How To Unzip Archived Files in DropBox without Downloading them Offline

Few days ago, I was confronted with this situation where I needed to get a specific file within a zip file shared to me on DropBox. The trouble is, the archive file is over 2GB in size and I am on a limited internet data connection and I can’t afford to waste time downloading the entire 2GB file just to get a specific file for my web project.

Such dilemma would’ve been not a problem if, and only if, DropBox has a built-in file management system where you can zip or unzip files in DropBox website. However, as you might already know, DropBox web app is still deprived of such functionality. And there are no DropBox App Extensions that can do basic archive file management.

So normally your only way out is to download the entire ZIP file on your local drive and do the actual unzipping on your machine, which sounds very much unacceptably antiquated.

Because 2GB of data would cost me $5 in my country to download (and $5 is not cheap), I had to find a way how to unzip DropBox files without downloading them first. Thankfully, I found a way out, albeit not the most straight-forward. And this article, I’m going to show you how.

What you need

• DropBox account
• Google Drive account
• Otixo account (or other free cloud file management apps)

Cutting off the crap, this method works this way: using Otixo service, we remotely copy those zip files from DropBox to Google Drive. And once those zip files are transferred to Google Drive, you can unzip them straight from Google Drive website.

How to unzip Dropbox files without downloading them first offline

For the purpose of this tutorial, I'm going to use a demo file globe-at-home.zip which sits right inside my DropBox account

1. You’ll have to signup or login first to Otixo and connect your DropBox and Google Drive cloud accounts. Otixo has a decent file management functionality where you can connect multiple cloud drives into a single interface so you can quickly manage your files from multiple sources. We wrote about it before, so go check it out.

2. Once you’ve added both your DropBox and Google Drive accounts, copy your DropBox ZIP file to your Google Drive. The transfer should take in seconds.

   

   

3. As soon as you hit the Copy button, the ZIP file should arrive on your Google Drive account.

   

4. Now, you're ready to unzip the archive inside Google Drive. To do that, you'll have to add ZIP Extractor as add-on to your Google Drive. See our guide here.

   Once ZIP Extractor is added, you can open your archive file with ZIP Extractor, as seen below:

   

5. And finally, selectively extract the contents within that ZIP file.

   

You're done!

Best & FREE Alternatives To Otixo To Manage Multiple Cloud Storage Accounts

ZIP Extractor will then automatically create a new folder containing all the extracted files within that folder where the original ZIP file is located.

Final Verdict

Being able to unzip files in DropBox isn't natively supported yet on DropBox web app. However, with a little bit of creativity, we can achieve the same feat by moving that ZIP file from DropBox to Google Drive and do the extraction in the latter. Well, thanks to Otixo.

Spotify iOS App Gets Native Sleep Timer Support

Music streaming giant Spotify silently rolls out an update to its iOS app which finally brings a sleep timer support for its app. No need to separately launch the iPhone’s Clock app.

Setting up a sleep timer on Spotify

To set up a sleep timer on Spotify, be sure you’re getting the latest update of the app. While your Spotify songs are playing, launch the Now Playing screen, tap the tiny three dots that sits in the upper right of your screen, and then scroll down a bit until you see the “Sleep timer” option. From there you can set a timer from 5 mins to 1 hour.

To turn off sleep timer on Spotify, just redo the above steps and in “Stop audio in“ screen, just tap ”Turn off timer“.

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As a music app, a sleep timer is a hotly-requested feature of Spotify which lets you doze to your favorite songs without draining your iPhone’s battery. It’s a feature first introduced to the Android version last year. iOS users, on the other hand, resort to the iPhone’s Clock app to stop audio playback on Spotify at a predefined time.

Quickly Create Printable Wifi Signs and Scan-to-Connect QR Codes

Found this cool website that lets you generate a WiFi sign and QR code so people can easily connect on your network. The service is called My WiFi Sign, which comes in handy when you want to skip the headache of sharing your WiFi credentials at home or office.

All you need to do is head to My WiFi Sign, supply your network credentials and in seconds you get a nice-looking PDF complete with your WiFi info which you can quickly print. Additionally, you get a unique QR code which your visitors can scan to quickly connect on your network without typing anything.

How awesome is that?

So, when a visitor or your child’s friends come in, you can just quickly point them to the printed My WiFi Sign rather than awkwardly reach to your access point and find the credentials.

New QR Tagging Service Helps You Find Your Lost Stuff

Not everyone will probably appreciate this but if you host an event or you own a shop, having a scan-to-connect QR code will do you a favor.

Go, check it out!

How To Automatically Block Spam SMS By Keyword on iPhone (No Jailbreak)

On average, I get around dozens of promotional spam text messages in a week from different lending companies offering their loan services. Not to mention the pesky offers from my telco and its merchant partners who aggressively promote their products through SMS.

Getting 20 unsolicited SMS in a week may not sound like a lot. But I felt harassed knowing that they have access to my personal contact number and they can anytime shoot me an unwanted SMS without my permission.

Truth is, while the internet is still the most effective place to attract customers, a handful of marketers still turn to robocalls and SMS marketing as a way to generate leads. They’ll assault your iPhone’s inbox with offers and yes, even dirty texts containing links of adult websites. And the most clever part is: they’ll use a different random number to text blast; not too easy to block and stop.

Well, not until today.

How To: Block Ads on iOS, Including Facebook Ads and Youtube Video Ads (iPhone & iPad)

If you’re using the iPhone and tired of getting spam text messages from lending companies and random people, now is the time to take action and permanently block those spam messages. And nope, you don’t have to jailbreak your iPhone just to accomplish it.

Meet VeroSMS, the Best iOS App to Block Spam Texts on iPhone by Keywords

Upon hearing VeroSMS’ promise of permanently blocking unwanted SMS, I didn’t easily get excited, to be honest. First, I thought it’s not at all possible to manipulate iPhone’s SMS inbox considering the well-protected iOS ecosystem. Or, even if you can do it, you’ll have to engage in the risky business of jailbreaking.

But I was wrong.

VeroSMS works flawlessly during my test and I don’t even have to upgrade to a $2.99 premium version just to get the job done. This iOS-only app automatically blocks incoming SMS matching my custom-defined keywords.

No more nasty alerts from spammers. All unwanted SMS are automatically rejected under SMS Junk tab in the iPhone’s Messages app. Yep, the nice thing about it is while iPhone won’t alert you for incoming spam messages, the app still keeps a copy of every unwanted SMS so you can anytime check back.

How To Stop, Block Spam Text on iPhone by Keywords or Phrases

Getting started is easy. All you have to do is:

1. Download and install VeroSMS from App Store.

2. Launch the app. If this is your first time opening the app, you’ll be asked to Enable VeroSMS Spam Filter. Just go to Settings > Message > Unknown & Spam. Under SMS Filtering, enable VeroSMS.

   

3. Navigate back to VeroSMS app. From Blocklist section, you can define your own keywords

   

   The paid version already comes with crowdsourced keywords so you can pretty much skip this step. However, you can also add your own, localised keywords, which makes this app really useful.

4. Now, see your iPhone magically junks those spam text inside your iMessage app. All matching text messages will be stored in SMS Junk tab. And you don’t hear a notification when a spam text arrives.

   

Note: Only those SMS coming from unknown phone numbers will be filtered out by VeroSMS. If a text message comes from someone in your contacts list, VeroSMS will see it as important and it won’t tag it as spam.

Top 5 Online Services to Trim, Cut YouTube Videos for FREE

YouTube, without a doubt, is everyone’s choice when it comes to entertainment and general info. With thousands of fun and informative videos being uploaded by the minute, it’s not uncommon for anyone to generate content out of existing YouTube videos.

How To: Watch Rated-R, 18+ Videos On YouTube Without Logging In or Signing Up

Teachers for instance can use copyright-free videos from YouTube to come up with supplemental video for their pupils. They can grab multiple, existing YouTube videos and do a bit of editing to produce a new video resource. Or if you’re a casual YouTuber like me, you may want to crop a YouTube video and get your favourite part to share as a meme.

Whatever the motivation is, trimming and making YouTube videos shorter doesn’t really have to be complicated. Truth is, there are free, online YouTube video editors that let you do basic trimming and cropping by simply pasting YouTube URLs.

5 Best Online Apps To Crop, Trim YouTube Videos

1. YT Cutter
   This ad-supported web app lets you extract favourite scenes from YouTube videos. Using the app is pretty much straight-forward. All you need to do is to paste a YouTube link and specify start and end time parameter. Once done, you have the option to download the cropped video, audio or GIF.

2. Kapwing Video Trimmer
   Kapwing’s Video Trimmer makes cutting YouTube video a breeze. The service offers the same video cropping capability but with a much nicer interface. After pasting YouTube video URL to crop, you can adjust which parts of YouTube videos to trim using easy-to-use, timestamp slider.
3. YouTube Trimmer
   Yet another free tool to trim, crop YouTube videos is Youtube Trimmer. The website may look simple but it offers surprisingly fast and easy way to trim, crop favourite parts of your Youtube videos online. Just supply the YouTube video URL and specify the start and end times for the crop.
4. YT Cropper
   And if for some reason you’re running out of options to make a YouTube video shorter, you may check out YT Cropper. Just supply the URL and adjust the handles to crop. Once done, hit “Crop” and let YT Cropper generates a custom embed code for you. Unfortunately, YT Cropper won’t let you download the cropped video for offline use. Sucks.
5. YT Videos Cutter by odownloader
   Yet another ad-supported YouTube trimmer which lets you cut YouTube videos in seconds. The good: it gives you the option to download either audio only or full video. And you have the option to select .webm and .mp4 formats. The bad: lots of ads.

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There you go! If there are other YouTube video editing apps out there that deserve a mention on this blog, just get in touch.

Get A List of All Google Drive Files & Folders in Google Sheet

Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could get a simplified list of Google Drive files and folders in a Google Sheet?

If you’re working as a graphic designer or web developer, chances are you’ve probably gone through that occasion where you needed to juggle through multiples files and folders just to get the file you want.

Google Drive’s built-in file explorer isn’t that intuitive enough. Rummaging through hundreds of files can be too overwhelming, to say the least. Well right now, not anymore!

How To List All Google Drive Files & Folders in Google Sheet

Meet Drive Explorer, it’s a tiny little add-on for Google Sheet that lets you export all (or selected) files and folders into a much readable spreadsheet format.

Drive Explorer (formerly Drive Direct Links) lets you pick folders/files from your Google Drive, Shared Drive or the files shared with you to export to the Google Sheet. Sheet columns contain metadata of the files like name of the file, containing folder, folder path on your Google drive, direct download link, etc.

How Drive Explorer works:

1. You install the add-on and connect your Google account
2. Once connected, go to your Driver folder and create a spreadsheet
3. Inside your spreadsheet toolbar, click on Add-ons > Drive Explorer > Select files/folder.
4. And finally, wait for a few seconds until your spreadsheet is automatically refreshed containing your files/folders’ meta info such as folder names, filenames, folder paths, links, etc.

When is it useful?

Being able to view your Google Drive files and folders in a list helps us save time and improve team collaboration. If you own an online store and works with VAs to manage inventories, this add-on definitely comes in handy.

In our day job, for instance, we constantly update images on our client’s websites. And our clients usually just share a large Drive folder containing all the images that need to be uploaded to their website. With Drive Explorer, we can now easily get a decent list of files in that shared folder so our team can easily collaborate rather than going back and forth on Google Drive.

5 Handy Google Sheet Tricks To Help You Work Fast & Save Time

Next-Generation iPhones May Soon Ditch Traditional Wireless Networks

It looks like Tim Cook doesn't want to heavily rely on traditional wireless carriers to beam internet data to its iPhone. And he hopes to see results within five years.

Bloomberg reports that Apple Inc. is hiring dozens of top-caliber engineers from aerospace, satellite, and antenna design industries in its bid to develop satellite technology that can beam internet data directly to iPhone devices.

Joining this newly-assembled team includes Michael Trela and John Fenwick, former aerospace engineers who helped lead satellite imaging company Skybox Imaging, which was sold to Google in 2014. Wireless technology messiah Matt Ettus also joins the team, along with Ashley Moore Williams from Aerospace Corp. who focused on communication satellites, and Daniel Ellis, a former Netflix Inc. executive.

Apple can pursue the costly development of a satellite constellation from scratch. Or they can team up with existing satellite makers to beam internet data direct to Apple devices.

Apple's Next-Generation Wireless Technology

The apparent goal of the said project is probably to mitigate Apple devices' dependence on traditional wireless networks across the globe, which are often confronted with issues on cost, efficiency, and privacy.

Remember that Apple's cash cow doesn't solely come from its devices' sales. Apple also gets a significant amount of revenues from other sources such as Apple TV+ subscription, Apple Music, Arcade, and who knows -- Virtual Reality experiences in the future.

Apple's New Patent Gives iOS Quick Access to Camera, Bypassing Passwords & Biometrics

Tim Cook's reign in Cupertino also requires him to fight tooth and nail in VR wars. In fact, Apple is working on its own virtual headset which is expected to debut as early as 2021.

All these TV and internet contents and VR experiences require a massive amount of internet data that needs to be fed to Apple devices in realtime. So, developing its own wireless technology is a sound decision from Apple in my opinion, as foreign companies like Apple are often held at a gunpoint when trying to penetrate a foreign market.

Developing countries, for instance, have exorbitant internet data prices and there are often data caps to deal with -- issues which Apple nor Google is unable to control, disrupting the company's goal to expand its services to foreign lands.

Satellite technology is an unchartered territory of Apple Inc., but with its massive $16 billion pumped in its research and development in 2019 alone, it can be just a matter of time when Tim Cook's reign at Cupertino surprises us with this wireless ambition.

How To Score Cheaper Airline Tickets with Google Flights’ Fare Alerts

Dreaming to hit Philippines’ white sand beaches this summer? Don’t book that tickets just yet! Chances are, you could be getting pricier round trip airline tickets if you’re too excited booking those tickets a lot sooner.

With just a few clicks, I’m going to show you how you can snap up the best airline deals for your upcoming trips using Google Flights.

Google Flights, by the way, is another service of Google launched back in 2011 that lets you search flights in seconds. Unbeknownst to many, Google Flights has a ‘fare alerts’ feature that notifies you in real-time through email if there are downticks (or upticks) of ticket prices from your selected flight. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do in order to get the best deals in real-time from different airlines.

Here's how to monitor airline ticket prices with Google Flights

1. Go to Google Flights website

2. Search for your desired flight. You may opt for a round trip or one-way ticket (there are additional filters too such as desired stop-overs, which cities, airlines, etc.) Best to leave them as is to get the best possible deals)

   

3. As soon as you specify the desired departure date, the page should automatically pull a list of flights you can choose. The best flights for the chosen date will appear first on top of the page. So in case you’re happy with those prices, you can book them right away.

4. If the best flights are too expensive for you, you can activate Track prices toggle. Basically, it will monitor the lowest price for the trip and you’ll be notified through email in real-time.

   

As long as you don’t omit those tracked prices, Google will automatically alert you when there are downticks of those chosen flight, as seen below's screenshot:

Both Skyscanner and Traveloka have "price alerts" functionality, but it doesn't hurt to add Google Flights into the mix to get the best possible airline deals.

Google Launches New Recorder App with Realtime Offline Transcription Support

After announcing the latest iteration of its flagship Android phone the Pixel 4 recently, Google introduces a new voice recorder app for Android with built-in offline speech recognition support. Well, thanks to AI.

The new Recorder app uses speech recognition and AI to transcribe lectures, meetings, interviews and more—and makes them easy for you to find later. (English only right now, with more languages to come.) #madebygoogle pic.twitter.com/fdKRItuS4b

— Google (@Google) October 15, 2019

The voice recorder app, as seen on the above demo, can transcribe audio recordings in real-time with utmost accuracy. And the best part: it works offline. You can transcribe whatever is being spoken during meetings, lectures or interviews even without internet connectivity.

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Google’s newest voice recorder app is a massive upgrade from traditional audio recorder apps, which require decent internet connectivity to enable real-time transcription. And in most cases, the experience can be a bit clunky, unpleasant. That’s because your speech is being processed on a remote server before finally returning the transcribed text.

Search Parts of Recorded Audio by Sounds

The new voice recorder app comes with impressive search functionality too. Imagine you have this 2-hours long recorded lecture and wanted to re-visit that part of the lecture but all you can remember is a phrase or word? You can search by voice and the app will automatically highlight playback bar where those spoken phrases or words are mentioned. No more horizontal scrolling.

Google’s offline transcription technology is made possible by combining the power of real-time speech recognition and AI. And with the company’s unlimited resources being pumped in their Machine Learning department, we can expect a better and heaps clever AI-assisted voice processing in the future.

Google Maps Now Predicts Bus Traffic Delays and Crowdedness in 200+ Cities

So, next time you’re in a meeting or lecture, you can pretty much ditch writing notes and just intently listen to whoever is speaking. Let your Android phone do the note-taking.

Again, the app is initially being rolled out on the new Pixel 4, and the offline speech recognition is currently available in English. But with Google’s intention to reach as many users as possible, we can expect it to support other devices and other languages.

This Website Lets You Prank Your Friends with Fake System Updates

Found this really clever and evil site that lets you prank your friends and co-workers with a fake system update and thought you might like this too ;)

If seeing your friends’ worried look delights you, then, this fun website lets you do just that. The website, Update Faker, lets you select a fake system Windows or Mac update on your unsuspecting friends’ computer by simply visiting the website and selecting the “theme”. Just be sure to press F11 to go fullscreen mode on your Windows or Ctrl+Command+F on Mac.

The fake Windows update screen looks too real; from fonts, colors and even progress bars. Your target should definitely freak out upon seeing their computer screen doing the dreaded system updates. Just be prepared for possible reprisal.

Update Faker Themes to Choose From

Yet another reason why you should lock your computer when you take a quick break however short that is. Or else you could be a victim from pranksters lurking around your corner.

This is probably one of the meanest websites we’ve come across.