If you want to watch your favourite soccer, tennis or other sports matches online for free, here’s what you need.

Note that this guide is based on having a Mac, but Windows users can use the same or a similar setup.

Software Needed

• Sopcast
• Soda Player / Acelink

With those two installed, you can go to Livetv.sx or Highlights365 and find the match you want to watch. You will find a few links, some of them for Sopcast and others for Acestream. The Acestream links are generally better. If you’re on Windows you can install the Acestream software and links will automatically open in that program.

If you’re on Mac, on the other hand, you need to copy the link from Livetv.sx and paste it into Soda Player. Soda Player can read Acestream links just fine, you only need to do this extra step of copy-pasting the link. If Soda Player doesn’t work or you have issues with it, you can use the Acelink software which requires Docker and VLC to be installed. It will open VLC and play the stream there.

If Soda Player or Acelink fail to open any streams, it is likely that your ISP is blocking P2P traffic. Install a VPN (I use and recommend NordVPN) and select a P2P and you’ll be on your way. If the sites themselves don’t load, you’r also likely being blocked by your ISP, so just use a VPN.

Sopcast is unfortunately not compatible with Mac OS Catalina, so that option is temporarily unavailable to Mac users.

If Livetv.sx is not available for any reason, you can try MyP2p.tv. Other good options to find URLs for live football streams are the Soccer Streams website (loads a bunch of ads, beware) and Ronaldo7. Yet another option is to join the Discord channel Papa HD Live.

You can also use the Acestream search website to find tv channels that are streaming on Acestream. You will need Live Soccer TV to check which channel your favorite match is being broadcast on.

Enjoy free live online sports!

 

A while back I wrote a guide to backing up one’s important digital assets. In that post, I mentioned that I decided to go for Synology instead of the Drobo, specifically the Synology DiskStation DS916+.

Apart from the negative comments on the Drobo, I had also begun to understand the potential of NAS technology in a deeper way. I realized that I would want to do more things with my NAS box than the Drobo would allow. The Drobo is not really powerful enough or doesn’t have a good enough operating system for doing things like media encoding or handling a home surveillance system.

Some readers might also be familiar with the QNAP brand. They are also highly recommended, but most prosumer users tended to prefer Synology. I’ve also read comments saying that the Synology OS is better and more user-friendly. This might be more important to you depending on what you want to do with your NAS. For example Synology have very good functionality for creating a video surveillance system.

Synology also seems to release more frequent updates to their NAS products. Synology are generally regarded as the most popular NAS choice for Mac users.

[Read more…]

Fax machines must be one of the most loathed gadgets ever invented, however, they are still in use by many corporations and governments.

If you have been asked to send a fax to someone and you don’t have a fax machine at home or in your office, worry not, I have a great solution for you.

Sending Faxes for Free

1. Head over to HelloFax and sign up (email address and password, or via your Google/Facebook accounts)
2. Have the documents ready on your computer, then upload them to the HelloFax site via their easy upload system. You can even upload files from Dropbox, Evernote, Box or Google Drive.
3. Enter the fax number of the recipient and hit send. That’s it!

With the free plan, you can send up to 5 free faxes per month. If you need to regularly send and receive faxes (yes, you can also receive faxes, they get sent to your email account), you can purchase a monthly subscription for just $9.99. That will give you up to 300 pages per month.

Of course, there is also a 30 day no strings attached trial.

For occasional use, I’ve just stuck to the free plan which works swimmingly well and has solved the fax problem for me going forward.

Send a free fax with HelloFax

Another great option for sending faxes, just in case you need to send more pages than the ones HelloFax gives you for free, is Fax.Plus.

Receiving Faxes for Free

The free plan at HelloFax does not allow you to receive faxes for free. Instead, I use FaxBurner, a similar service that also allows you to receive and send faxes for free. The sending of faxes with FaxBurner is limited to USA and Canada, so I prefer HelloFax for sending.

To receive faxes with FaxBurner all you need to do is sign up for a free account, then create a free number using the interface. You are then able to receive faxes on that temporary number.

Send a free fax with FaxBurner

Backups are essential both on a personal level and perhaps even more within a business context. My work and play are fairly intertwined, so for the purposes of backups I can’t really distinguish the two. What I will explain in this post can be used by someone to backup personal data but will also be useful to freelancers and small business owners.

There are some basic principles with regard to backups, and you should be aware of them.

• 3 copies of anything you care about – Two isn’t enough if it’s important.
• 2 different formats – Example: Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+BackBlaze, or more
• 1 off-site backup – If the house burns down, how will you get your memories back?

I used to have an Apple Time Capsule where I backed up all my Apple laptops and iMac automatically (including attached drives). I’ve since gotten rid of the Time Capsule and purchased a Synology DiskStation DS916+ which gives me more flexibility. The Time Capsule had really become too small for my needs at 2TB. The new Time Capsules have a max of 3TB hard drive space, which is still quite tight for my needs.

The Time Capsule also functioned very well as a wifi router, so I had to get another router instead, but that’s a minor inconvenience as they are quite cheap anyway.

The other benefit of having the Diskstation is that I use it for streaming video via the Plex app and then accessing media from any device around the apartment. It’s like having my own private Netflix. I also set up other things like Gmail and Trello backups as well as video surveillance in my apartment. You can read about all this in my dedicated post about backing up with a Synology Diskstation.

I had also considered the Drobo 5n, but after watching the video below and asking some friends for their experiences, I decided on the Synology system.

Another important benefit of using a Diskstation over the Time Capsule is that you can use RAID for better peace of mind. If a drive fails, the files are not lost, you just have to buy another similar drive and replace the dead one. The Diskstation will then take care of setting up the new drive and adding it to your storage.

Of course, if I would be still traveling frequently and changing apartments, the Synology setup would not be practical as it involves more hardware. Traveling with the Time Capsule is manageable, at least with the older version (A1409) that I had.

For off-site backups I used to use Backblaze but I’ve stopped using that as it was quite slow backing up from Europe and consumed resources on my devices. Plus I was never 100% convinced that at any point in time the backups would work.

I also have two external drives which I use for photos. I don’t keep any photos on the Macbook; instead, I transfer them all to one of these external drives, then mirror that drive to the second one. So in the case of photos, I have two copies of them on my external drives, another copy in the on the DiskStation, and another manual copy that I keep in another country (I move between two countries quite frequently).

Photos and videos are very important to me and hence why I have 4 copies at any point in time. The drive that is kept in another country is an absolute last resort and is only updated a few times a year, so in that scenario, I would still lose a few months’ worth of photos and videos, which is not ideal. All copies are encrypted.

You will have noticed that this system is not completely automated. It is, unfortunately, impossible to automate it completely because some devices such as my cameras (Sony RX100, GoPro, Mavic Air) don’t have the functionality to connect to the internet and take backups on their own. That means that I have to manually connect them to my laptop and transfer the photos to my external drive. When I’m on holiday I try to do that every day. During the rest of the year, I do this once a week and only if I used those cameras during that week.

Apart from files on my computers and external drives, I use Evernote and Day One extensively.  Time machine backup of Mac includes both local and synced notebooks (at the time when the backup was made). If you would like to generate a manual backup of your notes, what I can recommend you is to back up your notes as .ENEX file instead. You can read the help article about How to Backup and Restore Notes.

Day One keeps in sync across all devices using Day One Sync, and so that creates an automatic backup in the cloud of your notes. The Day One app on the Mac also keeps a local backup, which is itself included in the Time Machine backup.

If anyone has set up something similar, I’d love to have your thoughts.