Enter Pigeon Carrier, a unique Chrome extension and Firefox add-on that combines the powers of Twitter and DropBox to create something truly amazing. With the extension, you can easily upload files to your DropBox through Twitter and then share the link with the world.

How Can I Use It?

If this is your first time using Pigeon Carrier, you need to make a DropBox account for yourself if you don’t already have one. Theoretically, this is going to be pretty easy, and you can just choose the free 5GB space option. Upon your first usage of Pigeon Carrier, you will be prompted to authorize Pigeon Carrier to connect both your DropBox and your Twitter. This is perfectly safe, and the app developers won’t be stealing your soul in any way (as far as I know).

After installing the Pigeon Carrier extension, you’ll notice that there is going to be a brand new “Add Attachment” option right next to the Tweet button. At this point, you can already be sure that this extension is going to be incredibly easy to use.

When you are fully ready to Tweet attachments, all you have to do is type in your message (whether it be directed towards someone or just a general announcement), click “Add Attachment”, and then upload your file. After it uploads, confirm the attachment and send out your Tweet. Right next to the message will be the word “Attachment” in which anyone can click and download your selected file.

What About People Who Don’t Have The Extension?

By now, you may be wondering, “Josh, what about the folks who didn’t spruce up their browser with Pigeon Carrier? They won’t be able to see that fancy attachment link, will they?”

Well, my friend, you are too right. They won’t be able to see that fancy attachment link at all. However, what they will see is any standard “t.co” URL that you would use when sending out any link (like when I tweet out my MakeUseOf articles).

You see, when you use Pigeon Carrier, all it does is upload a file to your Public folder on DropBox, copies the link to this said file, and then pastes it in your Tweet upon your command so that it can be accessed through the Pigeon Carrier website. As a matter of fact, it does all of this with the click of a single button.

Imagine doing this all by yourself. It would take a ton of clicking, right? All Pigeon Carrier does is streamline it for you.

Since you have the extension, you will, of course, see the “Attachment” link in your Tweet, and if you happen to see attached files from anyone else who Tweets them out, you will see that same “Attachment” link. Basically, don’t worry at all about this not working for other people. The function is purely identical, but the form is slightly different.

Conclusion

Pigeon Carrier is a browser extension that basically conglomerates multiple functions into one swift process, allowing users to send files with their Tweets. Ideally, you can publicly send files to a mass group who may need them (say, for instance, a design team), or you could even just Tweet it out to one person (with the knowledge that other people can see the file).

Have you used Pigeon Carrier yet? What do you think of it? Do you know of any other ways that you can share files through Twitter?

You probably wonder what a DAT file is in the first place. Simply put, DAT files contain data in text or binary format.

They are typically found as winmail.dat files in email attachments, created by Microsoft Exchange Servers. But many other programs can create .dat files as well. So if the name doesn’t give it away, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re dealing with text, pictures, movies or something completely different.

Giving advice on how to open a DAT file of an unknown source is difficult because there are so many options, depending on the original source of the file. But say you were supposed to receive a WORD document and what you did receive was a document with a .dat file extension. Basically, you have two straight forward options to open and convert a DAT file into a Word doc.

First, you could try to change the file extension. In case you don’t see file extensions in Windows, go to the folder that contains your .dat file, click Tools and select Folder Options. Switch to the View tab and uncheck the option Hide extensions for known file types.

Second, you could simply try to open the .dat file with WORD or notepad or the program you suspect created the original file. To do this, right-click on the .dat file, select Open With from the menu, then select an application from the list or click Choose Program… to pick another.

Once you successfully opened the DAT file, you’re at least half way to converting that DAT file into a Word doc. But once again, there are several options.

Say we’re still dealing with a .dat file that originally was a .doc file. You changed the file extension and now that you open the file in WORD it looks fine. In fact, you already “converted” your file – congratulations!

If you managed to open with WORD, the easiest way to “convert” your file from .dat to .doc, is to save the document using WORD. And there you go. It wasn’t that hard, was it?

Now let’s get a little more serious. All the strategies above didn’t work and your file doesn’t display properly? Maybe it’s time to use a file converter. If Microsoft Outlook messed with your attachments, chances are that Winmaildat.com will get you out of the mess.

From within the Extract tab browse for the respective .dat file on your computer, send it and wait for the Results to show in the respective tab. The file size limit with this service is 5MB.

There really isn’t more to it than that. To successfully retrieve data from a .dat file or convert it to its original file format, you need to know the source or the original file type.

Is there another smart trick that I missed out on? Please share your knowledge in the comments!

If you have a 5 Megapixel camera, you may find your photo sizes being around 4-6MB each, if you want to email 5 photos to your friends, you can see that the email will be quite large around 25MB, and that is a bit big for an email. What happens if you have a bunch of photos to email, say 25, that will be 125 megabytes ““ which most people won’t be able to receive as it is too large.

So to reduce the email size, we first must resize the image for email. You may have another software that you use to compact the size of your images, but Microsoft Office Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird provides a handy tool that allows you to shrink the quality of the images automatically. You will now be able to turn your 125MB email to little over 1MB with hardly any effort.

Resize Images For Email In Outlook 2007

Open up Outlook 2007 and create a new email. Attach your images be clicking on the Message tab, and click Attach File in the Include section as seen in the picture below. I have added 10 pictures that are around 4MB each, which makes the total size of the email 36MB.

In the picture, I have also circled another button. Click it and you will be shown a sidebar on the right hand side. Under Picture Options, select your picture size. I have chosen large.

If you want, you can tick the box that says Show when attaching files, so the Attachment Option side bar will automatically appear when you attach files to your email. All you have to do is write your email and click send for your images to be reduced. When you send your email, you will see that the largest file I sent is 191KB.

Resize Images For Email In Mozilla Thunderbird

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird, you first have to install a Add-on. Go and download the Auto resize JPEG images for Thunderbird add-on. Open up Thunderbird, click on Tools ““> Add-ons and click on install.

Click on open when you have located the .xpi file and then click on Install Now when prompted. Then restart Thunderbird.

Once you have installed the Add-on, create a new email as you normally would. Click on Attach and add your images. Write the rest of your email, and when you are done, click send. You will be prompted with a message (unless you ticked the box saying Resize images automatically when sending).

Click on yes to send your email. Thunderbird will automatically reduce the attachments.

With the ten pictures that I emailed, I reduced the email size from 36 Megabytes to 1660KB which is 1.6MB.

What other methods do you use to reduce your email attachment sizes? Share it with us in the comments.

Affixa integrates your Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail accounts into Windows but not through a desktop mail application. Instead, it will ask you which webmail service you would like to use to compose your email, then log in to the appropriate accounts online in your browser!

Furthermore, you can manage large email attachments using Affixa by the built-in file sharing with drop.io.

With the free version you can add one webmail account of your choice. If you need to manage several accounts, you can upgrade for £2 per year and add all of your email accounts, including the use of your desktop mail programs. This will come in handy for those of you who use the same computer, but different email accounts for work and play.

Affixa works in a very cool way. In order to fully understand how it handles your email, watch this video.

Now, that you get the drift of how it works, let me delve into one of its best features: drop.io integration.

Most providers put a limit on file type or size that can be sent with each email. If you frequently need to send large files that will crack this limit, you will love Affixa because it integrates file hosting.

Files will automatically be uploaded to drop.io and the link to your files will be pasted into the email you’re going to compose. From within Affixa, you define for how long your files will live after being uploaded or viewed for the last time.

Affixa comes with an attachments manager that is represented in the system tray by a green point. Here you can create baskets that will hold files you’re going to email. Fill up the basket throughout your day or project (drag and drop supported), save, edit, close and open (re-use) them as needed — you have nothing to worry about because once you decide to send a basket, the latest version of each file will be fetched from your system.

Before checking out and attaching the files to an email, you can shrink files by zipping them, resize photos or use drop.io by default. You can send a basket by clicking the Email button, which will launch your email service. The files will be automatically attached to the email.

I have previously reviewed gAttach , a similar Windows desktop application that would integrate Gmail into Windows, so you could make it your default desktop eMail client. This tool has since been discontinued, although you can still download it from Cnet.

Download Affixa and give it a whirl. You might end up leaving your desktop mail program.

Are you still using desktop mail programs or is it all webmail for you? Is POP mail passé? We’d love to hear your opinions in the comments!

In my opinion, Stacks isn’t as bad as most people make it seem. I’ve found several useful reasons to keep it around, one of which is detailed here: Use Stacks To Save Websites For Later Reading.

After a bit of brainstorming, I managed to find a few more good uses for Stacks. Some of them may not be new tricks but I’d like to share them with you anyway.

Mail Attachments Stack

For those of you who use Apple Mail as the default mail application, this may actually come in useful for you. You can create a Stack to show all of your recent mail attachments.

Here’s how it works: every time you use Quick Look to preview mail attachments or directly open them by double-clicking on the attachment, they are automatically stored in ~/Library/Mail Downloads/

Simply drag the Mail Downloads folder to the Stacks section of the Dock and let go.

You may be overwhelmed by the thousands of attachments you have in there. It’s a good idea to arrange it by ‘Date Created’ and display it as Fan or List view so that you’ll know which are the latest attachments.

Any attachments which aren’t previewed with Quick Look or opened directly in Mail or instead, saved to the ‘Downloads’ folder will not show up in this folder.

Recent Applications/Documents/Servers Stack

This is a Terminal trick to make a Recent stack show up in the Dock. If you take a look at the Appearance preferences (System Preferences ->Appearance), you’ll notice a section which lets you determine the number of recent applications, documents and servers to display. This will generate a list located in the menu bar, click on the Apple icon -> Recent Items.

This is what you’ll need to do if you want that list to appear as a stack. Open Terminal (located in the Utilities folder or just Spotlight for it) and copy and paste these 2 lines of commands individually:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

killall Dock

After the Dock relaunches, the Recent Items stack will appear.

Right-click on the stack and there is a contextual menu which will allow you to display the recent documents or servers instead.

The ‘Favorite Items’ stack doesn’t really work in Leopard – it merely displays the ‘Places’ section of the Finder sidebar. If you want to display your favorite items…

A Favorites Stack

A Favorites stack is basically a stack of anything which you add to the Favorites folder. This function is not unavailable in Leopard, it’s just slightly harder to find.

The old ‘Control-Option-Click’ shortcut to make an item a Favorite doesn’t work in Leopard. Instead, what you need to do is click on an item to select it, click on the File menu, press and hold the Shift key and click ‘Add to Favourites’. Or select an item and press Command-Shift-T.

The shortcuts/aliases are stored in ~/Library/Favorites/. Drag that folder to the Stacks section in the Dock to make your Favorites stack.

Preferences Stack

By making a Preferences stack, it’s possible to shave a few seconds off your navigating time. It’s not very difficult to make this stack. I’ll just need to explain something: the preference panes you see in System Preferences are located in various folders. Also, it’s not necessary to add all the preference panes to the Stack. For instance, I hardly ever go to the Speech preference pane so I can exclude that from the Stack.

To make this stack, create a folder called Preferences and place it in your Home folder.

Open a new Finder window and go to System/Library/PreferencePanes. Command-click on the preferences you want to add to your stack, then Command-Option-click and drag them to the Preferences folder in the other Finder window. You should end up with a folder of aliases to the preference panes.

These are only the default preferences from Mac OS X. The other preference panes for example Perian or Flip4Mac WMV are located at ~/Library/PreferencePanes. Repeat same procedure to put their aliases into the Preference folder you’ve created.

Once you’re done, drag the Preferences folder to the Stacks section of the Dock.

Stacks as actual drop boxes

By creating stacks for the Public Folder located in your Home folder; and the Public folder in the Dropbox folder (not applicable if you don’t use Dropbox), you can literally create drop boxes as dumping grounds for everything you want to share with others.

Drag-and-drop anything into these stacks and they’re automatically shared within your LAN or through the internet (in the case of Dropbox). To find out how to set up sharing within your local area network, take a look at this Macnifying OS X article.

Are there any other useful Stacks tips you’d like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments.

Here’s the problem, though: emailing song files is tough. Some services don’t accept attachments over a couple of megabytes, and even the ones that do take a long time to download, slowing down your email and Internet. Even when emailing is possible, it’s rarely the ideal way to send big files.

Thankfully, there are a few ways to send big files over the internet that have made uploading, sharing, downloading and managing large files possible. I’ve tried a bunch of them, and picked a few favorites.

Ignoring all the other features, many or few, here are my three favorite ways to send big over the net files to my friends- whether they like it or not. There are others like each of these, but I think they’re the best at what they do within their respective categories.

For The Serial Uploader: Drop.io

With Drop.io, a service I’ve raved about before, you can add one file or many to what are known as “drops.” You name the drop, and it gets a permanent URL in the format of http://drop.io/yourdropnamehere.

Adding files is easy, and drop.io does a great job with managing them. If you upload pictures, drop.io figures it out and creates a slideshow for you. If it’s a video, it’s embedded and watchable. If it’s music, you can listen to it right there on the page.

There are viewers as well for a number of different document types, and many things don’t need to be downloaded to be enjoyed.

I like drop.io because I can give people one link to go to for all the BEST SONGS EVER IN HISTORY, and keep them changing. It took any file type I threw at it, and sharing and downloading are as easy as clicking on the file and selecting “Download.”

If all you’re looking to do is share one file, though drop.io can do it, it’s not designed for attachment-like sharing. Also, there’s a 100MB limit in any given drop, though there’s no limit to the number of drops you can have.

For the Uploading Machine: File Dropper

File Dropper’s simple, elegant, and the biggest of the bunch. 5GB! If you’re uploading files bigger than 5GB, you’re unfortunately out of luck. If you’re a rational person, you’ll never touch File Dropper’s size limit.

Uploading a file is as easy as browsing for your file, and clicking “Upload.” Every file gets a permanent link that you’re free to share with your friends. There are no frills, no awesome features to speak of, but it’s dead simple, practically limitless in size, and probably the one I use most.

If you’re a heavy uploader, File Dropper’s giving away free storage space for those who pledge to go green.

For the Email Lover: YouSendIt

I like YouSendIt because it fits the most closely into peoples comfort zones. You upload a file, select an email address you want to send it to, and YouSendIt does the rest. Once your file is ready, YouSendIt will send an email to your recipient saying that you’ve sent them a file, and a link is given to go and download the file.

With YouSendIt, you can also track when your files are downloaded, and by whom- no more “I never got the memo!” excuses. This is the most attachment-like solution I came up with, because it still works mostly in your email inbox. Anyone can click a link in their email, but there are more steps involved with the other ones. It’s only one step, but I digress.

Files can be up to 100MB in size for the free account, which means you can even send movies to your friends. If you need more, there are also paid account options for you.

With these applications, no longer do my friends have to suffer to attain the musical nirvana I offer them on a regular basis. Whether you want to send movies, music, or just any old big file (Powerpoints can get huge), there are a number of options out there that let you upload, download, share and interact with files of almost any size.

What do you do when you’ve got big, unwieldy files to share?

Photo Credit : FredR

At its simplest, drop.io is a place to store files on the Internet. You create “drops” filled with files, photos, audio, video and more that you can share with other people. There’s a 100MB limit on a given drop, but you can purchase more space if you want. Typically, though, 100MB is plenty- that’s an awful lot of PDFs and Word documents.

Every drop has a 7+ character name, and can be accessed, shared, and dealt with however you want. You can set the drop to be password protected, and even edit it later from your own account. Drops aren’t searchable, which means you’ll maintain the privacy of your files, and they’ll only be seen by the people who are supposed to see them.

In addition to all that, though, there are a ton more features that make drop.io unique. The feature list is gigantic, and there are a ton of features to make drops work for you. Here are eight ways to use drop.io to do more than just hold files.

1. Phone Drops and Drop Conferencing

For a long time, I used Jott to record all my random whims and thoughts – just call a number, record your message, and it gets saved for you. Then Jott got un-free. With drop.io, you can do the same thing Jott used to do. Every drop has a unique phone number- just call it, leave a message, and it’ll show up in your drop as an MP3 that you can listen to, download, or send to others. There’s also no time limit on your voicemails, like there was with Jott- your only limitation is the file size limit of the MP3.

Drop.io is also a really useful collaboration tool, both for file-sharing and discussing. Every drop, in addition to a voicemail number, has a unique conference number that you can give to people to call. Get everyone on the line, and you can discuss the files in the drop, manipulate them, and use drop.io as your project center. It’s free conferencing, and creates a central point for all of your dealings with a particular file or project.

2. Drop Tweeting

One drawback many people see in Twitter is that there’s no good way to share files with your followers on Twitter. Drop.io makes that process not only possible, but simple. Drop.io calls it Tweet.io, and it works like this: you enter your Twitter credentials into the drop.io page. Then, every time you add or update a file on the drop, a link to it will automatically be posted to your Twitter account. That means, for instance, that if you want to share a song with the Twitter world, just add it to your drop, and Twitter users will be able to listen to it with one click. To get here, select “Twitter Alerts” from the “Share” menu in your drop.

3. Back-up Space

This is possibly the simplest use for drop.io. You can add files to a drop by email (every drop has a unique email address), voicemail, fax, the web interface, a Firefox extension, or an embeddable widget. You’ve got 100MB per drop, with no limit on the number of drops you can have. To make them totally private, make sure to make them password-protected. Then, to keep them limited only to yourself, keep that password private. The number of drops you have could get big, though, so you may not want drop.io to be your only backup solution.

4. Drop Fax Machine

I don’t have a fax machine. I don’t need one very often, but every once in a while it’s a really useful thing to have. With drop.io fax, you can send and receive faxes right from the web. Just right-click on the file you want to send, and choose “fax”. Then, enter the number, and presto – they get a fax. To receive one is a bit more complicated, but totally possible – just follow drop.io’s instructions.

5. Drop Huge Attachments

Even if you use drop.io, odds are it might be too much for someone you know. For them, if they use email, you can still keep them involved. Emailing files out of drop.io is as simple as finding your file, clicking “send,” and then “email recipient.” They’ll get the file as an attachment, plus the link- which makes sure that they’ll get access to files of any size. It’s great for sending music, videos, or other large files you might not be able to send through email- but still dealing with email, which everyone’s comfortable with.

6. Drop to Facebook

Thanks to Facebook Connect, drop.io and Facebook are now totally connected. That means a number of really cool things: you can leave a voicemail to your Facebook feed for your friends to listen to, or fax things to your Facebook friends. With drop.io, Facebook has become a way to socially collaborate on files, and to share things you like with other people. No linking to download sites, making them download software, or other confusion- just fire up Facebook Connect, and your drops can be as involved with Facebook as you want. For more, check out drop.io’s Facebook page.

7. Drop Family Photo Albums

Drop.io’s support for photos is pretty fantastic. The viewer is good, the uploading quick, and the use of the drops easy. It’s as simple as uploading the images you want, and selecting “View” from the options. The view option (blog, media, etc.) you choose is up to you. Then, click on one of the images, and select the arrows to scroll through them. You can also share, embed, or comment on any given image.

8. Drop Insta-podcast

I’ve mentioned all of the things relevant here, but this is worth noting again. Here’s how simple it can be to make a podcast: one phone call. Call your drop’s number, leave a message, and boom- podcast. Or, upload a video, view it like a blog, and it’s a weekly podcast. How you create a podcast is up to you, but sharing it with the world couldn’t be easier- thanks to drop.io.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here of all the things drop.io can do. There are RSS feeds, SMS alerts, Dropcasts, and a huge number of other features that make drop.io a killer sharing application. I’ve learned a lot about it as I’ve been researching and writing this post, and I’m pretty sure I’ve become a life convert to drop.io.

Do you use drop.io, for backup or something else? Do you use a similar application? Tell us about them in the comments.