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

This article was written on July 31, 2012 by CyberNet.

Over a month ago I wrote about a Beta version of Dexpot that was packed with some very polished features that emulated the Spaces and Exposé features from the Mac OS. The developers have since put the finishing touches on the app, and have pushed it out the door after 3-years of development. The Spaces clone, pictured above, provides an interactive way to manage multiple virtual desktops. When you first enter this view, called the “Full-Screen Preview”, you’ll see all of your virtual desktops in a grid layout. Just start dragging windows between desktops to see how well Dexpot handles itself.

When in the Full-Screen Preview you can also tile the windows on any of the desktops by right-clicking on a particular desktop. Alternatively if you right-click in the space separating the desktops it will tile the windows in all of the desktops. If you find yourself tiling the windows every time you open the virtual desktop manager there’s a handy little trick to have that automatically happen. All you have to do is assign a keyboard shortcut to the “Window Catalog (all desktops)” option in the settings, and then use that shortcut for pulling up your virtual desktops. This is where you’ll find the setting:

While in the settings you should also check out the plugins section of Dexpot. I enabled the MouseEvents plugin which lets me specify actions to be performed when my mouse travels to the corners of my monitor. For example, I can have it execute the “Window Catalog (all desktops)” action that I mentioned above any time I move my mouse to the upper-left corn of the screen.

Aside from the virtual desktop management Dexpot also has a great Exposé clone built in. They call the feature a “Window Catalog” which may not make it immediately obvious what it does, but it’s basically the best Exposé clone I’ve ever used on Windows. If you’ve been itching for an alternate way to switch between applications Dexpot probably just became even more valuable to you.

Dexpot Homepage (Windows only; Free for Personal Use)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 25, 2010 by CyberNet.

I take all kinds of videos from cameras that save the movies to a single file that is difficult to share with people who aren’t overly comfortable using a computer. When that happens I try to burn the videos to a DVD that they can watch it using any standalone DVD player, but this can be quite a pain depending on the original format of the video.

The free DVDStyler takes the hassle out of the DVD burning thanks to the wide variety of formats and simple-to-use interface. You can throw multiple videos onto a single DVD (each one can actually be a different format), integrate a menu, and you’ll be ready to roll. Here’s a rundown on some of the available features:

• Creation and burning DVD video with interactive menus
• Support of AVI, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG, WMV and other file formats support of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid, MP2, MP3, AC-3 and other audio and video formats
• Support of multi-core processor
• Allows using MPEG and VOB files without reencoding, see FAQ
• Allows put files with different audio/video format on one DVD (support of titleset)
• User-friendly interface with support of drag & drop
• Flexible menu creation on the basis of scalable vector graphic
• Import of image file for background
• Placing of buttons, text, images and other graphic objects anywhere on the menu screen
• Changing the font/color and other parameters of buttons and graphic object
• Scaling of buttons and graphic objects
• Coping of any menu object or whole menu
• DVD scripting

IMPORTANT: Don’t blindly install this app. It will try to install a third-party tool during the setup process unless you explicitly say you don’t want it. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t click “Next” during the install routine without actually looking at what you’re agreeing to.

DVDStyler Homepage (Windows/Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla is trying to beef up extension security in Firefox 3 by ensuring that the updates are provided by a secure address. All of the extensions on the official Mozilla add-ons site will work perfectly with this new system, but there could be problems when venturing outside of the site.

An example of this happened when I tried to install a development release of Tab Mix Plus. I was prompted with a message that said:

“Tab Mix Plus” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates

As expected there is a hidden setting that you can adjust to prevent Firefox from checking the address from which an extension retrieves its updates. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Start Firefox.
2. In the Address Bar type “about:config” and press Enter.
3. Right-Click and select New->Boolean.
4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter “extensions.checkUpdateSecurity” (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
5. Select “False” from the box and press OK again.

After that you should be able to install your extensions just as you normally would. Disabling this feature could pose a security risk though, so be careful with what extensions you install when this is disabled.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on June 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

The free ZoneAlarm firewall program just received a welcomed update that includes Vista compatibility. To the best of my knowledge this is the first free firewall that has been released for Vista, although Comodo did just reach the alpha stage with their’s.

For those of you who think that Vista is secure and doesn’t need a firewall, you might want to rethink your decision. It is true that Vista has a built-in firewall which can protect users to some extent, but it isn’t much different than the one included in Windows XP. It is designed to be unobtrusive to the user, which is nice because you don’t get bombarded with confirmations, but at the same time a malicious application could easily circumvent the protection it enforces.

While I prefer Comodo over other free personal firewalls, ZoneAlarm might be earning a spot on my PC simply because it is both stable, free, and now Vista-compatible. Once Comodo gets a more mature Vista-compatible release (for me that means a Beta release) out I’m sure I will be switching back over, but you’ve gotta take what you can get. And it’s not like ZoneAlarm is all that shabby…it has gotten great reviews in the past, although Comodo has beaten them in several different areas when it comes to testing.

The free Vista-compatible ZoneAlarm actually isn’t available on their site yet, but it can be downloaded directly from the ZoneAlarm server or from our download mirror. I’m sure they’ll get the site updated shortly with the most recent version, but for now you’ll need to use those links if you want to give it a shot.

Download the Free Vista-Compatible ZoneAlarm Firewall (Download Mirror)

Source: Washington Post’s Security Fix
Thanks CoryC!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com