40Tech – Page 99 – by Evan Kline

July 13, 2011

App of the Week: Move2Picasa (now called Move Your Photos) [Chrome]

Our last post on Google+ was a question on what you thought of the hype surrounding it. We’ve had a chance to play with it now, and so have many of you — and all in all, we like it. That’s not what this post is about though. This post is about taking advantage of Google opening up unlimited storage in Picasa as a result of Google Plus, and how you can use that, and a handy migration tool called Move2Picasa to backup your Facebook photos — whether you plan to use Google’s new social network or not.

UPDATE: The creator of Move2Picasa has changed the URL to the Chrome extension (the correct one is now in the post), and has changed the name of the Move2Picasa extension to Move Your Photos. Thanks to Peter Pawlak on Plus for catching that!

Note on Unlimited Storage: Google has opened up storage in Picasa, in general. Plus users have free, unlimited storage for photos that are a maximum resolution of 2048X2048 pixels (and videos that are a maximum of 15 minutes), and 1GB of free storage for larger resolution photos. Anything over the 1GB (or whatever you have paid for additional storage) will be automatically resized down to the maximum free resolution. Non-Plus users get basically the same service, but their maximum resolution for photos is only 800X800 pixels.

Move2Picasa started as a website-based tool put together by Aman Kumar Jain, a web developer from Pune, India. It was leapt upon immediately by many of the early adopters of Plus, and the servers were quickly overloaded to the point that the site wouldn’t even load. Aman worked to solve the issues, and has now migrated Move2Picasa to a Google Chrome Extension .

The extension works beautifully! I copied over 1600 photos from Facebook to Picasa in less than an hour, and I barely had to lift a finger.

Here’s how it works:

After installing the extension from the Web Store, click on it to log in to Facebook. You will be presented with a page that, after a minor load time, has all of your Facebook photos broken down into albums. The top left of the page shows a legend that identifies the coloured boxes surrounding the photos, which are yellow for “In queue,” by default. The top right of the page provides some simple tools to select or deselect all, pause and close to come back later, and to logout from the tool completely.

Each album has check boxes directly below the album name that allows you to make quick choices to Upload All or Upload None of the photos of that album. You can also click on individual photos to select or deselect them for uploading, which is handy, because you may have certain photos that you want to weed out before they are copied to Picasa. Like the yellow boxes, Upload All is selected by default.

NOTE: At this point you may notice one weirdness: some of your albums may not be showing any pictures. Don’t panic. This is either because there are no pictures in that album, or because the albums have only one photo. Hopefully, this minor bug will be fixed soon — in the meantime, you may want to head to Facebook and add those errant solo photos to a combined album (you may have to log out and log back in to Move2Picasa to see the changes), or simply download them manually from Facebook and upload them to Picasa without the tool.

Once you have chosen the photos you want to copy over to Picasa, click the Upload button on the bottom of the page, and sit back and let Move2Picasa do all the heavy lifting for you!

When I did it, I didn’t notice any extra load on my computer, and had no problem doing whatever else I needed to do while it ran in the background. Some people have reported the occasional error pop-up that breaks the operation (this happened to me, too), but Aman posted to my thread on Google+ (find me here, we can add each other to our respective circles and you can read it) that the issue had been fixed. It was barely a problem, in any case, as all I and the other users who had the problem needed to do was click the upload button again, and the handy countdown picked up right where it had left off.

Before you know it, you will have complete duplicates of your Facebook albums living in Picasa, ready to do with as you please. The only caveats I have discovered so far is that the images appear to be the Facebook-resized versions only, as opposed to the full-res photos Facebook supports now (though I would love for someone to confirm otherwise), and that Move2Picasa does not support caption importing. That last bit is too bad, but hopefully will change at some point in the future. Move2Picasa as a Chrome Extension is only a couple of days old, after all.

Why Bother?

Some of you may wonder why you should care. You may have no use for Google+, or Plus, or whatever people want to call it, and think that it is just another hyped Google product that will crash and burn. And it might; you never know. The fact that Plus has already surpassed 10 million users (though many are probably not active — but then, neither are bulk of Facebook’s hundreds of millions) indicates otherwise, however. The efforts that Google is putting into design and to integrate Plus into its overall offerings — possibly making it the connecting flagship of Google’s main products — is another strong reason to think Google+ may be around for a while yet.

Whichever way Google’s social efforts go this time, it is unlikely Picasa is going to fizzle away anytime soon. Take it from someone who lost the entire first year of photos with the lovely lady who is now my wife (due to a backup hard drive falling off of a bloody coffee table!), it never hurts to have another backup of your precious photos. The fact that this is an online backup with practically unlimited storage, an interface that allows easy viewing and sharing, and a built-in photo editor doesn’t hurt either. So why not use it?

If you still don’t want any part of Plus, Picasa does offer unlimited storage for everyone, now, but, as mentioned in the note at the beginning of the article, you will only be allowed to upload photos that are 800X800 pixel resolution, as opposed to the 2048X2048 resolution offered to Plus users. If you go that route, though, I’m not entirely sure Move2Picasa will work for you. I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but I haven’t tried it that way. Why would I? Whether I stick with Google+ or not, I’m definitely ok with having dust bunnies swarm over my account if the trade off is the unlimited storage and backup of higher resolution photos.

How about you?

July 12, 2011

How Destroying a Botnet Reduced Worldwide Spam By 90% (Have You Seen a Difference?)

killing spam.jpg

Have you noticed a decrease in spam in your email inbox recently? I haven’t, but that may be due to Gmail’s excellent spam filters. According to Symantec, though, worldwide spam has decreased 90% in the last year. How? Two of the world’s largest botnets were knocked offline, accounting for much of the reduction. Those botnets controlled millions of infected computers, sending out billions of spam email messages a day. With the botnets out of the picture, spam has fallen dramatically. Here’s how the botnets were taken offline.

July 11, 2011

How to Change Where Windows Live Writer Saves Posts on Your PC [Blogging]

windows live writer.jpg One piece of software that Microsoft got right was Windows Live Writer. If you’re a blogger, and don’t want to dig around in HTML (and arguably even if you do), Windows Live Writer is the software that we recommend for your drafting needs. One flaw with Live Writer, though, is that it doesn’t offer a setting to change where your blog posts get saved on your machine. By default, your drafts and recent posts get saved to your user folder, in the \Documents\My Weblog Posts\ directory. What if you want to save your posts elsewhere? You can do this, with a registry hack. Read more

July 10, 2011

Is Usenet Dead?

Today, 40Tech is pleased to present you with a guest post from Jared Scott.

Long before you ever created your first MySpace page or added your grandma as a friend on Facebook, two guys in North Carolina were looking for a new way to share local announcements. The year was 1979, and Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University established a link to the nearby University of North Carolina and Usenet was born.

Early the next year, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through UC Berkeley and the community quickly flourished.

Before online discussion forums, email or instant messaging, Usenet was the original social network.

In many ways, Usenet was the Wild West of the Internet. No subject was too far out there and “Newsgroups” for just about every topic imaginable were created. Spirited discussions between professionals and amateurs would play out over days, weeks or months.

Usenet is the place where Linus Torvalds’ announced Linux, Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web, and where the first “Make Money Fast” post was placed.

And most movie buffs don’t know that The Internet Movie Database, better known as IMDb, even began on Usenet in 1990.

With the emergence of the World Wide Web, many people began calling for the death of Usenet. In fact, I just read an article on TheNextWeb.com this past week referring to Usenet as Long Dead & Buried.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

While no longer commanding the spotlight it once shined under, Usenet has been quietly thriving for years. As major Universities and Internet Service Providers abandoned their Usenet servers, private enterprise stepped in to pick up the slack.

No longer constrained by the limited budgets of academic institutions and armed with capital from paying customers, competing Usenet providers have been steadily improving the product and providing previously unthinkable levels of service.

Today, it is not uncommon for a Usenet service provider to offer one or all of the following:

Uncapped Download Speeds. By harnessing the full speed of your Internet connection, downloads can take a fraction of the time they do with other technologies.
Privacy & Security. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) server connections provide an encrypted link between your computer and the server keeping prying eyes out.
Huge Data Archives. Retention of data may be the biggest improvement of all. Almost nothing gets deleted from Usenet these days.

Now well into its 30’s, Usenet has continued to develop, evolve and mature. As one of the pillars of the Internet, Usenet has a long and robust history. And as a system built on openness and mutual benefit, Usenet is well positioned to last another 30 years.

If you’ve never used Usenet or just haven’t used it in a while, take a look. You’ll be surprised at what you find.

Jared Scott is a blogger and Internet entrepreneur who spends the vast majority of his waking hours connected to the Internet. He’s currently the Manager of Public Outreach for Binverse.com. You can follow his updates on Facebook.

July 8, 2011

Get Your Google+ Invites Here [Update: INVITES NO LONGER NEEDED. GOOGLE+ IS OPEN TO ALL]

Google Plus

9/20/11 UPDATE: Invites are no longer needed, as Google has opened up Google+ to everyone, as of September 20, 2011. If you’re looking for someone to follow, you can follow Evan Kline or Bobby Travis from 40Tech.

We’re on Google+, and invites seem to be working – at least for now. If you’d like an invite, post your Gmail credentials here. You can mask it to avoid the spambots (for example, yourname[at]gmail.com), or you can use our contact form to get in touch with us (but that might take longer for us to approve). Fill out the comment form with the email address you want to use with G+ (might have to be a Gmail address), along with a request to be added, and we can add you. If there are many requests, we’ll do our best to keep up. There’s no telling how long Google will keep the invites open, so this might not last for long. If you want to thank us, please consider following us on Twitter or Facebook, or subscribing to the RSS feed.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten word that the invite links are once again not working, so I’m closing this thread for now. Invites appear to be open again, so I’m reopening this thread. Add a comment with your address if you want an invite. As long as you add your address to the email field in the form box, I can send you an invitation. Invites might not be instantaneous, though, depending on whether we’re by our computers when you request an invite.

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