So the other big news, that I didn’t actually talk about last week, is that Emmi and Kyle are looking to move back East — specifically, they are moving to Bethlehem in the spring. Awesome news! But that also means a lot of work, as they must now shop for a home long distance…
We’re helping where we can, looking online for suitable houses, searching the neighborhoods for new “FOR SALE” signs, etc, and we went on a walk-through of one hot prospect the other day with the realtor. Emmi & Kyle participated on Zoom, and I documented the walk-through on video.
That all worked out pretty well, but when I got home I saw my video file was pretty big, like 2.5 GB, too big for regular email, so I tried sharing it to Google Drive. I clicked the link, and it said “uploading” but there’s no progress indication, and more than an hour later it’s still hanging fire, so I canceled the upload. I figured I could just put it on my laptop and move it from there, but the USB cable was wonky and won’t connect data; I tried moving it via FTP but the file is on my auxiliary memory card and the server wouldn’t access it. Cue that song about the hole in the bucket…
So now what?
Well, I’d set up an SMB share on my laptop a while ago, so I can share things from the laptop to other devices on the network, but it was deliberately set up to be read-only for guest accounts — I don”t want people to be able to come along and dump arbitrary files onto my computer. What I forgot I did though, and remembered in the heat of this debacle, is that I’d also made the share read/write for an authorized regular user (like, say, me with my regular login and a password) — hmmm, maybe I’ll give that a try. The SMB connection on the phone was set up to be anonymous, so I had to change a few settings, but after that I was able to move things easily from either the phone or the laptop over to the other. I tested it on that big video file, which took some time to transfer but it worked fine, and then I just uploaded the file in the usual way to Google Drive. Easy peasy!
(I also made those changes to my tablet settings, so I can share files the same way there.)