Posts

Showing posts from April, 2011

Suggested Improvements to Facebook Tagging

Image
In this age of facial recognition , one should be able to accurately tag their friends in a photo of a crowd of people. Facebook allows you to use a crosshair to pin point the spot where you want attention focused. You can then label the point with a tag (a name of your Facebook friends or any name you like). When you hover over the tagged name, your spot is delineated by an empty white-outlined box which is about a square inch in size. Problem is, this can fit several identifiable people or objects. I can understand our GPS navigators being deliberately off by a couple of houses, probably for privacy reasons, but I don't get the impression that privacy is of major concern to Facebook where photo tagging is concerned. Yes, Facebook has photo recognition software which they use in suggesting your name to others when they upload pictures that feature your likeness (you may want to disable this feature in your privacy settings). Yet, even their software would have a hard time ident

Quick One! Moving Read-Only Files

Ok so I start to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data to an external drive. The computer tells me it will take dozens of minutes so I leave it running and go for a nap. I have a 'one nod rule', which is to prevent me from working while half-asleep, so if I nod off once, I go straight to bed. I wake up hours later only to discover that the transfer hasn't even reached halfway. The computer has paused the transfer to ask me if I'm sure I want to move a read-only file! Shouldn't the default be to just transfer the files? In the many years that I have been transferring files, never have I intended for the read-only files to stay put while the others move. That has never been my default. Why wait till the 35% mark to ask me a question you could have generically asked at the beginning of the transfer? Can you hear my Linux friends laughing at me? I know I'm ranting only because I was inconvenienced and I bet there are other scenarios where moving a read-only file (t

Stop 'Waisting' Food! You Have My Blessing.

Image
Have you ever found yourself trying to force yourself to finish all the food on your plate simply because you're reminded of images of near-death-starving children in less privileged situations? You feel that pouring that food away while others are starving makes you nothing short of a devil so you stuff your body with unneeded calories. Problem is, instead of refrigerating or dumping the leftovers in the trashcan, you dump them in your body, hence making your body the trashcan. Your body, 'thinking' you're storing up for a rainy day, converts the excess food into fat. You then either live with the untoward effects on your body or you go through weight loss regimens to 'burn' the fat into energy that is at best, for only your benefit. Thus, you 'burn' the leftovers that may have fed a hungry alley cat or better still been used to nourish the soil to grow food that can be shipped to starving children (this of course assumes that you're eating healthy

Quick One! Clear Phantom Hard-Disk Hogs.

Dear Photogs, If you use Adobe Bridge you might want to change your cache settings. Every time you view a large file you are most likely viewing a preview of that file generated by bridge. Bridge saves these previews in the cache so that next time you view the file, it doesn't have to waste time generating a preview. The problem is that this can amass many gigabytes of data in a rather short while. Open Bridge, press Ctrl+K (Win) /Command+K (Mac) and under 'Cache' you can start by changing the location of the cache to a partition of your drive that has more space. If you are bold enough you could even purge the cache altogether. Either way, you now know where those phantom 20 gigs have been hiding. One more thing, if you've ever used (or are still using) Bridge CS3, you might want to search your system for a file named 'filesystem_blobs.MYD'. Cheers, DrAjao