Um… What?
* Facebook asks users to send nudes to prevent revenge porn
“Facebook is asking users to submit their nudes in a preemptive strike to combat revenge porn. ” Read more..
I wonder how many morons will actually do this.
Yeah. I’m done with tech.
Copyright 2007-2017 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.
Then and Now Images
Folks, just taking a quick moment to share a series of “then and now” (interactive) images of D-Day, posted by the The Guardian. Move your mouse over the image from right to left to see the image change from 6/6/44 to today (or visa versa). Must see! Click here.
Sample:
Click on image
Today’s quote: “I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” ~ Marilyn Monroe
Copyright 2007-2014 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.
And please, never forget – one person can make a difference.
Find a way to make someone’s day today.
(Best advice I ever heard? Don’t sweat the small stuff.)
Remove “Metadata” From Your Files Before Sharing Them
Whenever you create, open, or save a file or document, that file will store information — known as metadata — that you had no intention of including or disclosing to others. Taking a conscientious “extra step” can prevent embarrassment, and also make you a bit more secure. Here’s the “how to”.
Hidden Attributes and Tags Might Reveal More Than You Would Like
You may not be aware that the documents you generate, and the photos you edit on your computer are “stamped” (if you will) with little bits and pieces of information that the computer thinks are useful — called “metadata“. This metadata is not out in plain site for you to notice, but it’s there. Fortunately, it is not difficult to remove.
[note: “Metadata is not necessarily “bad”. Metadata is essentially there to help the computers do their jobs better and faster, and can be helpful to us as well.]
Metadata for a photograph would typically include the date and time at which it was taken and details of the camera settings, such as focal length, aperture, exposure. It would also contain any titles or keyword “tags” we’ve added to help us organize our albums. (If your camera/smartphone has “geotagging”, your location is pinpointed.)
Metadata for a document would typically include the date and time at which it was created, title, author, subject, number of pages, and the language of the text.
But the metadata will also contain the number of revisions, how long you spent working on it, (possibly) hidden markups/edits, who it is “shared” with, who else it’s been sent to, the Save path (which usually reveals your User Name), computer name, and more.
This can open you up to embarrassment (What? They took 4 hours and 16 revisions to write this ??? And why did they show it Joe?) and/or provide info a hacker might use to gain control of your PC.
Tip of the day: Before you e-mail off your file as an attachment, or turn it in to the boss, it might be a good idea to strip it of the metadata. To do this:
1) right-click of the file and select “Properties” from the context menu. In my example, I’ll use a Word document named BarbaraInvoice.doc.
2) Click on the “Details” tab, and look to the bottom area. Click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
3) A new window will open. Here you will see two choices represented by radio buttons. ‘Remove it all’ is the default, but you can be selective by clicking the second button, and using the window scroll, and remove just certain tags.
4) Click “OK”, and the metadata is gone.
Today’s yippee yahoo: 450,000 user passwords leaked in Yahoo breach
“A hacker group claims responsibility for attack on a Yahoo service, exposing more than 450,000 plain text login credentials.” Read more..
If anyone should know better than that, it should be IT Pros, working at a place like Yahoo..? Ya’ think?
One more reason not to Yahoo!
Today’s free link: Amazon’s Game Downloads area lets you try every title – including new releases – before you buy. There are games for all ages and interests.
Today’s free download: Photographers: I believe this small free utility – BatchPurifier Lite– will allow you direct control over exactly which EXIF (metadata) info you want to remove from your image files. (I have not used this myself, but, there you go.)
Germane to nothing at all: in my world/our local slang, a “yahoo” is a happy-go-lucky idjit (aka a “fool”.)
Today’s quote: “All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Copyright 2007-2012 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.
A Gift For You
Folks,
To help celebrate this special weekend, I have a nice surprise.
PearlMountain Image Converter is a photo converter as well as batch image converter, which helps you convert images to other formats, resize, rotate, crop, add watermark, apply effects and add border to thousands of images at a time.
Some of the features include:
• Convert thousands of files at once in batch mode.
• Supports the most popular image formats: BMP, JPEG, TIFF, RAW, PNG, GIF, TGA, and PSD, and almost all image formats.
• Save operations that you usually use as profiles and bring convenience to you in the future.
• Convert between many different image file formats.
• Resize image for any different use, such as for web, e-mail, photo printing, Facebook, MySpace, mobile phone, ipod/ipad/iphone, etc., with optimum quality.
• Add image and text watermark for Image Copyright Protection
• Adjust image brightness, contrast and saturation in batch to make your images look more special.
• Apply borders to your images.
• Crop photos, removing unwanted areas.
Product info page: http://www.batchimageconverter.com/image-converter/
Due to time constraints, I only had time to play with test this utility a little bit. So I can only tell you it worked, and that I enjoyed the animated GIFF feature (aka “no product review here.”) And for me, there was zero “learning curve”, as I have used this type of graphics program before. But even if you have not, learning how to make optimum use of this photo/image tool should not take long.. maybe, mere minutes. (The link above has a illustrated How To. Take a peek, and see for yourself.)
PearlMountain has generously donated ten licenses to me, and I have had the pleasure to give them away – to the first ten people to leave who left a comment with a valid (not Facebook) email (so I can send you the license keycode). This software retails for $29.90.
Happy Mother’s Day! (And thank you, PearlMountain!)
*** Update: Sorry Folks, but that’s all the licenses I have to give away — for now. ***
You can download a full-featured “trial” version, here, if you’d like. It will put a watermark on any output files, but otherwise performs just like the paid version.
Copyright 2007-2012 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.
How To Keep Your Images In A Specific Order
Reader Asks A Good Question..
Q: “I have a folder with 200 pictures which I have arranged in a very specific order. I want to burn them to a CD, but when I try to burn them in Roxio they burn to a cd but not in the order that they are in the folder. Any help is appreciated. ”
A: The trick for resolving this puzzle is to understand that computers will do their own arranging (and assigning), using a pre-configured, rigid, logic — generally alphabetical order. So even though you have carefully nudged the icons representing (for human viewing) your photos (actually JPEG files) around into an arranged order of your liking, the machine will still think of the files in terms of IMG0001.JPG, followed by the “greater than” IMG0002.JPG (2 is “greater than” 1) which will be followed by the “greater than” IMG0003.JPG.
Etc.
So the answer is to rename the files , and do so in an order that matches your order.
If you had just a few files, you could manually rename the first image by giving it a name and adding a one. Repeating for the second image, but adding a 2. And, repeating for the third image, but adding a 3. As I did for this collection of screenshots that were going to be a slideshow (and needed a certain ‘order’)
But since you have so many, you need an easier way – what is called a “batch rename” by us Über Geeks.
1) Arrange the photos into the order you like.
2) Click on one of the images to turn it blue (aka “select it”)
3) Hold down the Ctrl key and press the “A” key (or Edit > Select All). This will turn all the images blue (all are now ‘selected’).
4) Right-click on the first image, and choose Rename from the context menu (the name of small side window that pops open).
Your cursor will now be blinking inside the file name ‘box’.
5) Type in a ‘name’ — preferably something related to your project, or the subject matter.
(This one might be “fishtrip”, for example.)
IMPORTANT Do NOT add a number — this is done automatically during the rename process
Press Enter.
Note: If for some reason you are unhappy with the result.. say you made a mistake, you can Undo the rename you just did by pressing Ctrl+Z (or going to the Edit menu and choosing the top choice – “Undo rename”. (I love Ctrl + Z!)
Now that you have put your ordering in terms a computer cannot argue with, your CD burning software, or “import”-ing into PowerPoint, or whatnot, will respect and follow your arrangement.
Because “fishtrip (4).jpg” is ‘greater than’ (aka “alphabetical”) “fishtrip (3).jpg” … right? Right.
Remember folks, machines are kinda dumb: they can only “think” in binary (a 1 or a 0)(aka “true or false”, “on or off”). They cannot “see” your photo – they see C:\User Name\Pictures\IMAG0001.JPG.
Sorta related: Make Your Photos and Videos Automatically Fly From Your Camera to Your Computer
“I spend much of my obsession for technology, by looking for the latest technology in computers and computer accessories on Amazon .. Today, I came across a technology that I did not know about that is just downright impressive.” Read more..
Today’s quote: “A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.” ~ Bob Edwards
(There’s something about this quote.. something.. “off”, I think)
Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
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How To Send 100 Photos In An Email
If you have ever tried to ‘attach’ a bunch of pictures to an email, you have probably bumped into email’s limitations. Most Email will only allow you to send 10 MB’s of attachments, and ‘paperclip’ on 4 attachments at a time.
Those of you who have a Hotmail account can use the free (included) “SkyDrive” feature can get around these limits and send your PowerPoint slideshows and/or multiple images with a few clicks. (Yeah, I know. Bashing Microsoft and Hotmail just got a bit harder to do..)
Sharing pictures with friends and family is now a whole lot easier.
To share multiple photos:
- Click New to create a new email message.
- Type an email address and subject.
- Click Photos, and then click New album.
- Select the photos that you want to create an album with, and then click Open. Hotmail will upload and save the photos to SkyDrive.
- Type a message, and then click Send.
Note: You need to install Microsoft Silverlight to use this feature. This feature is not yet available in all countries or regions.
A short video tutorial is here.
Don’t have a “Windows Live ID” or Hotmail account? You can sign up (free) for one here
Related: Those of you who do not want to do Hotmail/Silverlight may be interested in my How to send big files (updated)
Today’s quote: “It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.” ~ Max Eastman
Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
Note: You are responsible for using this blog and its content. I am in no way liable for any losses caused by user error, viruses and/or other malware, hardware or software failure, or any other conceivable reason.
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