Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Flickr is a photo sharing service that has around for over four years, and in that time it has grown at an astounding pace. Thousands of images are uploaded to Flickr every minute, and it was just last year that they had over two billion photos uploaded to their site. The good news is that with the increase in popularity also comes an increase in the number of free tools available.

Personally I’ve been a Flickr Pro subscriber for a little over a year now, and the amount of features you get for the $2 per month is well worth the money. I currently have over 6,000 images uploaded on my account that I share with friends and family, and I’m always looking for tools that make the job even easier. So what I’ve got for you today are my favorite free applications that help me upload photos to my Flickr account.

–iPhoto Plugin (Homepage)–

Flickr makes an application for Mac OS X that is easy to use, but the problem is that it doesn’t integrate into Apple’s flagship photo management application called iPhoto. This is a big deal because many Mac users will probably be using iPhoto, and using the standard Flickr uploader means that you’ll need to add tags, descriptions, and titles to all of your photos twice: once in iPhoto and again on Flickr. Yuck!

No problem. The Free Flickr eXporter iPhoto plugin works inside of iPhoto, and preserves all of your descriptions, tags/keywords, and titles while uploading your images. You can also adjust privacy settings, resize images before uploading them, and choose which set(s) you’d like the images placed in.

–Windows Live Photo Gallery (Homepage)–

Windows Live Photo Gallery is one of the best ways to not only manage your photos, but also to upload images to the Yahoo-owned Flickr. What’s interesting is that Microsoft ships Windows Live Photo Gallery with Flickr support, and that means there’s even less you have to do to get it running.

To upload images to Flickr all you have to do is go to Publish -> More Services -> Publish on Flickr to have the wizard walk you through the steps needed. After authorizing the application you’ll be able to choose which set your photos should be uploaded to, select a maximum image size, and also change the permissions. The application will automatically grab any tags and descriptions you’ve added to the photos and include those with what gets uploaded.

One of the things that is rather unique with Windows Live Photo Gallery’s implementation is that you can queue multiple uploads. After you get one set of photos uploading just switch back to Photo Gallery to start uploading more. The program prevents multiple uploads from going on simultaneously, and will add any other batches to a queue. Most Flickr uploading apps will just block you from trying to upload more than one batch at a time, which can be a pain if you just want to walk away from your computer while the uploading is going on.

Here is a step-by-step walkthrough of the Flickr support in Windows LIve Photo Gallery.

–Picasa Plugin (Homepage)–

Google’s Picasa application is an excellent way to manage your photos, and all hope isn’t lost if you don’t want to use it with Google’s online photo services. There’s a handy plugin called Picasa2Flickr that adds a “Send To Flickr” button to the Picasa toolbar near the bottom of the window. When you click on the button it will add the selected photos to Flickr Uploadr 3.0 where you can then finish the upload process.

It’s a bummer that in order for this to work you need to have both Picasa and the Flickr Uploadr installed, but it is more convenient this way. The button keeps you from having to find your photos on your computer, and then drag them into the Flickr Uploadr.

–Send To Flickr (Homepage)–

I’m thinking this has to be one of the fastest and easiest ways to get your photos on Flickr. After you get it installed you’ll be able to select any photos from Windows Explorer, right-click on them, and in the “Send To” menu you’ll see a Flickr option (pictured to the right). The images will immediately start uploading themselves to your account, and you’ll see a preview window that includes the status of your upload.

There aren’t any of the advanced options that you might be used to, but if you’re not concerned with how your photos are organized this is probably one of the best Flickr solutions.

–Overview–

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with the tools that you can use to upload photos to Flickr, but I only wanted to cover the ones that I’ve used. Let us know in the comments how you get your photos on Flickr!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

It looks like 2014 is off to a series of hacks, with our report earlier claiming that Snapchat was hacked, compromising some 4.6 million user names and phone numbers in the process, and now it looks like Microsoft’s Skype Twitter and Facebook accounts have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, who have in the past successfully hacked Twitter, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post just to name a few. The group took the opportunity to tweet out some anti-Microsoft sentiments, and advised the followers to stop using Microsoft’s services due to monitoring, which we can only assume has to be related to the recent bout of accusations leveled at the NSA.

According to the tweet, “Don’t use Microsoft emails(hotmail,outlook), they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments. More details soon #SEA.” The tweets have since been deleted which we can only assume means that Microsoft has managed to regain control of their accounts. Thankfully unlike the Snapchat hack, this was only the hack of Microsoft’s Twitter and Facebook pages, meaning that as far as user information is concerned, it appears to be still intact. Microsoft has yet to respond to the hack.

Skype Twitter Account Hacked, Group Posts Anti-Microsoft Sentiments original content from Ubergizmo.

Back in 2013, we reported on a rumored that Xiaomi could be looking to launch a successor to its Hongmi (Red Rice) handset and that the device could sport an octa-core chipset. Well thanks to newly leaked information, we now know some additional specifications of the upcoming handset that may or may not be true, so please take them with a grain of salt for now. According to the reports, the Hongmi 2 is rumored to be powered by MediaTek’s MT6592 octa-core chipset, and unlike the Samsung Exynos 5-series of chipsets which uses the big.LITTLE technology, MediaTek’s offering is said to be a “true” octa-core chipset, although we’re not sure about its clock speeds at this point.

Other rumored specs of the Hongmi 2 include a 5.5” Full HD display and that the phone will be priced around 999 Chinese Yuan, which is about $165 when converted. Given its specs so far, we reckon $165 is a pretty decent price for what you are getting in return. Granted we don’t know about its camera, battery life, or storage at this point in time or the fact that it does not sport a 2K display which appears to be the standard for 2014, but an octa-core phone with a Full HD display for $165? If you’re shopping on a budget it certainly makes for a good deal. The original Hongmi was a success for the company and managed 100,000 units in the first 2 minutes of its launch back in October 2013, so we can’t wait to see how well its successor does.

Alleged Xiaomi Hongmi 2 Specs Surface original content from Ubergizmo.

When it comes to chipsets for mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, there used to be just a handful of manufacturers, such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and MediaTek. However recently we have started to hear more companies developing their own chipsets, a departure from not too long ago where these smartphone OEMs used to source their chipsets from the companies mentioned above. These companies include LG with their own brand of Odin chipsets, Huawei, and recently it has been rumored (via GizChina) that even ZTE could be planning on releasing an octa-core chipset of their own.

The chipset will be known as the WiseFone 7550S and is expected to be a “true” octa-core processor. According to the rumors, production is well on its way and could debut as soon as February, just in time for MWC 2014. Unfortunately not much is known about ZTE’s own chipset for now, but word has it that it will use less power compared to the likes of the NVIDIA Tegra 4 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800. It will be interesting to see how ZTE’s “true” octa-core chipset performs. Back in 2013 Samsung announced their own brand of octa-core chipsets which used the big.LITTLE technology where only four out of eight cores are used at once, but will swap between the sets of cores depending on how much power is needed.

The difference is that companies such as MediaTek have released octa-core chipsets which will use all 8 cores at once, which is presumably what ZTE is trying to do with their WiseFone 7550S. In any case take it with a grain of salt for now, but hopefully we will learn more about ZTE’s efforts in the upcoming weeks.

ZTE WiseFone 7550S Could Be The Company’s Rumored Octa-Core Chipset original content from Ubergizmo.

The other day we reported that according to an initial comparison of the Mac Pro with a DIY equivalent, it was found that the Mac Pro was not much more expensive, and in some instances even cheaper which seemed to dispel the myth about the fabled “Apple tax”. If you still believe that the Mac Pro is more expensive and that users are essentially paying for the Apple tax, a comparison by the folks at Anandtech might be able to answer some of your questions. The folks at Anandtech recently reviewed the Mac Pro and in the process attempted to find out if one could get a Windows equivalent of the entry-level Mac Pro for cheaper, but as it turns out it looks like once again despite the Mac Pro’s hefty price tag, it seems to be in line with what other OEMs are charging (see table above).

Of course there were some factors that had to be taken into consideration, such as discounts associated with workstation orders, and also because not all OEMs offered the exact same components, prices had to be fudged a bit. However Anandtech also notes that while the price does appear to be competitive with other OEMs such as HP and Lenovo as listed above, they state that building a comparative PC from individually sourced parts would be far less expensive at least as far as lower-end systems were concerned. What do you guys make of these more comprehensive findings? Are you still convinced that as far as the Mac Pro is concerned, users are still paying a premium in “Apple tax”?

Entry-level Mac Pro’s Price Is Comparable To Other OEMs original content from Ubergizmo.