InkLInk
Played InkLink with my kids last night. Still one of the best free online games EVER. There is not a whole lot of activity, which is just fine with us because we are happy to have a private room to play in. You can find it at shockwave.com. It’s basically online Pictionary
Kristen playing 3v3 in LTYA tournament
Sending Photos to a friend
* This is a duplicate post originally posted here. Google has an issue with that site for some reason and I don’t know that they won’t take it down one day.
There are many folks out there with digital cameras but with little understanding of what they have and what do with the photos they have taken. This post will attempt to help those that want to send one or more photos to a friend.
Free Online Services
Most people, I am guessing, use a free service like Shutterfly, Snapfish, SmugMug, Walmart, or Walgreens to upload their photos and share with others. This is a pretty good option. Anyone can order prints including the owner, there is a nice slideshow that can be viewed by anyone and that can often be the end of it. The downside, is that people have to sign-up to the specific service and they may not like doing that, especially if they have already signed up for other similar services. It also, of course, locks everyone into using that particular service for printing and they may or may not give the original owner or any one else access to the original high-quality files. If printing is not necessary, I recommend services such as Flickr or Google’s Picassa Web Albums which integrates nicely with their free Picassa photo managment software. Flickr has a free basic account but it limits you to 100mb of storage and only 200 pictures. You can only access your original high-quality images on Flickr if you have a paid account. Picassa Web Albums has a 1G limit on their free account and you DO have access to your original high-quality images. With Picassa Web Albums you can allow others to download photos or entire albums. This page describes how to download entire albums.
So, any of the above mentioned online services will do the job, but if you want the most control over your photos and for other reasons you want to send them directly to people, then keep reading.
Photo Resolution
If you remember when you were shopping for a camera the buzzword was MegaPixels. You were offered 2, 3, 6, 8 or more “megapixel” cameras. The more the better, you were told. Below is a chart of what the megapixels really give you:
| Type of image | Minimum resolution needed | Number of megapixels needed |
|---|---|---|
| Web image | 640 x 480 | 1-megapixel cameras* & up |
| 4″ x 6″ print | 2048 x 1536 | 3-megapixel cameras* & up |
| 8″ x 10″ | 3072 x 2048 | 6-megapixel cameras & up |
| 16″ x 20″ | 3264 x 2448 | 8-megapixel cameras & up |
What this means is that if you plan to print your photos, and depending on the size of the prints you plan to print, you should be using a 3-6 megapixel camera. Now just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD take high-resolution pictures. Each camera has the option to take photos at a lower resolution than the highest that it supports. So regardless of what megapixel your camera is, if you only plan to take pictures that you can view on your computer, email, put on the web somewhere, or mail your friends, then you should set the camera to take lower-resolution photos. 1024 x 768 or something close to this, is a good size.
The larger the resolution, the bigger the file. Nobody should be mailing around photos that are bigger than 500k each, otherwise you are wasting bandwidth, and eating up valuable space on your PC, SD cards, or wherever you are storing your photos. Often less than 100k per photo will suffice, and if printing, anything greater than a 2 or 3 Megapixel is overkill, unless you plan to print VERY LARGE prints.
Now if space isn’t an issue, and you think “Well, I don’t KNOW which shots I plan to print so I want the option of printing or not printing”, then that’s ok too. Shoot at a high-resolution. But when it comes time to SEND the photos somewhere, do the receiver a favor and scale them down before sending. Sending friends and family 6 megabyte files for each photo is not very friendly.
Resizing Photos
There are many different ways to scale down photos and you may already have a few programs installed on your computer that can do the job. I’ll mention just a few that I recommend.
If you are running Windows XP, try installing the Image Resizer Power Toy. Once installed you open up Windows Explorer, find your photos, right click on them and resize to another size.
A free program which also integrates into Windows Explorer allowing you to right click an image you want to resize, is VSO Image Resizer.
Finally, you can change how you email photos. Instead of starting an email message and attaching a file to it, use a program like Picassa to manage your photos, then select one or more photos, hit the email button and Picassa will give you the option of resizing the photo and will automatically start the editor with the resized files attached! Couldn’t be easier. iPhoto on the Mac works similarly.
There are many other ways to resize your photos, just Google “free image resize” and you’ll find many more choices.
For the daring, FTP your files!
If you have a lot of photos to send and the receiver is a propeller head like me and you are a bit daring, you might dust off your propeller hat and try the following workflow. It actually isn’t that hard and once setup it is incredibly easy!
Download a free FTP program like Filezilla, or for Mac CyberDuck. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It’s an old tried and true technology for moving files from one computer on the Internet to another.
The recipient must have their own website, or be setup to allow FTP access and you must know the address, username and password to connect. Once connected you simply drag and drop from your computer to the FTP program’s window and it will transfer your files to the destination computer. This is the best way to copy many large files to another computer or to a website. As a matter of fact FTP is often the technique used to update websites.
Update Nov 2, 2010: Minus Photo Sharing Service looks nice
Kristen Playing Baseball
Some footage of Kristen’s last games playing LTYA Rookie National League. She played up with the 4th graders as a 3rd grader.
Speeding up your Windows computer
The best and most reliable way to speed up your computer is to reinstall the operating system. Yes, I know it is a hassle and an extreme option but it’s the best option. You can try to manually cleanup your computer and you can make improvements but this is time consuming and no gaurantee you will fix the biggest problems. Reinstalling the OS requires that you back everything up which is a good thing to get in the habit of. Your computer could crash one day and you should be prepared for this anyway.
Reinstalling the OS takes a few hours but it runs pretty much unattended. The most work will be preparing for the reinstallation.
But if reinstalling the OS isn’t an option, here are the things you can do to improve performance:
- Remove spyware using Windows Defender or AdAware
- Remove viruses using Microsoft’s free scanning service or installing Microsoft’s free Security essentials software.
- If you are low on disk space, free up disk space using Disk Cleanup or WinDirStat
- Defrag your disk
- Detect and repair disk errors
- Make sure you have enough RAM
- Uninstall unused program
- Remove unneeded services
- Remove programs that auto-start
- If your browser is causing problems use a different one. You may inadvertently have installed many plugins for Internet Explorer which is slowing it down or causing problems. Firefox and Google Chrome are excellent alternatives.
Router logins
Logins for some common routers:
| Router | Address | Username | Password |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3Com | http://192.168.1.1 | admin | admin |
| D-Link | http://192.168.0.1 | admin | |
| Linksys | http://192.168.1.1 | admin | admin |
| Microsoft Broadband | http://192.168.2.1 | admin | admin |
| Netgear | http://192.168.0.1 | admin | password |
Why you might not want to be owned by Google
I had my first bad experience with Google software which has been remedied but it was enough for me to reevaluate my level of commitment using their websites and software. Everyone knows it’s not good to rely on just one company for ANYTHING. Over time I have become more reliant on Google for mail and documents. I use their Calendering and Picassa/Web Albums, Blogger, and Google Voice service. I also use GMAIL for my company’s tech support and we share documents at work.
This week when I attempted to create a new document, I got a message that I may be in violation of their terms of service. I was locked out from ALL accounts which was tied to my Google GMAIL account. I couldn’t check GMAIL or use Google Docs. Soon after that, I received a message that a blog I had setup (http://pcbestpractices.blogspot.com) had been flagged as a possible SPAM site. Ironically, that blog I started which has 2 lengthy posts attempting to inform about the proper use of BCC, and how to manage photos is probably the two most USEFUL posts I’ve ever created! Here is the text of the email I received:
Hello,
Your blog at: http://pcbestpractices.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at [linked removed]
Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn’t reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we’ll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn’t belong to you, you don’t have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won’t be affected.
We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577
Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: [link removed]
The only thing I can think of is that the fact my blog was flagged as a potential spam site, triggered the lockout of all my other google accounts.
It’s one thing to suspect wrong doing and I accept that there are false positives, but to turn off EVERYTHING associated with an account until it is proven an error doesn’t strike me as not Doing Evil. It’s like the policy of shooting first and asking questions later.
I’m not going to stop using Google properties, but I’ve got my foot on the brake and I will no longer recommend them as enthusastically, or without warnings. I will post a Google Best Practices ;-) at a later time.
Here are a few other stories related to being “Google Owned”
Google Voice
I use Google Voice when I’m on the computer (which is most of the time) and I start receiving text messages from Jane or one of the kids. Google Voice gives you a free phone # that can also receive and send text messages. I can go to the Google Voice website and type in my messages using my computer keyboard, or read text messages received. Google voice maintains a thread just like GMAIL. You can do other things such as forward the # to another phone so that your primary phone rings if someone calls it. It also transcribes voice messages into text messages!
Here is a portion of what Google Voice looks like:
Mercurial For Source Control
It appears that Subversion is no longer where it’s at. We now have Mercurial.
Joel has a nice tutorial f or Mercurial.
There is TortoiseHG for Explorer Integration which is what I installed which included Mercurial.
Two plugins for Visual Studio exists as well: VisualHG, hgscc
Update: I was unable to get hgscc to work on Windows 7 VS 2008. Any attempts to add a file from within VS resulted in a generic error message. I uninstalled hgscc by right clicking the .msi install file and selecting uninstall