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Technology’s Infestation of my Life

Examples of how technology has permeated every single bit of my life.

Flickr Geotagging

From the Inboxen™ of Andrew Ferguson:

Ahoy,

I work for Flickr. I’m writing to you because you have lots of geotagged photos and we’re about to launch geotagging. Our system works in a slightly different, more “built in’ way than what you’ve been doing so far, and does not require the “geotagged”/”geo:lat”/”geo:long” tags on your photos. (Existing 3rd party geotagging tools will continue to work and we will release the APIs so everyone can take advantage of the new system.)

We are not automatically importing existing geotagged photos into the new system since there are some privacy features we want people to be aware of. The location a photo was taken can be kept private, even if the photo itself is public. You can set a preference for the default location privacy and change it on a photo-by-photo or batch basis. Importing will respect whatever privacy setting you choose.

In advance of the launch, we’d appreciate if you could take a second to set your preference and start the import process. Then as soon as we launch, you’ll be all set to go!

Set your privacy preference here:
http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/privacy/

And then you can import here:
http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/import/

Thanks a lot, and keep on Flickrin’!

Cheers,

– Stewart

Now, a couple of things.

“you have lots of geotagged photos”
This is true, over 33% of my 6000+ photos on Flickr do have Geotags!

“Our system works in a slightly different, more “built in’ way than what you’ve been doing so far, and does not require the “geotagged”/”geo:lat”/”geo:long” tags on your photos.”
This worries me a bit. Geotags have been a great, open standard so far. Is Yahoo taking a page out of Sony’s manual and playing the “new-format” game? They say they’re going to release the APIs so that everyone can use it, but why change something that already works? Makes no sense to me. If anyone from Yahoo is reading this, can you please explain it? Or better yet, fix it!

“In advance of the launch, we’d appreciate if you could take a second to set your preference and start the import process. Then as soon as we launch, you’ll be all set to go!”
Not a problem. But if I’m going to be doing something for you, can you do something for me and tell me when it’s actually launching?

“keep on Flickrin’!”
Google doesn’t want to be a verb, but it seems like Flickr doesn’t mind. Interesting.

“Stewart”
Thanks Stewart. But who are you??

[tags]flickr, geotag, api, google, sony, geotagging, email[/tags]

An Option

The part that broke is called an LCD Mask, Toshiba part number P000388420. I did a Google Search for it and the prices are around $180 ± $50. This, as it turns out, is very close to the “official” price from Nation Parts Depot (Toshiba’s parts vendor) of $172.22.

For fun, I decided to check on eBay. Low and behold, I found an auction for the exact part I’m looking for. Even better, it would only be about $60 with shipping, as of now. But seriously, how often do these buggers break? Methinks not that often.

Despite the fact I would have to spend 60 of my hard earned dollars, it would still be cheaper then driving down to Lone Tree and back, and paying the $75 express fee to get them to look at my laptop now…instead of in 10 days or whatever.

I’m going to check with Toshiba directly to see if they’ll just send me the part if I send mine back.

Oh Crack

I’m at Ryan Goodwin’s house, doing my Statics homework like a good boy. I flip by screen around and ever so gently tap the pepper shaker and my screen cracks. Actually, it’s just the plastic on top of my screen that cracked. It’s still usable, but now it has a hairline crack going through one corner.

I called up my good friends at Central Telecom, down in Lone Tree, Colorado:

Bad news: They won’t be able to look at it until Monday at the earliest.
More bad news: They currently have a 10 day turn-around time.
Maybe good news: Toshiba should cover it.
Good news: It stills functions just perfectly. I just have a hairline crack in it.

Here we go again.

Technology on the Go

Dateline Florence, Italy.

Most people were surprised that I wasn’t taking my computer with me, but the reality of the situation is that I don’t really need my tablet to check email, update my blog, check my RSS feeds, or chat online.

What I took with me:

Firefox Portable extracts straight to the thumbdrive.

You can install Skype straight to the thumbdrive too (or just copy Skype.exe from your existing installation), however you will also need to create a BAT file to make sure it loads your profile. On my thumbdrive, I have a folder called Phone with Skype.exe inside. I also have a BAT file called skype.BAT. In skype.BAT, copy and paste this code:

skype.exe /datapath:"Data" /removable

Then create a new directory in Phone called Data. Skype will now use that location to store your profile. This is very important when you start using computers in places like Italy where the computer language is set to Italian.

PuTTY is an open source SSH client I use to connect to various computer systems, such as my site.

Flickr Uploadr is what I use to upload my wonderful pictures. The downside of Flickr Uploadr is that I have to authorize on every computer I use it on. This is not that big of a deal as I just deauthorize when I’m done. But it does beat using the web interface every time.

There are also a number of websites I use:

Easy. Simple. Free.

Happy Birthday WWW

Quick break from Europe postings:

From www.downloadsquad.com:

On August 6, 1991–15 years ago today–Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web with a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup. In the message he says,” The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system,” and provides the source code for his prototype line-mode browser, a GUI hypertext editor for NeXT, and a skeleton server daemon. From those humble beginnings, all of this. Thanks, Tim, and Happy Birthday WWW!

See also: http://www.kottke.org/remainder/06/08/11599.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5242252.stm

Curious Web

I use 30Boxes as my calendar and it’s been work really well, until I got to Boeing. I couldn’t see my calendar! The site would load and I could see the header and footer, but the actual calendar was nowhere to be found. Curious.

I had no idea why this was happening, except maybe the proxy server was tweaking some of the HTML on the way to my system. So I tried using the Mines HTTP VPN portal to see if that would make a difference. It did: I could now see the default calendar. But I couldn’t log in.

So I tried to view the site straight up on the Internet (without using the Mines VPN portal), and it worked! Weird.

[tags]boeing internship, boeing intern, boeing, intern, internship, 30boxes[/tags]

External Harddrive Backup

One of my good friends just emailed me:

Ferg,
I want to get an external hard drive to back up our desktop (pictures, music, files, etc.). I don’t know much about them though. Can you point me in the right direction? Where is the best place to buy? Local or online? How large of one do you think we need?

Your options are pretty basic: who makes it, how big the drive is, what kind of connection to the drive, and what kind of software does it come with.

I would pick a drive from a more reputable company (Western Digital, Maxtor, LaCie).

How much space you need depends on what you’re storing and how much. Plan on:

100 Photos = 0.3 gigabytes
100 Minutes of DV Video = 25 gigabytes
100 Minutes of Music (~33 songs) = 0.1 gigabytes
100 Word documents = .05 gigabytes

You’ll want either a Firewire or USB 2.0 connection so that transfer speeds are relatively fast.

I’ve never really been big on the software side of backing up. Drag and drop seems to work pretty fine and that way you know that everything is backed up.

In terms of ideal backup techniques: backups should be done regularly, on different types of media, stored in different locations (the trifecta of backing up, if you will). Thus, you also might consider burning copies of photos/video and anything else of extreme importance onto DVD and keeping a copy at work. Mostly in case someone where to steal your original or God forbid the house were to burn down (not trying to scare you, honest!).

There are ways to automate many of these processes that I would love to help you with.

One final idea is using an online storage company to backup data. You end up paying a monthly fee, but they take care of making offsite backups (i.e. you upload files to their servers which they then backup in various locales around the US).

Update: Added title