Dropbox (nasty) - NOT amateur radio

Just received an email from Dropbox saying my free account is over limit. The page is very intimidating and almost forces you to pay an extortionate £95 plus a year for extra space. All their stuff seems designed to take money off you or send you emails you really do not want. Even cancelling is made difficult.

I think I have deleted my account. I do not like their approach at all.

For information, Google offers all the file storage that I need for far, far less.

G3XBM online grabber

This evening I've been setting up my on-line grabber again so that I can monitor VLF, LF or MF activity and upload what I am receiving to the internet for others to see. The grabber is, at this stage, only on intermittently as I experiment. The plan is to have a dedicated VLF or LF receiver and PC for this purpose, so the grabber can be run almost 24/7.

The main weak signal detection is done using Argo software running on my PC connected from my RX via the SignaLink USB interface. The captured signal is then uploaded to a location in my public Dropbox which is then linked to from my webpage. So, what appears on the G3XBM online grabber page is what I am seeing with Argo. The direct link to the Dropbox image is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15047843/g3xbm.gif .

G3XBM online grabber

Google Drive (bye bye Dropbox issues)

With the introduction of Google Drive, an online storage facility, I can at last overcome my issues with Dropbox and my VLF grabber. With Google Drive one can store up to 5GB free and more for a fixed price. With the PC or Mac add-on, the drive appears as a file(s) on the computer into which documents can be saved in the normal way. These then appear/sync on any PCs when you sign in to Google Drive.

The bonus is that you can make any file public and get a URL that others can go to. This means that a saved .jpg screen shot of a VLF grabber can be saved to a unique filename on the PC which then is visible to the world if they know the URL. From a webpage I can point people to the URL and they can see the screen grab as it is updated regularly.

I could do all this with Dropbox until about 4 months ago when it started playing silly and refused to sync on my WinXP PC complaining of a registry issue. Despite trying all sorts of recommended fixes none worked and I gave up on Dropbox.

In the coming weeks I will be mounting a more permanent E-field probe which will be connected to the PC whenever it is running and the VLF spectrum view(s) will be available on my sub-9kHz website.

Dropbox Windows Registry issue - NOT fixed!

Having struggled to get Dropbox files sharing working on my main WinXP PC I today did a full uninstall and loaded a new version 1.1.45.exe from http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/Dropbox%201.1.45.exe and I was back in business for the first time in 3 months. Within 10 minutes though, the same "unable to access vital Windows registry data" message reappeared! What the heck is going on???

Dropbox Problem

When my grabber is running I use Dropbox to automatically upload the captured image to a location on the net where anyone can see the image. Recently Dropbox has been doing something wrong and when I try to launch the program I get an error message (see image). I have tried EVERYTHING to fix this, to no avail so far. Has anyone else had this issue? I looked on the Dropbox website (not too helpful), tried running Ccleaner to see if the registry entries were faulty (no luck), reinstalled the software (about 10 times now in different release versions) and deleted each when the same darn message appeared.

Help!