Dec 18
How-To Guides David
flickr, geotag, google, maps, photos, search
Earth Album
If you are a regular Flickr user, you’ll know you can Geo-Tag
your photos. A site called Earth Album makes finding photos by location so much easier by mashing up Flickr’s location data with Google Maps. Simply search for a location, drag and zoom with your cursor, then click on any point in the map to see a selection of photos taken on or near that point!
http://www.earthalbum.com/
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Nov 11
How-To Guides David
alias, backup, backups, cloud, computing, curl, download, e-mail, email, flickr, forwarding, gmail, google, hotmail, scripts, upload, webmail, wget, yahoo
When cloud computing goes bad
Cloud computing is great isn’t it? We can have all our data stored somewhere on the interwebs, accessible to us from any computer or mobile phone. I’m picturing it now, a white fuzzy-bordered soft-focus video with shampoo-advert beautiful people gather around a computer smiling and laughing at work and at home. Yes, I’m being sarcastic, but cloud computing definitely has its advantages, especially given that OSX and Linux are nibbling away at Window’s desktop market share. We’re in more need than ever for cross-platform and platform agnostic software solutions.
So, what’s the catch? Well, if you exercise due diligence on which services to use, then there are not really any significant catches. But there lies the rub, I know most people won’t bother with due diligence, they’ll just sign up to that free email/calendar/documents service and give little thought to what happens when that services breaks down or (wrongly) decides you’re doing naughty things and locks you out, or even worse, disappears from the internet forever. Think about that for a moment, it could be a disaster for you.
The most important thing to ensure with any cloud computing service (e.g. email, calendar, documents, etc.) is to make sure you can get a copy of your own data. If your data only exists in the cloud, then you don’t have your data. If your cloud service ever has a catastrophic failure, goes out of business or locks you out of your account, then you loose access to all of your data. If you have a backup copy, then you’re already in a position to set up an account elsewhere and upload your data. Of course, your cloud service should do their own backups, but downloading your own copy is like having an off-site backup too.
If you use any of the Google services then you should take a look at dataliberation.org. It is a site ran by Google employees, and collects all the information you need on how to extract your data from Google’s cloud services like Gmail, Calendar and Documents, etc. If you use some other cloud service, then it’s up to you to investigate how to get a copy of your data from their servers. If you can’t, then stop using them and find someone else. Being able to manually download backups is okay, but what you really want is to automate backup downloads. This is where command line applications like wget and cURL can come in handy for running scheduled scripts. Email is no different. I recently blogged about how to set up an automated email backup. Although a reliable manual method is to set up Mozilla Thunderbird to keep offline copies of all your IMAP folders. What’s that? You don’t use IMAP? Really, get with the times, please!
Compute in the cloud with peace of mind
Talking of email, there is one extra thing you can do to protect yourself from loosing your email/webmail account. In the even that you loose access to your chosen webmail service, nobody can email you, and if you have to set up a new account you’ll have get in touch with everyone you know to share your new email address. This is an inconvenience for everyone. Therefore, the best way to protect yourself against this is to: first, never let anyone know the email address of your webmail service; and second, get yourself an email alias to redirect to your real email address. The easiest way to get an email alias is to register a domain name an set up email forwarding there. Some organisations offer email aliases as a curtosy to their members (e.g. the Institute of Physics offers user@iop.org aliases). Failing everything else, you could try out myhandle.com. Then, if your regular webmail service ever closes down, you can set up a new account and redirect your public email address to the new webmail account.
Let’s go over this again …
Cloud computing is great, so if you want to enjoy the advantages while avoiding the pitfalls, then just make sure you do the following:
- Make sure you know how to download regular backups of your data.
- Obtain an email alias to use as your public email address.
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Oct 19
Mobile News David
atom, facebook, flickr, furtive, google, media, mobile, nokia, phones, picassa, s60, series 60, sharing, social, social media, Twitter, youtube
Nokia Share Online with Furtiv's added social media gateways for Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube
Furtiv, a new internet start up in Helsinki, is creating a service to be a social media gateway, making it easier to send content from your phone to all of the various social media websites.
Their first beta project is an addition to Nokia’s Share Online application. Most new Nokia handsets come with the Share Online application allowing you to upload photos to Flickr, Ovi and Vox. Furtiv uses the API from this application to create gateways to more websites, like Facebook, Picassa, Twitter (via Twitpic.com and Vid.ly for video) and Youtube.
They are using the open Atom standard to achieve this, and they implement it in such a way that you don’t even need to have an account with them. Furtiv’s presence is completely transparent, once you get everything set up by visiting http://furtiv.mobi on your Nokia browser. Further instructions on getting set up can be found here.
I’ve tested this service out and it works perfectly. To qualify this, I tried it along with other readers from AllAboutSymbian.com who read about it there. Possibly coincidence, or possibly with us all flooding the service, but there were some early teething troubles. This is to be expected with any new system, although the Furtiv team had it fixed again surprisingly quickly, so kudos for that.
The benefits of this service are clear to see. Being able to plug-in to existing services on your handset saves having to install any extra phone applications. It also saves you having to figure out how to use e-mail portals and mobile site uploads. Every site you could want to upload to is there in your phone’s own services. This has the potential to remove more inertia in the way of the proliferation of social media, especially for non-technically inclined users, which can only be a good thing. Not withstanding Facebook becoming littered with as much mindless content as can be found on Youtube!
You can find Furtiv on Twitter, @furtiv, and read their blog and FAQ. Thanks to @rafeblandford from AllAboutSymbian for posting a heads up article about this.
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Jul 27
How-To Guides David
camera, digital, e-mail, flickr, micro sd, photography, sd, sharing, upload
An Eye-fi card
If you’re really into photography and sharing your work on the web, then you’ve probably heard of the Eye-Fi SD card, which not only stores your photos but transmits them to the web via Wi-Fi, all from within the SD card itself. It really is a very smart solution.
Micro SD card with a Micro SD to SD adapter
Although, if you don’t want spend the money, or you know you’ll be beyond the range of a WiFi hotspot, I have a simple alternative for you. You’ll need a mobile phone with a Micro SD card slot and a reasonable data plan.
Rather than using the standard SD type card in your camera, buy yourself a 2GB Micro SD card, along with a Micro SD to SD adapter. Using this adapter, loaded with a Micro SD card, makes no difference to your camera. When you’re ready to post your photos, simply take the adapter out of the camera, and the Micro SD card from the adapter and slot it into your phone, then connect to the internet via your 3G connection. Once you’ve done all that, simply locate the files from your camera in your e-mail or browser, and start uploading!
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