How to Upload Videos to YouTube

Lifehacker: How to Upload Videos to YouTube (for Beginners)

Your videos are a whole lot more fun when you can share them online, and YouTube is one of the best ways to do that. While it's mostly a simple operation, it's not something everyone knows how to do. This guide provides a walkthrough to help newcomers sign up for a YouTube account and upload their first video.

Uploading videos to YouTube might seem a little intimidating if you've never done it before, but once you've done it you'll find it's very quick and easy. You'll find a video walkthrough at the top of the page and it will take you through this entire process. If you'd prefer to read each step, or just want a text reference for the video, you'll find it below.

To get started, you'll need to have a YouTube account if you don't already. If you've already signed up for one, just skip this section. If not, here are the steps you'll need to take:

1. Go to youtube.com.
2. Click the large blue "Create Account" button, or the smaller link with the same name at the top right of the page.
3. Fill out the form with your personal information. If you have a Gmail address, entering it as your email address in this form will save you some time later. When you're done filling out the form, click the "I Accept" button.
4. If you used your Gmail account when creating your YouTube account, you'll be asked to link them together on the next page. If this is the case, link the accounts. If you did not use your Gmail account (because you don't have one) you'll be asked to create on on the next page. If this is the case, create a Gmail account and it will be linked to your new YouTube account.
5. Now you're signed up and should be automatically signed in. You'll know if you're signed in if you see your YouTube account name in the upper right corner of the screen. If you don't, you should see a "Sign In" link up there. Click that, then sign in with your new YouTube username and password.

Now that you have an account, uploading a video is very easy. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Make sure you're signed into your account by looking up at the top righthand part of the page. If you see your username, you're signed in.
2. To the left of your username, you'll find a link called "Upload." Click on that.
3. A new page will load and you'll be presented with two options. The first option is a yellow button labeled "Upload video" and a link titled "Record from webcam." You want to click the "Upload video" button.
4. Once you've clicked the "Upload video" button, you'll a new window pop up that will let you select a file from your hard drive. Select the video you want to upload and click the "Choose" button.
5. The video will start to upload and you'll see its progress as well as a bunch of other options. Make sure you do not close this page until the video has finished uploading or it will not finish. While the video is uploading you can change the name, add a description, set your privacy options, and fill out other relevant information.
6. Once the video has finished uploading it will need to spend some time processing on YouTube's servers before it is ready for viewing online. You'll be able to watch it process at the top of the page. Once it reaches 100%, you'll see a link at the top of the screen that you can click to view your video. Alternatively, you can always find your videos by click on your username at the top left of the page and then choosing "Videos" (which may be labeled as "My Videos" for some accounts). This will let you access all the videos you have uploaded.
7. When you're on your video's page, you'll be able to watch it and share it. You'll find a button labeled "Share" underneath the video that will provide you with a link to send to other people and a few other sharing options, such as email and Facebook.

Congratulations, you've just uploaded your first video to YouTube. Now that you know how it works, you should have no trouble doing it again and again.

How to Upload Videos to YouTube (for Beginners)

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

Gmail users put a lot of their lives into their inboxes. Over nearly seven years, with ever-increasing storage, how could you not? So if your inbox suddenly went blank, where would you turn? Now's the time to get a secondary stash in place. Here are four options—free or cheap, easy or geeky—that will give you peace of mind.

Keep in mind that Gmail's data loss from this weekend wasn't actually a total loss for anybody, and that, as a result of a bug caught quickly, only about 40,000 users, or 0.02 percent of Gmail's estimated 200 million, were effected. And everybody got their email back, eventually, as Gmail goes so far as to keep tape backups of everything. But for a weekend, some users had no access to anything they'd ever sent or received. And when more typical site outages occur, one can act the part of a pro if they've got a backup source for anything they need from their life's files.

Below, we've separated a few of your backup options into levels of convenience, price, and geekiness. We recommend finding the option that hits your sweet spot and making sure you've got your email backed up.

For Those Who Don't Mind Paying for Convenience: Backupify

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Once you sign up for Backupify, then authenticate your Gmail or Google Apps account through the service, you really don't have to do anything—and we mean that. Backupify uses its servers to pull data from Google's servers, and after an average of 2-3 days, your Gmail archives are there, and new stuff slowly streams over.

Backupify also backs up Facebook data, Flickr photos, Google Docs, your long-term Twitter stream, and lots of other webapps. Best of all, they're offering one year for free right now with discount code savegmail, so giving Backupify a try is really worth the (very minimal) effort.

For Cheapskates Who Like Automation: Gmail-to-Hotmail

What are the moral implications of using Hotmail primarily as a free, server-to-server backup of your Gmail messages? We cannot say. But Hotmail really, really wants you to transfer over your messages, and they've even created a simple web interface for doing so: TrueSwitch.

First up, though, sign up and secure a Hotmail account, get a good password, and sign into it. Then head to TrueSwitch, enter your Gmail user/pass info, then your new Hotmail login, and choose what you want Hotmail/Windows Live to copy over. As with all the other options, you'll likely have to wait a while, but once all your data has arrived, you'll get an email from Hotmail, letting you know you're all set.

Hotmail is a nice backup solution in a few ways, really. First off, you can send messages from your Gmail address using the account importing tool, and Hotmail offers a nice spam-fighting alias feature.

For Free, Local, DIY Backup: Desktop Thunderbird (and Then Somewhere Else)

Gmail offers access to all your mail through desktop clients, even the really old stuff. You could use Outlook or Apple Mail to download all of it, but Thunderbird is free, works on any system, and creates nicely portable packages that are handy for any other backups you're doing (you responsible data owner, you).

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First things first: head to Gmail, click the "gear" in the upper-right corner, choose Mail settings, then head to Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Enable POP for all mail, and set Gmail to keep its copy. At this point, you should download and install Thunderbird, if you haven't already.

You can then click Gmail's link for configuration instructions; their step-by-step walk-through for Thunderbird 3.0 is spot on. Alternately, Thunderbird's automatic configuration usually picks up on the necessary Gmail settings if you enter your Gmail username and password. But if you're only planning to use Thunderbird for this backup job, you only need to have the incoming settings up and running for POP mail, so hit the "Manual Setup" button and drop this in:

Incoming: change to "pop.gmail.com"
Protocol (the drop-down list to the right of the Incoming field): change to "POP"
Port (the field to the right of the protocol drop-down list): change to "995"

Clear out the Outgoing settings if you'd like, but they won't do much harm. After hitting OK and verifying that everything's working, your only job is to keep Thunderbird running on your system whenever you can, and to give it a few days to grab everything.

Your Gmail messages are stored inside your Thunderbird profile, which you can find in a semi-discrete location. We'd highly recommend backing up that profile in the same way you'd back up your other important data, and hopefully somewhere online. Now you've got triple-threat access to all of your mail history, and Gmail's rare service interruptions and hiccups affect you hardly at all.

How to Back Up Your Gmail the Easy and Cheap Way

9 Quick Ways To Free Up Space on C:\ Drive

9 Quick Ways To Magically Free Up Space In C:\ Drive

Gone are the days of low disk space warnings, you say? Not really. Many a time, the primary partition on your hard disk is loaded up to the last few gigabytes – probably because you installed too many programs and games. You can do a clean up, but you can also free up space without the hassles of Shift + Delete. Just try these workarounds to free up some space in the C:\ drive and make your computer run faster.

1. Change Dropbox Location

If your computer has Dropbox installed, you probably chose to keep the Dropbox folder inside ‘My Documents’. You can quickly move it to any other partition to free up space in the C:\ drive. Just right click the Dropbox icon in the system tray, choose Preferences and click Move to move your Dropbox folder’s contents.

2. Relocate Program Files

If you are a download junkie, the program files folder on your disk is probably crammed. Use the Steam Mover utility to move programs installed in C:\Program Files\ to another partition. Specify a particular program’s directory and the target location – Steam Mover will instantly move all your files there and create symlinks in the original location. That is a lot of disk space saved.

3. Move iTunes Backups or Delete Podcasts Automatically

Podcasts that you download using iTunes are in your main partition, right inside your music folder. You can quickly use the Edit > Preferences dialog to move them to another partition. This is quite a confusing process, and there’s a detailed guide here on how you can go about doing it.

You can also set iTunes to automatically delete podcasts that you’ve already listened to. You can do that by going to your Podcasts list and choosing Settings from the bottom, and then altering the choices in the ‘Episodes to keep’ option.

4. Change the default My Documents location

If you have a large number of files saved up in My Documents, you can move the folder to another partition in the disk to free up some disk space. Right click your documents folder, choose Properties, click the Location tab and hit Move to choose a new location for your documents. This is a pretty easy step, and could potentially save you plenty of disk space.

5. Use Symlinks When Desperate

Symlinks are your best bet when you have very little space left in the main partition. When you create symlinks, your folders will be accessible from the original location but their contents will actually be stored in the place the symlink is pointing to. The Link Shell extension for Windows Explorer makes it easy to create symlinks via the right click menu. You pick a link source and then you can go to the destination to drop a hard clone/soft link.

6. Power up CCleaner

If you thought CCleaner cleans all the temporary files in your C:\ drive, think again. Previously mentioned CCleaner Enhancer adds extra definitions to clean junk files left by over 270 applications. Just get the Enhancer installer which downloads the latest .ini file with definitions and you’re done – you can quickly reclaim more disk space in the C:\ drive!

7. Delete System Restore Points

System Restore files could be occupying considerable size in your hard disk partition and it makes sense to delete all these restore points except the latest one. You can use More Options in the Disk Cleanup utility to accomplish this. If you have CCleaner installed, you can use the System Restore cleaner from the Tools tab and remove individual system restore points quite quickly. The Disk Cleanup utility could help you gain more disk space by permanently deleting hibernation and other temporary files.

8. Look at the disk usage graph

The quickest way to find what’s hogging your hard disk is to deploy a disk usage graph. Install any one of these tools, and you can instantly see the amount of space used by the files and folders in your hard disk as neat and pretty graphs. These tools also give you an option to trash these folders immediately. Your only other choice is to use the Symlinks workaround mentioned above, in case you just don’t want to remove them from the partition.

9. If you don’t want to fiddle with any of these methods, just resize the partition using a partition manager like Easeus. That’d do the trick.

Low Disk Space? Free up C: Drive

How to Video Chat Using Skype

Lifehacker: How to Video Chat with Your Friends and Family Using Skype

If you have a friend or relative living a bit further away than you'd like, you can stay in touch with the magic of video chat. It's actually quite simple to set up; here's how to do it.

You can check out the video above to see video chat in action, or follow along with the steps below:

1. Download Skype from its home page and install it on your computer. It works on both Windows and Mac machines.
2. Start up Skype. If you don't have an account, hit the "don't have an account" or "create an account" button to make one. You just need to enter your name, the password you want to use, an email address, and your "Skype name", which will be the name by which people reach you. Make it something easy for your friends to remember.
3. Once you've created your account, you can sign into Skype by entering your Skype name and password. Once you do, your buddy list should pop up. If you've just created a new account, it will be empty.
4. To add someone new to your contact list, hit the "Add a Contact" button on the bottom. Type in their Skype name at the bottom, and their phone number and email if desired. To video chat with them, all you really need is their Skype name, though.
5. You can see which buddies are online by looking at the small, green Skype logo next to their names. If it's colored in and has a white check mark on the inside, they're online and available to chat. Double-click on someone's name to chat with them.
6. Double-clicking on their name will start a text-only chat. To video chat, hit the "Video Call" button on the next screen, and if they're around, you should see them pop up on your screen.
7. That's it! Have your conversation, and when you're done, just hit "end call".

From now on, you can start up Skype whenever you want, and initiate a video chat with any of your friends or family that are online. Note, of course, that you need a webcam connected to your computer for this to work, though many laptops today come with them built-in.

How to Video Chat with Your Friends and Family Using Skype

How to Change Your Facebook Notification Settings

How to Change Your Facebook Notification Settings

If you or someone you know needs help managing their Facebook notifications, either because they can't stand getting all the emails or they just want to adjust them a little, here's how it's done.

The video above will walk you through the process, but here are the steps you need to follow to alter your Facebook notifications settings:

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. Click the Account menu at the top right of the page and choose Account Settings.
3. At the bar on the top of the Account Settings page, click Notifications.
4. You'll now see a large page of notifications with two checkboxes beside them. The checkbox on the left is for email and the checkbox on the right is for text messages. Checking a box means you'll get a notification and unchecking a box means you won't. Simply choose the options you want.
5. When you're done making your choices, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the button labeled Save Changes.

That's it. You're all done! As an alternative, if you'd like to receive all your notifications as a daily email digest, read this guide too.

How to Change Your Facebook Notification Settings (for Beginners)