With AOL’s Xdrive going under, Drop.io is poised to pick up their lost users. Drop.io sent out a message from their twitter account about an hour ago:

Know anyone looking for an alternative to xdrive? Tell them to try Drop.io! http://drop.io/welcomeXdrive

They link to a page which tells a bit about their services, but hidden away at the bottom is the neato 1G upgrade promo (from the regular 100MB) that you should jump on while it’s hot:

To use drop.io’s “Xdrive” premium code, just follow the directions below:

1. Click on the “upgrade” icon below the “add files” box (as depicted in the image below).
2. Type in: “Xdrive” in the box that pops up.
2. Set your password.
3. Drop your files.
3. And you’re set - welcome to Drop.io!

Enjoy everybody!

Here’s my E-Mail.

How neato is that?

Re-Captcha also offers their service to stop comment spam. They offer plugins for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type — basically all the major content management systems.

“I’ve seen Anti-Spam tools before. Why use this one?”

I’ll tell ya why. Each time a person types a captcha, it helps to digitize a book:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Isn’t that ingenius?

So you first you name your “drop.” I just made drop.io/tiptrickmod. Choose something easy to remember. Then upload your file, set a password if you like, and “drop” it.

Now while this file sharing feature is enough to make drop.io noteworthy, here are a few more functions which make it thoroughly kick arse:

1. Embeddable Upload Widget

You can also embed an upload widget into your site, and people can upload files to you directly to your drop. See? Here’s ours:

2. Email and RSS

Stay up to date on when the drop is updated. So for example, if my friend shares a photo with me, I’ll be notified. You can also email media to your drop. The email address for our drop is tiptrickmod@drop.io. If I wanted to send a photo from my phone directly to this drop via email, it’s easy. Yes, flickr has that too. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t cool.

3. Phone your Drop

Ok. Here’s where it gets cool. You can phone your drop using the telephone number they provide (each drop is unique) and your call will be recorded in mp3 format. Feel like leaving TipTrickMod an mp3 message? Call 646-495-9203 x 73504. This is a way neato tool. Podcasters, you listening? Oh yeah… There’s a conference call option as well, if you’d like to give that a go too.

4. Receive a fax

And yes, to round it all off you can receive faxes as well.

Hope you guys find that useful! I know I did.

But I prefer Zarvox.

Off the record, I believe Zarvox is just a cover name. I suspect it’s really Soundwave from the Transformers, who having been excluded from the Transformers movie was snatched up from the unemployment line by Apple.

But seriously folks, I can see how this text-to-speech function can be extremely beneficial to visually impaired Mac users. Basically, you highlight a section of text – be it two paragraphs or two pages – and then hit the set key to trigger the reading. I have my keys set to Command+Shift + S. To demonstrate, here is “Zarvox” doing a reading of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

[See post to listen to audio]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Bravo Zarvox!

As for the default voice, Alex, his isn’t flawless english, but it is as good a computerized voice as I’ve seen to date. This feature could come in handy if you have any e-books that you’d like Alex to read to you, possibly while you’re doing some chores around the house. Or, for all you deadbeat dads out there, have Alex read a bedtime story to your kids while you sit back with a beer and watch the Battlestar Galactica.

Here’s Alex doing an excerpt from the Gettysburg Address:
[See post to listen to audio]

Now if you’re a real a-hole, and you want to scare the beejesis out of your kids, you can have Zarvox read to them. Go to the drop down menu, and select “Show More Voices” (see below). Zarvox is hiding at the bottom.

For example, to see the latest pages saved under the tag “photoshop,” just type in:
http://del.icio.us/tag/photoshop

Similarly, for the most popular of those pages, type:
http://del.icio.us/popular/photoshop

Anyone familiar with delicious bookmarks knows this already of course. But what some of you may not have noticed is the super-way-cool-and-totally-awesome RSS feed at the bottom of every single delicious page:

That means you can subscribe to a feed of pages tagged as “tips” or “movies” or “mitochondria” — whatever turns your crank.

Now, like any RSS feeds, you can use these however you see fit. But I think they work especially well with Twitter and Netvibes.

Share certain Delicious Links through Twitter

I’ve often seen some of my friends send a twitter message that looks something like this:

Reading: TipTrickMod.com - The best thing since chilli-cheese nachos!

Most likely, what’s happening here is they’re running an RSS feed through Twitterfeed.com. It might be a delicious feed, such as the RSS feed for http://del.icio.us/your_name/reading, or possibly even a feed from Google Shared Bookmarks maybe. The point is, you can insert any prefix you wish in front of your bookmarked link to create your Tweet:

Favorited: TipTrickMod.com - The best thing since chilli-cheese nachos!

or even still (though highly unlikely):

This Sucks: TipTrickMod.com - The worst thing since chilli-cheese nachos!

I mean really… Who doesn’t like nachos?

Use Netvibes to Create a Personalized Portal

Netvibes can mash together a collection of RSS feeds from all your favorite websites, so you can create your own personal portal page. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can keep tabs keep up with the very latest news on any given topic watching the delicious feed for that given topic.

So for example, I like to keep up to speed on all things Apple, so I subscribe to the Apple, Leopard, Macbook, and OSX tag feeds. The resulting netvibes page is below:

That page is just a mock-up I did to show you how it looks on the APPLE tab on my netvibes page. Just imagine how much info you can browse and digest if you create 4 or 5 tabs on your netvibes page?

Browsing the internet becomes a whole lot easier when you use the right tools. And delicious feeds are among the best filters out there for the mass of content that exists on the web.

I got very excited when I thought about the prospects of eating macaroni and chess on the sofa and yelling chess notation at my Macbook. I know, I know… Who wouldn’t? But after testing out the speech recognition just now, it looks that’s not going to happen. Here’s a clip of one game that I just couldn’t finish:

No self-respecting chess player is going to sit through an entire game of that. It’s just agonizing… But that said, Leopard’s speech recognition is as good as any I’ve seen, and I expect good things from Apple in the future.

My tip here: Don’t even bother. At least, not yet.

Further info on Mac OSX Speech Recognition:
Make your Mac’s Speech Recognition Work for you

That’s likely the case with Mac OS X’s Active Corners feature, which is a neat little tool that helps you do many different tasks just a little bit quicker.

Go to System Preferences, then Expose and Spaces. You’ll see Active Screen Corner options on the top of the page.

In a nutshell, what this feature allows you to do, is to activate any of the following Mac OS X processes simply by moving your mouse to any of the screens far corners:

• All Windows
• Application Windows
• Desktop
• Dashboard
• Spaces
• Start Screensaver
• Disable Screensaver
• Sleep Display
• -

The most practical of these I find is “enable sleep display.” Whenever I step away from my Macbook (which isn’t often!), I just drag the mouse to the bottom corner, thus kicking her into sleep mode — and saving me a little battery power.

If you use the spaces feature, Active Corners is a must as well.

Enjoy!

Well, Spacemonger is neato little app (just a 100kb download) which looks at your hard drive and then renders a graphical representation of its contents. Files, folders, and apps which take up the most space are represented by bigger squares.

As a result you can easily determine where the trash is, and then proceed with throwing it out.

Download Spacemonger for Windows here.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll see once you run it: