In prior generations, there were generally lots of 'hard copies' of photos either in photo albums or boxes stashed away in closets, and copies of the more memorable photos would be made and sent around to relatives etc. This was a good thing, and back then, if I were to lose a copy of the photo of my great aunt Lulu (I actually don't have an aunt by that name, but you get the idea) there would have been a good chance I could either dig through my shoe box full of negatives and have a new photo printed, or perhaps could ask a family member for a copy of a photo they had and I'd be back in business. That was then, and this is now.

Like many people, I starting burning CD copies of my photos, and then as the numbers and sizes of the images grew and video clips were added to the mix, eventually DVD copies which I keep in a safety deposit box at a local bank. This has the advantage of it being a relatively cheap option and also of the photos being kept off site so if the house burns down they will still exist. Of course it has the disadvantage of me having to constantly update and replace these discs as new photos are added, which is time consuming and like most people, I'm not quite as disciplined as I should be.

Off site storage for a few photos in something like WebShots is an option which many people use, and there are many others like it, as well as the various 'social network' solutions such as Facebook, but in general the advertisements drive me crazy, so I refuse to use them for photos. To avoid all the ads, and for displaying a handful of photos that you really like, there is the option of putting a few photos up on your own web site as I have done, or as a friend of mine has done. But what do you do to replace the shoe box full of negatives you used to keep filed away, 'just in case', and how do you ensure it is not computer dependant as well as being easy to use ? Well, I'm not sure what you are using, but I am using Amazon S3.

Before retiring from Shell, I did a writeup on the various Amazon offerings, and I like what they have done - they have a platforms for applications development, commercial platforms for managing and running applications, collecting money etc., and they also have a bulk storage solution. The storage solution distributes your data across many servers, is highly fault tolerant, is accessible from any computer (Linux, Mac or Windows) anywhere that you have a decent internet connection, is hugely scalable, and is pretty cheap (you just pay for what you actually use). All of this makes it quite attractive.

By itself Amazon S3 is not even slightly user friendly, as it is targeted toward developers, but there are a few companies who now offer beta (of course !) software you can use as a user interface for the S3 service to allow you to store all your 'stuff' on the Amazon S3 servers. I actually have about 17 GB of files sitting up there 'in the cloud' and other than a couple of horrible moments which I'll get to in a minute, I recommend it.

Before starting, you need to decide what it is you actually want to be able to do - in this instance, although you can use Amazon S3 as the storage location for the data displayed on your web site, what I was looking for was a replacement for the shoe box I had for my negatives. I admit only a few of the photos are masterpieces (to me at least), but on the other hand saving everything gives me the freedom to pick and choose whenever I want. Having decided on the 'shoe box' approach, there are quite a number of commercial alpha and beta products out there - many of them are listed in the Amazon Solutions Catalog. Some of these are good - some of these are frankly awful, but all of them demonstrate the possibilities and will get better with time.

Three of the interface solutions that I tried out to allow me to just be able to drag and drop files from my hard drive into Amazon S3 buckets (which is what they call the storage locations you have access to in S3) are S3Fox, Bucket Explorer, and Jungle Disk.

S3Fox looks nice, but I (and many others) could not reliably get it to work plus there appears to be no way to easily un-install it so I'd suggest it be avoided till it has a few of the kinks worked out. It also requires Firefox and does not work with Microsoft Explorer, which I think is OK as Firefox is what I'd recommend anyone to use if asked, but it does freeze them out of a large part of the market

Bucket Explorer and Jungle Disk are roughly similar to the casual eye, but did offer me a few stressful moments. After creating a bucket with Bucket Explorer and filling it with my photos, I then tried to open it with Jungle Disk - no go. Everything appeared to be gone, other the the top most level which only had the bucket name. Likewise when I created a bucket in Jungle Disk, Bucket Explorer could not read the name of the bucket, or the names of the files it contained. I'm sure things like this will get fixed over time, but for the moment - for the casual user - I'd suggest picking one or the other and not to try to mix and match.

I will continue looking at new options as they become available, but for anyone looking for a digital shoe box for their digital images, I think the Amazon S3 product with the user interface of your choice is definitely a good option. For the moment I'm happy - and sticking with Bucket Explorer !

Nah, I'll fight this! I will get those 400 people back! And I'll get more too! Damn you Twitter, I will win!!! I shall triumph, I shall preserver, I shall conquer!!!

The only thing that really bothers me about this is the video quality from YouTube is horrible compared to Vimeo. I'll have to see of there's somekind of work-around to improve the quality.

Unfortunately, despite the attempts being carried out, the effects are highly limited within developed countries. For instance, In India we hardly ever have had any hype (the way we had for TATA* nano) for these unconventional automobile empowerments. So far, the products coming out are simply (considered) as least-commercial, academic-research oriented, or at best some luxury add-on stuff (if the maker is some foreign automobile giant). These projects have hardly ever gained any serious attention commercially. Whereas, this is the thing we badly need to adapt while we stand at the verge of loosing grip of the environment.

Automakers need to target that mass of population in developing countries who recently due to globalisation have got affluent and are in phase of buying their first car. Everyday in India and China alone, over 1200 new cars get added into city traffic. This figure is taking pollution level higher and higher everyday with rate increasing.

We cannot prevent these newly emerging car customers from adding more to traffic (that'll  look funny if not ridiculous), but we at least can prevent them from adding more to carbon content in city air. What all we do is, we hand them over a spoon to eat instead of letting them use their fingers. These people shall be more adaptive towards this technology as an implicit, in comparison to those who have spent years paying for gas before going over a leisure drive. Instead of producing these concept cars to become nth entry in a millionaires' parking lot, major disbursal made over sleek and shiny exterior may be avoided to make such vehicles more economic and affordable to major population.

We need a cheap non-gasoline car that will suit the city traffic and parking conditions that shall be readily available everywhere, even in rural. It'll be advisable to Automakers in Indian market, to invest more in non-gasoline empowered automobiles (Instead of competing TATA** coming out with their ultra-mini car which is going result into a major environmental threat for Indian suburbs).

* I have no misgiving towards the technology marvel made by engineers of TATA automobiles. But the possible side effects of uncontrolled and unthoughtful marketing need to be taken into consideration.

** Tata may let every indian own a car, but it either indicates a lack of foresight or simply is profit-being-labeled-as-technological-advancement-at-cost-of-actual-well-being situaton.

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Due to Chris using uStream, he has weekly giveaways sponsored by uStream itself. This is normally just a free webcam but not too long ago, Chris was approached by HP and asked to giveaway a HP Dragon Notebook to one of his viewers. This is not the first time Chris has been approached by big names - Chris used to be a host on "TechTV" which dramatically boosted his audience, this was along time ago but still Chris has as many as 500 people watching his live stream, which offers up great publicity when it comes to companies wanting to get their name out there, so keep an eye on his lives stream or YouTube videos as he may just be giving away another Latop. ;)

Chris is currently developing his custom wordpress theme (which can be downloaded for free) which goes away from the traditional wordpress themes by adding extra functionality by incorporating Twitter updates at the top of his page along with many other little add-ons. Chris is also (along with his wordpress theme) developing a Social Relevant Network, meaning you can find people with the same interests as you, he has a very interesting idea of what he wishes to incoporate (here)

Cheers guys!

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Think my blog could be improved?

Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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I've done a short little guest post over at Daily Tech Talk on touchscreens. As an avid specialKolin reader, you'd probably be smart to add it to your blog roll as well, since I'll be doing slightly more serious posts for them. Go have a look-see at it.

http://www.atheistnexus.org/profile/Hessenroots

Feel free to say hi, harass me...whatever. It's a social site so be social!

Bloggins' aside I will be using this page for the podcast I've been working ononce it's ready to roll. I'm planning on doing my first few entries on whom and what I encounter at the RNC.

If you're curious about it please do ask!

While browsing the Vodafone website this morning, I decided to see if there was any change in the plans given the general disappointment by the public (see here* and here*). To my surprise there has been a change in the listed plans(!), but not a change I was expecting.

So lets play spot the difference...

The listed plans today:

And the plans announced on July 8:

As you can see above, and for yourself on their iPhone plans page, Vodafone have ceased advertising their exorbitant 1GB data plan - you now have to visit a store to find that one.

So why the change? I can only conclude that Vodafone are EMBARRASSED by their own plans to the point that they are trying to hide the true cost to "heavy" data users. I say "heavy" as I believe that's is complete bollocks by the way - 1GB per month is a mere 33MB (or so) a day and trivial to burn through given the richness of the internet. Furthermore, paying $6,000 for 24GB over two years is plainly insane when my ISP can offer me 50GB in one month for $40. Go figure (coz I can't).

So yeah, SHAME ON YOU VODAFONE - firstly for pricing your data ridiculously high and secondly for trying to hide it.

(* WebCite links to the Stuff.co.nz articles here and here)

Sorry I've been so scarce for a while. I've been experiencing a summer slump of sorts, not really feeling in the mood to read much online, like my feeds in Google Reader, or keeping up with my buddies on Jaiku or FriendFeed. And before the summer slump, I was always on Jaiku and FriendFeed, essentially microblogging in a true sense. Frankly, I get way more interaction on Jaiku and FF about the RSS items, articles, and photos I post there than I do here. The almost instant feedback on Jaiku was fun and satisfying.

However, it seems now I am not in the mood to spend a whole lot of time on my social network sites, either. Part of that could be attributed to my wonderful Kindle that The Hubby got me for my birthday. I have enjoyed getting back into a reading mood with it! My relatively voracious reading of late reminds me of how much of a bookworm I used to be when I was younger, before Teh Internetz killed my attention span. **smirk** I also have been writing in my journal a lot more, partially because it's a nice, inconspicuous way to kill time at work. :P And so I've been writing in my journal, even outlining things I'd like to blog about, but then never get around to actually writing the blog posts. Hence, not a lot of writing on the blog. I've been trying to supplement the lack of writing with pictures cross-posted from my Flickr stream, but that's not really enough, is it, Dear Readers? So, I'm going to consciously make an effort to keep up with my RSS feeds again and post more, even if it's just shorter, blurb-y posts that are more appropriate for Jaiku. All I ask in return is for a bit more commenting here so I can enjoy more interaction here as well. Deal? Okay. :)

Before I wrap this up, let me address the "...and a test" part of my blog title above. I am composing this post in the Wordpress app for iPhone/iPod touch. I just downloaded it from the AppStore for free, and this is the first test.

Quick first impressions:

- UI is pretty good. When you set up your blog account, you can choose how many recent posts the app should display. I didn't try it, but I assume this means you can edit currently published articles.

- It has an embedded browser so that you can preview your work. This worked pretty well when I previewed an older article.

- It has full access to your categories. It was pretty easy to scroll through the list (I have a lot of categories) with my finger, with the kinetic scrolling typical of OS X's touch interface.

- It's annoying that you cannot rotate the screen to landscape mode. Therefore, you can't use the more comfortable landscape version of the on-screen keyboard. I don't have as big of a problem with the iPod's virtual keyboard as others do, but I still would've appreciated the "breathing room" accorded by the landscape keyboard.

I'll see how well it works when you want to include pictures, or if there are any issues if you're composing a post and you don't have wireless access (you shouldn't). But for now I'm going to wrap this up and upload the post. Later, Kids! :)

Making adjustments to settings, and turning various things on or off, is known as "tweaking", and sometimes "optimizing". And being a Geek, I love to tweak my machines until they're running like a Indy 500 car. Today's quick tip will take you all of 45 seconds to do, and it will give you noticeable results.

Tip of the Day: Turn on font smoothing, and turn off special effects.
The settings we're going to tweak are all found on the Appearance tab of your Display Properties: right-click on a blank area of your Desktop and select "Properties"
 
On the "Appearance" tab, click on the "Effects" button.

Here we're going to turn one item on, and three off, by placing or removing checkmarks.
1) Turn on the ClearType font smoothing feature by placing a check in its checkbox, and using the drop-down arrow to set it to ClearType. This will make reading easier, and reduce headache-causing eye strain.
2) Turn off the "bells-and-whistles" special effects that, while 'modern' and 'cool', really only slow things down quite unnecessarily. (aka "waste system resources")
* uncheck "transition effects"
* uncheck "shadows"
* uncheck "show windows contents while dragging"
3) Click OK, and OK again.

That's it. You're done. Easy, right? Right. Should you change your mind someday, undoing these changes is just as easy.. just place a check again. (But I very much doubt you will!)

Today's free link: Loyal fans of this series know that I am obsessed with advising folks to make backup copies of their computer files in case of a failure; and that I wrote that one option was to use a "online" storage solution (as one of your two locations)(read Online Storage for Data Backup).
There's a new service out called BackBlaze that is worth checking out. Click here to read a review of the "World's easiest online backup" (and download link).

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Επιπλέον θα είναι συμβατό με το υπάρχον DirectX 10 και DirectX 10.1 hardware αν και για να μπορούν οι χρήστες να απολαύσουν πλήρως τις δυνατότητες του, θα πρέπει να "εξοπλιστούν" με νέο συμβατό hardware. Ανάμεσα στα νέα χαρακτηριστικά συναντούμε την υποστήριξη μιας νέας τεχνολογίας προγραμματισμού των shaders (compute shader) που επιτρέπει την εκμετάλευση της ισχύος των επεξεργαστών γραφικών (GPUs) ώστε να είναι δυνατή η χρησιμοποίηση τους και ως "παράλληλοι" επεξεργαστές γενικής χρήσης, εκτός από επιταχυντές τρισδιάστατων γραφικών (3D graphics).

Βελτιωμένες σημαντικά θα παρουσιάζονται οι δυνατότητες multi-threading ώστε τα παιχνίδια να εκμεταλεύονται αποδοτικότερα τους multi-core υπολογιστές ενώ παρέχεται υποστήριξη στη τεχνική tesseletion που επιτρέπει την ρεαλιστικότερη, πειστικότερη αναπάραστατη των τρισδιάστατων μοντέλων, όταν οι χρήστες τα βλέπουν από πολύ κοντά.

Πολλές λεπτομέρειες σχετικά μπορείτε να βρείτε εδώ ωστόσο δείτε και παρακάτω video της Nvidia, που αποκαλύπτει τις διαφορές ανάμεσα στα DirectX 10 και DirectX 11.

Being sick and tired of sprint, I figured anything was better then them and Jess had been bugging me to get her more Mac stuff for awhile. So when I went to go see her show instead of Roses I brought her promises of an iPhone.

I've had mine for a few days now and I'm still geeky about it. I can't tell you how many messages went over AIM going "I"M AIMING YOU FROM MY CAR HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" The first time i touched "OH NOES FINGERPRINTS!" and promptly wiped it everytime I touched it. But thanks to having a trifty wife I got a cover for the screen so it doesn't get dirty as easily. I love everything about the phone so far. There are two downsides, I think I have to do something server side to my email so the phone can connect to it. And I you can't make your own ring tones with your own mp3's. You gotta use songs that you've purchased with iTunes. Even then not every song can be used. It was infurating to say the least. All I want is the Final Fantasy FanFare as a ring tone. Is it really too much to ask?

1. That Was Just Your Life
2. The End Of The Line
3. Broken, Beat & Scarred
4. The Day That Never Comes
5. All Nightmare Long
6. Cyanide
7. The Unforgiven III
8. The Judas Kiss
9. Suicide & Redemption
10. My Apocalypse

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Editorial:

"The Unforgiven III" is in the record. What happened? No "Fade To Black II" or sequel to any other songs? "The Unforgiven II" was a nice follow up to the original. We'll have to wait to hear Act 3 of the saga.

I thought I was reading "This Was My Life" as the first track of the record. It is actually "This Was Just Your Life."

Anyway, I am looking forward to listening the record.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/138-Age-of-Conan

and the RADest show on the web is back with a new episode.
The Totally Radshow from E3

http://revision3.com/trs/guess/?autoplay=true&hp

Descargar: el podcast de pablot - Episodio 19 - Privacidad en el email

Links adicionales: Una sensación espantosa de vejación, GnuPG.

and.. just discovered orli's list! love it orli - thanks for including me :) nice to see such a broad spectrum of bloggers represented.

Reference: http://drupal.org/node/226968

Anyhows, before diving into that, here's a quick update on the tech happenings....

1) Wordpress iPhone app, beautiful addition if u ask me.

2) Facebook's redesign, not much of a diff, i dun care too much for the privacy issue...

3) Google buying Digg, that would change a lot of things... I wonder if they would leave the service be or maximize ad revenue from it by manipulating the digg results...

Great, moving on, there're some awesome postings i came across today which i would like to share

1) Walter shares telling the bad news and how companies should deal with their reputation management in times of a crisis. I blogged about something similar but with regards to social media bring an option to consider when a company faces a crisis in Crisis management: Social media the way to go?.

2) Seth Godin once again provides valuable insights on the Long Tail theory in The long tail and the dip and warns that it is not a consolation prize but rather another market to master which requires a different set of marketing skills and more time and money to move to the lower end of the tail. I agree and it provides me a fresher perspective from my previous blog on the theory Mass heads or long tail.

3) Lastly, if you're driven to find an ROI on social media and how we NEED to find a way to justify the use of this medium, this post on measuring social media effectiveness is wonderfully insightful.

I particularly like this part on what the "I" in ROI should really stand for when measuring the effectiveness of social media.

Is Return on Investment really the right term, then? Perhaps we need to consider a new “I” when it comes to social media. How about these:

• Return on Initiative. What are we reaping from the effort when we look at it holistically?
• Return on Interaction. Are you having better conversations with your customers and do they feel more connected to you?
• Return on Involvement. Does this change how involved your customers want to be with your business?

So there you have it, 3 great tech happenings and 3 things we should look out for in traditional communications which is still effective. I hope you found this insightful and would love to hear what u might have to share which might be interesting in a marketing or PR perspective.