Once upon a time (about 3 years ago), when I was using windows, I had a laptop (the one I broke) with only 10GB of hard disk. It was a Fujitsu S-5582 which later I upgraded to 20GB, wow! I had a 60GB external laptop drive (which I also broke shortly after I bought the laptop), so that leaves me with a big storage dilemma - speaking of irony.

It was running on XP and Puppy Linux (live, i.e. run from CD and not installed locally) and understandably the hard disk was almost full before I started using it. So what did I do with my files and extra applications I need to use?

A. Don’t keep any files in the hard disk.

B. Put it somewhere else that I can access easily.

C. Forget about installing any applications, even office.

Answer:  all of the above.

After much thoughts in the shower and on the toilet bowl, I’ve decided to use my ever-increasing gmail mailbox, as a storage. Someone told me about gmail drive, a very small application for windows that enables one to drag and drop files into a gmail account. It will magically save each file as an email attachment in gmail. It worked marvellously. The only limitation is the file size is limited to 10MB (now 20MB) each, as per gmail’s attachment limit.

As for office apps, I used Google documents, ebuddy or meebo for messaging and other hosted apps - anything to avoid installing on my hard disk. Being poor made me analyse really hard for solutions
What about Mac?

Since I broke that laptop and changed to Mac, gmail drive is no longer usable. Although now I have a 250GB hard disk, it will still be nice to back up important stuff. There is a Mac equivalent called gDisk but it was very buggy when I tried to use it. After much googling, I found a firefox extension called Gspace, which works on windows, mac and linux. Yay!

How to Work It

1. Download the Mac OSX version

2. Install the .xpi file with firefox

3. Launch firefox and go to menu Tools -> Gspace. Gspace will be launched within firefox. The interface looks like an ftp client. You don’t have to care about what ftp clients are if you don’t don’t what it means

4. Add account - Click on “Manage Accounts”. Fill in your gmail account and password. You can add more than one gmail account. Check “remember password” if you don’t want to be prompted to enter  your password on every launch.

5. Login - from the drop down menu next to “manage accounts” button, select the gmail account you’d like to login and click “login”.

6. Transfer -  in the left pane, browse to the specific file(s) on your computer you’d like to upload to your gmail account. The file limit is the same with gmail attachment size, which is 20MB at the moment. Then click the right arrow button in the middle and walla! You can also download from gmail by clicking the left arrow button in the middle but using the same method.

In Gmail

Every file uploaded will be automatically converted to an email attachment in gmail. If you’d like to access your files from any computer with a browser, just sign in to gmail as you normally would. The files would be in emails with subject starting with “GSPACE”.

I was away for a few years and I just got back 3 weeks ago. I was appalled by the speed of Streamyx at home, especially for downloading, so I made a report with TM through the phone. The customer service was very friendly and advised me step-by-step what to check for and what to test. I did that and called back, like I was advised. This followed more tests and calls. At the end, they opened up a case for the technician to come over to check the line. The tech guy showed up next morning. He did some tests on the line and concluded that everything was ok and in fact the bandwidth was pretty good for my 384 kbps package and some people had it worse.

Ok, I realised that there is nothing to be done but to upgrade the package. As I researched, I stumbled across postings in forums and blogs about TM throttling P2P and torrent downloads. So, that was my moment of enlightenment. It so happened at that moment, the technical support of Streamyx called me to follow up on the case. So I asked if it’s true that TM is limiting P2P and torrent downloads and he confirmed that and apparently that is in line with TM’s fair use policy which is available on the website.

So, overall I was very pleased with the customer service provided although the throttling of bandwidth is very unpleasant (but that has nothing to do with the customer service quality, it was more of an infrastructure limitation).

After much reading, I have found a way to improve the download speed and overall browsing experience. Best of all, it’s free.

Before I proceed, I must say that this is what I did and it worked for me. Do it at your own risk and if it didn’t work for you, please don’t complain to me as I don’t have a customer service department to handle that

Two Things You Need
There are two utilities you need to use and they are independent of each other. They are both available for Mac and PC.

One is called Hotspot Shield and the other is called Opendns.

I’ll skip the details of these two applications as you can read it before downloading. Patrick Soon did wrote a very interesting article about another good use of Hotspot Shield here. Im a nutshell, one will create and VPN between your computer and their internet gateway and as a result, assigns you an American IP address. The other will unbundle your DNS service from your ISP’s Internet connection for a more reliable, secure and faster connection. They do a lot more but that’s not what I’m covering for this post.

You can start by installing either one but I started with Hotspot Shield.