These days, I am spending a lot of time looking at companies that provide useful services over the web. Joyent’s Bingo service is a great example:

1. Joyent’s Bingo adds value right away. For $49 a year you get a 25 GB networked drive that you can access from any computer.
2. Bingo doesn’t force you to change what you do now.
3. Setting Bingo up as a networked drive couldn’t be easier.

I use Bingo to save back-ups, share large files with friends and as an extra drive for work files that I might want to access from home. That last one is a time saver. No more saving something onto a jump drive. Instead, I just save it directly to the Bingo drive right from what ever application I am using. You can save directly to Bingo from Excel, Word, Keynote, Pages, Inkscape or whatever other kind of desk-top app you use.

How to Automate the Log-on to Bingo using Apple’s Automator

The only thing that I am not crazy about when it comes to Bingo is the first step. If you use a mac, it seems that you have to reconnect with the Bingo service as a network server each time you turn on your computer. There may be some way to configure the mac to automatically connect you - I just haven’t worked out how.
In the mean time, I decided to learn how to use Automator. It was really easy. I opened up Automator, selected Finder from the library of applications, a dragged on only two Actions. The first is called “Get Specified Servers”. The second is called “Connect to Servers”. Configuring the “Get Specified Servers” required me to simply hit follow the instructions on Joyent’s Bingo Instructions page. That was it. I saved the resulting work flow as a little .workflow application on my desktop.

Now I connect to Bingo with only one click.

Here’s a screen shot of the little Automator script I use.

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