Tech Tails Tip of the Week: Sharing Huge Files

ByMike Moffit

We all need to send enormous files now and again, and email is not the best way to go. Most all email providers cap the size of files sent and received messages to conserve bandwidth and to help manage the sizes of users’ mailboxes.

iChat is a great way to get around that. If you know the recipient’s screen name, simply initiate a session in iChat and select Send File from the Buddies menu on the top of your screen. In the box that opens up, simply navigate to the file in question, and click the Send button. Your recipient will be asked to approve the transfer and select a destination on his or her hard drive, and the transfer will begin.

This is very fast if you and your peer are on the same network and you’re both using a wired ethernet connection. Wi-Fi gained a significant speed boost in the transition from 802.11g to 802.11n, but these speeds don’t even approach those offered by a wired connection. If the file must travel across the Internet, speeds will be completely dependent on yours and your peer’s connections.

It always makes sense to compress files before sending, no matter the method. You can do this by right-clicking on the file or folder in question in the Finder and selecting Compress from the contextual menu.

Get more tips like this by subscribing to Tech Tails, our weekly Mac tech, tips, and news newsletter!

Similar Posts

  • Jon

    Simple steps for resolving and diagnosing simple (non) boot issues. In the past week we have, in the Waitsfield service area, received no…

  • The Crypto Craze Part One: Overview

    Between work, band practice, recording, and going on those gorgeous autumn hikes, I’ve been spending a solid chunk of time familiarizing myself and delving into the science and application behind the digital currency craze known as Cryptocurrency. Unless you haven’t been on the internet in the last 5 years, you’ve no doubt heard of Bitcoin, the first and still most important cryptocurrency out there. But while a lot of us have heard of it, some may find themselves asking…

    What is Cryptocurrency?

    You’ll get a different answer from each person you ask, and some may give a lengthy response that still leaves you scratching your head. But the simplest definition of cryptocurrency is that it’s a form of digital money that is designed to be secure and anonymous.

    Full disclosure: the theories, protocols, applications, and sciences behind cryptocurrencies vary between the various types of cryptocurrency (Last documented number of cryptocurrencies was clocked at over 900 and still growing!). For the sake of these guides, I’ll be referring specifically to Bitcoin. And another warning: this stuff is dense, but throughout this series, I’ll do my best to make it palatable.

    While the boom of cryptocurrency (henceforth called simply ‘crypto’ in these guides) is not new, it only truly took off within the last ten years. Throughout the early 2000’s, there were a number of attempts to create a digital currency system (see: Digicash) that ultimately failed. It wasn’t until late 2008 that the concept of crypto became more than just a failed pipe-dream.

    In October 2008, an individual, (or individuals, the identity is still debated) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on a cryptography mailing list titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. This has come to be known as the Bitcoin “White Paper”. Within the white paper, Nakamoto describes and details the methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust”. By the following January, Nakamoto implemented the Bitcoin software as open source code and released it to the public. The Bitcoin network was born after Nakamoto ‘mined’ the first ever ‘block’ on the ‘chain’, known as the “genesis block”, for a reward of 50 Bitcoin***. Embedded in this first block was the following text:

    “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of the second bailout for banks.”

    But wait, block? Mine? Chain? What do these mean, you may be asking yourself? And we will certainly go down that rabbit hole! But I think it’s better left for The Crypto Craze Part Two: Party On The Blockchain.

    Fun fact: 50 Bitcoin would be worth $275,497.50 at the time of this writing.

  • Super User to the Rescue

    In last week’s article I mentioned a special command that requires a password to perform certain tasks. This week I’d like to talk about that command a little. It is called “sudo”. It is both an acronym for the expression Super User DO and also the “su” and “do” commands put together. The first part, “su”, is the power part. It enables you to enter commands as what is known as the superuser or root user. The superuser can do anything, which is both is power and danger. When you enable as superuser you will be warned up front that you are now capable of destroying your system with ease. While you are always required to enter your password when enabling as superuser, you only get the warning once. After that they assume you are on board with being responsible for your system. The warning is pretty dry at this point, but in the past the text looked like this:

    We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System

    Administrator. It usually boils down to these two things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.

    #2) Think before you type.

    Kind of friendly and humorous. And kind of sad that level of humor seems to be gone from OS X at this point. On to the second part- “do” is what it seems like. It is an action command. So together you get “sudo” or SuperUserDO. One might ask why bother to use “sudo” when you could just use “su” and then type in your commands? From a caution point of view “sudo” provides some benefits- it times out after 15 minutes, after which it requires you to enter your password again. So it’s OK to walk away and forget you were logged in as root, because after 15 minutes you revert to your normal status. The “sudo” command is a great tool to accomplish tasks normally not allowed in terminal, such as changing permissions and ownership of certain files and moving things you normally couldn’t. For more information see the wikipedia page on “sudo”, and next week we’ll look at some tasks that require the use of this powerful command.

    Thanks