Author: Jim Cofer

Filecloud.io is one of the most popular cloud services for sharing files. The only problem is that, at some point in the past week, the site owners have changed something so that every time you go to download a file, non-premium members get the following message:

you need to have a premium account to download this file

Bummer, right? Well, there is a workaround for this, although it requires a free Filecloud account and takes a few steps:

1) Create a free Filecloud account (if you haven’t already). Make sure you’re logged in for the next steps.

2) Copy the full URL of the file you want to download (e.g., http://filecloud.io/1a23b4cd).

3) Go to any Filecloud page and click the “Tools” button in the upper-left corner.

4) Click the “Clone files” link.

5) On the next page, paste the URL from step 2 into the “URLs” box and click “Continue”.

6) On the next page, click the file name. You should be sent to a new page which will allow you to download the file normally.

As the site says, what’s happening is that you’re copying the file you want to download to the “public” section of your own account. So you probably don’t want the files sticking around any longer than necessary. When you’re done downloading, click the Filecloud banner in the upper left of the screen to go to back to your account settings page and delete the files from your account (I just CTRL+Click the file(s) in step 6, so the new download page opens in a new tab, then close that tab when done and go back to the original tab and delete it from there, but that’s just how I roll).

I have no idea how long this workaround will last. I tried it just now, and it seems to be working, though.

UPDATE: There has been a change in how Filecloud handles file imports that you should probably know about. If you import a file into your account and immediately go to download it, you may get a “blank” page instead of the file download page, Just wait several moments and try again. I think (but do not know) that Filecloud’s servers are actually copying the file to your account, and I guess there’s some sort of queue for the file copy to take place. It can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2-3 minutes for the file to be able to be downloaded from your account. It’s unthinkable to me that they wouldn’t use Single Instance Storage, but that appears to be the case.

PRO TIP: on Sunday nights (a big downloading night for me) I usually open a Notepad++ window and go through each post and copy the Filecloud URLs (on a single line) to the Notepad window. That way, when I go to import the files, I can do all of them at once. And once the first file is available to download, the others will certainly be ready by the time the first download is done.

This story is from the Old Stuff Archive. I’m going through the archive and re-posting a bunch of old items that didn’t make the cut when I migrated this site from FrontPage to WordPress. Enjoy!

Some people are under the misguided impression that IT jobs are “glamorous” and “exciting”. They’re not. I was once hired by IBM to answer phones for their internal Y2K Help Desk. Initially, the job kept me pretty busy: my coworker Janette and I were getting a fair number of calls. After a few weeks, though, the calls really died down.

Since Janette and I were contractors, we were treated lower than dirt. And because the site was originally owned by GE Financial and had only recently been sold to IBM, corporate paranoia ran amok. We had to give our driver’s licenses to the security guards every day to get our “visitor’s badge”. We weren’t allowed to have a company email account. The firewall blocked access to 99.99% of all interesting content on the Internet. We were relegated to sitting in the training room and had to use the PCs there… and were not allowed to customize them at all. In fact, there were originally three of us, but one guy was fired for – I kid you not – moving the taskbar to the top of the screen. Because of all this, if our phones weren’t ringing we literally had nothing to do. And when the calls died down, I started to go a little crazy.

To explain it to others, I kept a diary for a day. This entry is from September 1st, 1998 and is absolutely true. Enjoy my insanity!

07:55 – Entered building
07:58 – Logged in the phone.
08:00 – Unzipped a file that had some bitmap flags I was designing with MS Paint (why, yes I am a geek).
08:01 – Played with the flags with MS Paint.
08:12 – Bored with the flags, play a few games of Solitaire.
08:30 – Bored with that, and tired too! I think I’ll take a nap.
09:20 – A nearby phone rings, which wakes me up. Need a cigarette.
09:30 – Back, with coffee for me and Janette.
09:35 – ANOTHER quick game of Solitaire.
09:45 – Back to the bitmaps; made an English flag and a couple of others.
10:05 – Started drawing a castle with MS Paint.
10:33 – Yawn. Going for another smoke and a bathroom break.
10:41 – Back. Janitor left the bathroom closet unlocked – briefly considered getting high off Endust.
10:42 – Hmmmm. Bored with the castle – I guess I’ll start reading Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.
10:50 – Woo-Hoo! The phone rings!
10:50 – Dammit! Wrong number!
11:35 – Read the first 28 pages of Wise Blood. Janette goes to lunch. Still no calls.
11:45 – Yawn again. Too sleepy for Wise Blood – back to Solitaire.
12:02 – WOO-HOO! A real call! A guy in Barrington, IL needs IDs created on the t2k4 mainframe!
12:05 – Through logging the call.
12:06 – Saw a commercial last night for a Carpenter’s CD; have “On Top Of The World” in my head – the Endust is looking better!
12:15 – Fuckin’ sick of Solitaire. Back to Wise Blood.
12:39 – Janette is back. Lunchtime!
14:01 – Omygosh! Another call!
14:18 – Well, that guy had the wrong number, only it took me 15 minutes to figure it out. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s still just 1 call.
14:21 – A maintenance guy comes in and fucks with a phone on the other side of the room. Leaves after 30 seconds.
14:25 – Maintenance guy comes back, picks up the phone, looks puzzled, leaves again.
14:26 – Mark comes in to say chat – he’s a guy who works in the NOC. I feel like a guy who just got off a deserted island….
14:42 – Mark leaves. I decide to write rant about a friend of mine that I’ll email ’round the world later.
14:50 – My friend Holly calls.
15:20 – Holly and I get off the phone.
15:32 – Holly calls back.
15:40 – Holly and I get off the phone.
15:43 – ANOTHER CALL! I’m getting carpal tunnel here! I log on to the mainframe and reset the ID.
15:45 – Finished rant, not in the mood to do my daily NT studying… Wonder where the maintenance guy went.
15:46 – Wonder if the Endust is still in the bathroom. Ah, never mind – back to Flannery O’Connor.
16:53 – No calls; I’m logging off for the evening.

Yep – eight hours and two phone calls that took a grand total of five minutes to log. We never used the same PC more than once and eventually I got so bored that I changed some of the hardware entries in the Registry so that in Device Manager all the hardware was listed as “another crappy IBM product”. I wonder if anyone ever noticed…