, but it’s really annoying if you want to be able to tweak docs in your favorite desktop word processor—you actually have to go to the Drive webapp, export them as an Office-compatible file, then open that copy up instead. I get that Google Docs is integrated, but I wish I had a choice in the matter. Other, non-Google Docs files will show up normally and open with their default programs.

It’s also worth noting that Linux users don’t have access to Google Drive, but they will have access to Dropbox. It’s not a huge point of comparison (since it’s pretty much a deal killer for any Linux user), but it’s worth noting anyway.

Feature-Filled Webapps, Plus Google’s Powerful Search

Google Drive’s webapp is where it really shines. You’re probably pretty familiar with it already: it looks exactly like Google Docs, except you have two views: a list view (like the one in Docs) and a thumbnail view, that will show you previews of all your documents, images, and other files. The webapp has a search bar at the top and, just like other Google products, it’s pretty powerful—you can search by document type, owner, and other advanced filters. Dropbox has an advanced search, but it isn’t quite as good—you can only search for “all these words” “any of these words” “this exact phrase”, or “none of these words”. It’ll suffice for most things, but those of us that have gotten used to Gmail’s awesome search powers will really love Drive.

Drive’s search also hooks into Google’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Google Images database, to find images and uneditable document scans using text search terms. So, if you’ve scanned a document, it’ll scan it and you’ll be able to find it by searching for words in the document. Similarly, if Google can tell what your pictures are of, you can search by subject—e.g., searching “Eiffel Tower” will bring up your photos of the Eiffel Tower from your recent vacation. Dropbox can’t do any of that.

Lastly, like Dropbox, Drive’s webapp also has built-in viewers for tons of different file types, including images, videos, and even Adobe files. You won’t be able to edit them all from the web, of course, but it’s nice to be able to view them without downloading them or installing any extra software. Dropbox, from what we can tell, has just about the same feature set when it comes to previewing files—though Drive has the added advantage of making Docs files editable in Google Docs, as you would expect.

Powerful File Sharing, But No Desktop Support for Google

Both apps do pretty well at sharing files, they just work in slightly different ways. Dropbox lets you share files by right-clicking on them in Windows Explorer or the Finder and getting a link to share with your friends. Google Drive forces you to go the webapp, and has a slightly confusing method of sharing files—if you check a file and go to More > Share, you can send it as an email attachment with Gmail or Share with other people. When you click Share, you either type in the names of other Google users to add it to their Google Drive, or click “Change” next to “Who Has Access” to share it with “anyone that has the link” or “public on the web”. It’s a bit more convoluted, and we wish there was better desktop integration, but at least the feature is there. Both services also let you share entire folders with other people, for easy collaboration.

Google Drive, however, has an edge in the collaboration department. Not only can you share folders, but it also has all of Google Docs’ built-in collaboration features that we love so much. By sharing a document with another Docs user, they can edit the file, make comments, and so on. That way, you don’t just see the edited file, you see what they’ve done and can chat with them in real time as they do it.

Dropbox Gives You More Power Over Your Syncing Speed

We tested syncing a 50MB file with both programs, with interesting results. By default, Dropbox is significantly slower, because it automatically throttles your upload speeds. However, this is all tweakable in Dropbox’s preferences. You can change how fast it uploads and downloads files, which is great if you don’t want it to steal bandwidth from other important things (like video chatting, games, or BitTorrent). Google Drive doesn’t give you these options, which is kind of annoying. With Dropbox set to “Don’t Limit”, it uploaded files at the same speed as Google Drive in our tests.

However, Dropbox also has LAN sync, which means transferring files to another computer on your network is going to be a lot faster than Google Drive, which will download it from the servers instead of the other computer. After uploading our 50MB file to Dropbox, it took less than a minute to show up on our other machine, while Google Drive took about 3 more minutes.

Drive is also really annoying in the sense that it doesn’t give you any information about how fast it’s syncing or when it’s done. Dropbox’s system tray icon will not only show you when it’s uploading or downloading just by looking at the icon, but if you hover over it, it’ll also show you how fast it’s going and how long it thinks the transfer will take. It’ll also notify you when new files are added. Drive doesn’t do any of these things. To see if it’s syncing, you have to right-click on it, and it’ll only tell you that it’s syncing—now how fast it’s going or how long it’ll take. It doesn’t have any notifications, so the only way to see when it’s done is to right-click on it compulsively, reload your Drive folder in Windows explorer, or visit the web interface. Dropbox wins this section by a mile.

See Old Versions of All Your Files Right From the Webapp

Both services offer revision control, although for normal, non-Google Docs files, Dropbox does it a little better. In Google Drive, you can see revisions by opening a file and going to File > See Revision History. If it’s a Google Docs file, you’ll be able to see the revisions in detail, but for other files, you just have a choice of downloading old revisions to your desktop, which kind of sucks. Dropbox, on the other hand, will let you restore old versions of a file right from the web interface, which is much more friendly. So, each has their own advantages depending on what kind of file you’re looking at, but the bottom line is that you can always revert to an older version of a file if you need to.

That said, Dropbox has the distinct advantage of letting you restore files long after you’ve deleted them from your Dropbox, something that Google Drive doesn’t do. So, if this tends to be something you deal with, Dropbox has a pretty big advantage in this area.

Dropbox Has More Opportunities for Extra Free Space, but the Pro Service Will Cost You

Lastly, each gives you different amounts of space for different prices. Dropbox only gives you 2GB for free, while Drive gives you 5GB—although it’s very easy to get more Dropbox space for free, and you can get well beyond 5GB. However, if you need more than, say 50GB of space, you’ll need to pony up some cash. Drive is significantly cheaper than Dropbox, offering 25GB for $2.49 a month, 100GB for $4.99/month, and even 1TB for $49.99 a month (with a few other tiers in between, and going all the way up to 16TB). Dropbox, on the other hand, gives you 50GB for $9.99/month (or $99 a year), 100GB for $19.99 a month (or $199 a year), and anything above that requires a pretty expensive Dropbox Teams account, starting at $795. If you’re looking to save cash, Drive is the clear winner.

Drive is actually pretty solid for something that just launched, but they’re also super late to the game, and it’s a little disappointing that they’re only most of the way there after all this time. If you’re a heavy Google Docs user, you’ll probably love Drive, but Dropbox still has the edge in most of our minds—especially because its desktop app is just so much better than Google’s. Have you tried out Google Drive? What do you think of its feature set and how it compares to Dropbox (and, the big question: Will you be switching)? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Privacy is dead, right? Facebook knows everything about you, and the world is still turning. Whether you don’t mind companies or the government knowing all about your private life or still feel completely uneasy at the idea, we often gloss over exactly why your personal data is worth protecting. We teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get to the heart of the issue, and dispel some common myths around the ways your data is used.

We sat down with Rainey Reitman, Activism Director at the EFF, to discuss why digital privacy is important, why you should keep a skeptical eye to services that make promises of “free” services in exchange for tidbits of personal information, and why you should care about the privacy of others even if you’re not concerned about your own data and how it may be used. All in all, the message is clear: It’s tempting to throw up your hands and say “privacy is dead,” but nothing could be further from the truth.

Cause for Concern: Why No One’s Telling You Your Data Is Valuable

When we discussed how companies track you on the web and what you can do to stop them, I drew on my personal experience working for a company that trades in information—both personal and aggregate—to explain why your data is so valuable to the businesses that want it. Making the case that information about you, your demographics, your behaviors and habits—all information you may think has little to no value—is valuable to the people looking for it is one important step in explaining why this is all important. After all, if someone a company is able to build their business model on getting your information, it must be worth something, right? Photo by Andy Mabbett.

That’s part of the problem—individuals are all too often told that the information collected about them is “non-identifiable,” which may very well be true to the party requesting it, but not so for anyone else with access to it later. “Consumers are often unaware of the transaction that takes place when they sign their information away,” Rainey explained, noting that this lack of transparency, coupled with the fact that companies who trade in and use that information resist efforts for consumers to opt-out of behavioral marketing are causes for concern. The fact is, your data is worth real, tangible money to the companies that offer you free services (in Facebook’s case, you’re worth just shy of $5 per year) and the companies they do business with, even if they’re not asking you to open your wallet.

Does Anyone Actually Care Anymore? Isn’t Privacy Dead?

Hardly. Rainey explained “People do care about privacy!” She directed me to a 2009 study by KnowPrivacy, a research group headed by Jason Schultz and Chris Hoofnagle of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley, that shows that people are indeed concerned about what data is requested of them, how much of the requested information is required for the service they want to use, and how their data is eventually used. The survey notes that even young people are concerned about their privacy, the ones often written off as part of a generation that’s willing to share everything online. Photo remixed from jayfish (Shutterstock).

“These same people are comfortable telling their friends what they ate for breakfast,” Rainey remarked, “but they’re not comfortable telling their medical insurer, or having their medical insurer get access to their Facebook account because they clicked a Like button, for example.” These results were reiterated in a 2010 USA Today/Gallup poll that uncovered similar results—people are still quite concerned with their privacy. The baseline for privacy has simply changed.

Rainey says that even those who dismiss privacy concerns become concerned when confronted with the depth of information they’ve revealed, and when shown how that information is used once they give it up. In the end, the argument isn’t a zero-sum game: people don’t want their services free and their privacy intact, Rainey reiterated. “They just want control over what information they give up, what they agree to, and what information is made public versus kept private in the databases and annals of the companies and organizations that get to see it.”

Who’s More Dangerous? The Government or Businesses?

The short answer is that there’s no real difference between the two. Here’s why:

• The Government: When you sign up for a new web service, you might assume that your data goes only as far as the company you’ve signed an agreement with. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Rainey points out that filing a simple FOIA request revealed that government agencies like the DEA and even the IRS regularly collect, store, and request information from companies like Facebook and Twitter.
  
  
  So the government uses the information they collect on social media to hunt and catch criminals—that’s not so bad, right? It’s not that simple. “Those organizations all map social graphs to see how people of interest relate to each other, and subsequently investigate their friends, followers, and others in their networks,” Rainey explained. To boot, the government often doesn’t bother to get a court order or justify the reason they want this information to the network in question—they make a few phone calls or send over a letter asking for someone’s information, and the service responds with the requested data.
• Businesses: At least the government has to provide some measure of transparency. Private entities are largely exempt from the Privacy Act of 1974, and once they collect your information, there’s no way to tell what happens to it after that. Some companies reserve the right to sell the information, and while most explicitly promise not to in their privacy policies, they give themselves the out of being able to “share” information with their “strategic partners,” which is the same thing, just without a cash transaction taking place. Photo by Ludovic Hirlimann.
  
  
  But these companies don’t keep personally identifiable information (PII), right? You’re just an aggregate number to them, so what’s the worry? Well—that information sharing is generally done between companies in order to obtain that information and refine their marketing efforts. While it may mean nothing more than a few coupons at your doorstep, the fact of the matter is the trade in aggregate information is a hot one, and companies specialize in taking aggregate information and making it very personal. Even if that’s not a problem for you, the real issue is that once that information is assembled, and once it is personal, you have no rights or access to it once you’ve signed it away. “Most people don’t ask themselves, ‘Do I still have the rights to this data once I click OK?’” Rainey explained. “And then, once it’s gone, you don’t even have the right to change it, update it, or even request your information be removed later if circumstances change.”
  
  
  She then pointed me to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse’s Chronology of Data Breaches, a massive collection of data publicly reported data breaches at companies that store public and private information going back to 2005—everything from missing laptops to massive hacks. “The fact is, that once your data is collected, even if it’s aggregate, and stored in one of these databases, it’s being actively targeted by people who want it, and it’s vulnerable to breaches. One study showed that a year after a database like one of these is broken into, your chance of being a victim of identity theft is four times greater.” That’s long after the courtesy credit and identity theft monitoring services most companies offer if their databases are hacked, and as we’ve seen from recent credit card breaches, once your information is lost it may be a big deal to you, but on an individual level, it’s not horribly valuable to the company tasked with protecting it.

So while the government and businesses are both scrambling to collect as much information as they can, you should have serious reservations about whether the data is being kept securely, what rights you have after the fact to remove personally identifiable information should be it collected, and how that information is being used by other groups you didn’t sign an agreement with once you give it up to the one you did. The issue is so pervasive that the White House recently called for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights to ensure both the government and private agencies only collect the information required to provide specific services, and no more—a measure that many called a good first step, but just that: a first step.

But Targeted Ads are Better than Random Ones, Right? And If We All Keep Our Data Private, Nothing Will Be Free Anymore and the Internet Will Cease to Exist!

When I brought up this concern to Rainey, she laughed: “It’s always entertaining to hear the argument swing from ‘but people like these ads’ to ‘and without them the Internet will be gone forever!’ The problem with the first part is that if it were true that people really did prefer and actually enjoy behavioral marketing, then why not give consumers the option to opt-in to them instead of forcing them to opt-out of every kind of marketing entirely? If they like it, giving them the choice to turn it off won’t stop anyone!” She explained that privacy advocates aren’t fighting for an ad-free Internet, they just want to give consumers who care about their privacy a way to opt-out of behavioral and targeted marketing efforts, something industry groups are fighting them on tooth and nail. Photo by Jim Linwood.

As for the “death of the free internet,” Rainey noted that while the basis of revenue-generation on the internet has always been advertising, it’s only been recent years that we’ve seen a massive shift towards behavioral and targeted marketing that sticks with individuals not just on a single page, or in one company’s services, but across all of their activities online. She’s right—Jeff Jarvis wrote at BuzzMachine that even while he thinks much of the concern over privacy and do not track is a tempest in a teapot, companies at least need to be transparant about how they do what they’ve always been doing, and give consumers a choice. He noted that fast-forwarding through ads on television has been around for a long time, but that hasn’t led to the death of the TV advertising industry. “Ads don’t have to track you to make money,” Rainey said, “You [advertisers] just need to give consumers the choice—the option to see ads without tracking! Then you could have both options and make everyone happy!” It’s that lack of choice—she explained—that’s the real problem.

So What Do I Do About It? What Does It Matter?

Even if your privacy isn’t important to you, there are others for whom privacy is paramount. “Even if you’re comfortable giving up your personal information,” Rainey said, “there are plenty of people who aren’t, and they shouldn’t have to fight to keep their addresses out of publicly accessible databases or off of a website where it’s easily obtained. Victims of domestic violence, members of the LGBT community, political activists, human rights activists, police officers, even public figures all need privacy to make sure their families and homes are safe.” Even if you’re not convinced that your data is worth protecting, there are others who need that protection. To that point, it’s worth remembering that on many social networks, we give up information about those we’re connected to when we let another app or service in—even if we’ve consciously decided we’re okay trading the information requested about ourselves. Image by freelanceartist (Shutterstock).

So what do you do now? We’ve shown you how to protect yourself and even how to watch companies track you in real time. In the end, the important thing to remember before you click through another privacy policy is to be actively aware of the transaction you’re making. Just because something claims it’s free doesn’t mean it is, and it’s up to you to decide whether the service is worth the price of admission.

Rainey Reitman is Activism Director at The Electronic Frontier Foundation. She graciously offered her time and expertise for this post, and we thank her.

http://lifehac.kr/HAzVBE
April 11, 2012 at 12:19PM via Pocket

Even if you have no idea what a VPN is (it’s a Virtual Private Network), the acronym alone conjures visions of corporate firewalls and other relatively boring things, right? While a VPN is a common corporate security tool, it’s also one of the coolest things you can set up for personal use that you probably have never tried.

Browsing the web from a coffee shop can be dangerous, but you know that already. Gaming with friends over the internet is great, but it’s better when it’s just you and your friends, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could surf the web anywhere as if you were at home, and game with friends like you were all in the same room? That kind of functionality is at the very heart of a VPN, and we’re going to show you how to set one up. Here’s how to get started.

What’s a VPN?

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is just a network of computers that are all connected securely even though they’re in different locations and all using different connection methods. The biggest benefit to a VPN is that all of the computers on one are securely connected to one another and their traffic encrypted and kept away from prying eyes. Another great benefit to a VPN is that all of the computers on one are effectively on the same network, meaning they can communicate as if they were right next to one another, plugged in to the same router. Photo by cloki (Shutterstock).

If security is all you want, sure you can sign up for a free or paid VPN service that will encrypt your traffic only, but why throw your money (and trust your privacy and security) into the hands of a third party when you can roll your own? It’s incredibly easy, and once you have your own personal, private VPN, you can browse securely on any network by leveraging your home internet connection, get a group of friends together for LAN gaming, get access to all of your music and movies from home with ease, and more.

Why You Should Roll Your Own

We’ve often discussed the dangers of using unsecured internet connections at coffee shops, airports, or other public places, especially if you’re planning on doing any browsing or surfing that may be considered private. We’ve warned you of the ubiquitous “Free Public Wi-Fi”, explained how you can stay safe when you do use public networks, and even outlined how to set up your own private VPN with Hamachi.

We’re going to build on that second story, where Adam Pash showed us how to set up a proxy and Hamachi to protect ourselves when browsing from public places, and extend Hamachi’s functionality to not just secure surfing, but LAN gaming with friends, secure remote access to your home computers and files when you’re on the road and on the go, and more. Rolling your own VPN—while ideal for security—also gives you access to your home network at any time, and all of the great things that come with effectively sitting at home using your Wi-Fi there, when you’re actually at home, in a coffee shop, or across the country.

Before You Get Started

Hamachi isn’t the only utility that does this—most notably OpenVPN, which is one of your favorite VPN tools. However, for our purposes, Hamachi wins for being the most hands-off, zero-configuration VPN tool to configure. The others aren’t terribly difficult, but Hamachi really is easy to install. Before we get started, there are a few prerequisites that will make this solution work best for you:

• You have to have an always-on computer at home.
• You don’t trust, or don’t want to use third party VPN services.
• You don’t have an office or school that offers free VPN services..

If the above sounds about right, and you have a nice sturdy broadband connection at home (remember, when you’re connected to it, you’ll be sending your traffic to your home network and then out again, so you may feel a performance hit by double-hopping) then it’s time to get started.

Set Up and Configure Hamachi

Hamachi runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, so grab the installer for your OS of choice. It comes in two flavors: a free (for non-commercial use) version that gives us everything we want (the ability to leverage to our home network from anywhere over a secure, encrypted connection), and a paid, managed version that does more than you’d likely ever need.

We don’t want to rehash all of the steps that Adam walked through in his post on setting up Hamachi and Privoxy for secure browsing—so here’s the quick version:

1. Download Hamachi
2. Run it. If it’s your first time, click the Blue power button to power it on.
3. Click the Network menu, then select Create a new network, giving your network a name and a good, strong password.
4. Done!

After you’ve set up your network on your always-on computer at home, grab your laptop, netbook, or any other system you plan to travel with, and install the client there. Instead of creating a new network, this time join the one you created (Network > Join an existing network), using the network name and password you just generated. That’s all there is to it—it really is zero-configuration security. Make a note of that network name and password—you’ll need it again later. Now those two computers can securely access one another from anywhere, and do so as though they’re on the same local network. (You can add as many computers as you want to the network you just created.)

Protect Your Web Browsing, Anywhere You Roam

Most people use VPNs to protect their browsing when they’re using an unsecured network, like the one at your local library or coffee shop. With Hamachi, you can turn turn your always-on system at home into a proxy that you can securely browse through when you’re there. We suggest (and help you set up) Privoxy to handle this, and while it takes a little work, once you’re finished, you’re good to go. You’ll effectively be connecting to your home computer, and then asking your home computer to feed you any sites or services you want to access, so your browsing may slow down a bit based on that—but if you have broadband at home and a good connection to the internet from your always-on computer, the slowdown will be worth the added security. The knowledge that you’re largely protected from snooping by people who may be using tools like Firesheep or Faceniff to sniff out your credentials on public networks is a great feeling, and knowing that your connection is secured and encrypted goes a long way towards making it more comfortable to check your email, log in to your social networks, and generally use the web through your proxy when you’re out and about as though you were at home (because effectively, you are!) Photo by Ed Yourdon.

Bring Your Friends In On Private LAN Gaming

Secure browsing isn’t the only thing you can do with Hamachi though. Connecting to your home computer with Hamachi puts you on an on-demand mesh network with any other computers connected to the same network, which is ideal if you and your friends want to effectively LAN party it up without lugging your computers to each other’s houses. You have the choice with Hamachi to either give out the network name and password you created earlier, or you can set up a specific network just for your friends to play LAN games together, without forcing you all to try and find slots on a public server or desperately try to find each other in whatever matchmaking service your favorite games offer. Photo by dbgg1979.

Every computer in your virtual LAN will have to have Hamachi installed, and they’ll all have to log in to the network with the credentials you supply. One system will have to host the game server (and with most games, it’s best if that system is the most powerful one with the fastest connection to the internet, and ideally one you’re not actually using to play the game) and all of the other systems, including yours, will connect to it as clients. As far as Hamachi is concerned, as long as it’s running in the background of all of those systems, you’re all set. Keep in mind that here too your connection to your friends will be as slow as the slowest system in the group, but again, if you all have broadband you should be fine.

Use Hamachi for Zero Configuration Remote Access and Streaming

Along with secure browsing, running Hamachi at home while you’re traveling gives you a great way to get access to your files at home without the need for remote desktop tools. If it’s just movies, music, or photos you’re looking for, a shared folder on your home computer will do the trick. If you use iTunes, you can use Home Sharing to stream anything in your library at home to the computer you have. That means you can relax in your hotel room across the country and stream the movies you have downloaded to your HTPC, or stream the music you have stored on your home PC, effortlessly, as though you were right there. Photo by myvector (Shutterstock).

You may not care about streaming music if you’re already using one of the many cloud-based music services when you’re away from home, but when it comes to movies, TV shows, photos, or other media that’s too much for your Dropbox account, using Hamachi when you’re on the go is a great option. Speaking of bandwidth, it’s worth mentioning here that when you stream movies to your PC while connected via Hamachi, you’re limited to your upload speed at home, and you are using bandiwidth on your home connection—so if you have an ISP that throttles after a certain bandwidth limit (like Comcast’s 250GB), you may want to exercise some caution.

You can also get out from under services like GoToMyPC or even LogMeIn Free, made by the same people who now manage Hamachi. With Hamachi installed and active, you can remote desktop natively or use VNC to connect to any computer on your home network if you want to use it as though you were there, all without worrying about port forwarding or tweaking your router to make sure you can connect from outside of your network.

Enjoy the Benefits

These uses just scratch the surface of some of the things you can do with a tool like Hamachi. There are caveats, like using bandwidth on your home connection as well as where you are, and the potential slowness that comes with being limited by your upload speed at home, but the benefits of a VPN go past just accessing the files on your home network and connecting to the internet as though you were sitting right there at home. LAN gaming, collaborating on an ad-hoc network with friends or coworkers, secure browsing, they’re all easy to set up once you have your own VPN up and running.

What are some of your favorite uses for Hamachi—or your favorite VPN client—beyond simple secure tunneling? Let us know in the comments below.