BlogTouch (Blogspot/Blogger app)

It's 2017, there's MORE social media available on mobile than on web browsers, but blogspot has been abandoned by google or something. I'm testing BlogTouch, a 3rd-party app that lets you post to blogspot blogs. It shouldn't be so hard!

• Needs better previews 

Picasa Merging With Google Photos

Google is killing the Picasa desktop program, and merging Picasa Web Albums with its Google Photos. It tried to merge it with Google+, which was.. not well received.., and now it's trying, harder, with Google Photos. It's a necessary evil. It'd be much worse to have 2 photo services.

Merging services is fine. What's not is dropping features.
Copy Image URL
Wish we could get a picture URL
One of my biggest uses for PWA was for photo hosting. Most sites/forums will let you display photos, but won't actually host them for you, because it's expensive. PWA used to officially support this, with direct links to different sizes of photos in the panel. Photos has hidden this feature, most probably because it's expensive and uses more bandwidth. I wonder what the TOS has to say about bandwidth? Because all these cloud plans from all the companies (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud etc.) only specify storage space, but in web hosting, I'd say bandwidth is a more important parameter.

Anyway, Google is hiding this feature and may drop it at any moment. Just like Apple doesn't like you to use Photo Stream as photo storage. FOR NOW, right-click and "copy image URL" works. Here's a good page with more details, and how to dynamically resize the image:
https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ/google-photos-1/how-to/how-to-get-a-direct-link-to-an-image

What about on mobile though? I've found a longwinded way:

• In the Google Photos app on iPhone, make a shared album and add all the photos you want to share into it (photos can be in more than 1 album)
• Open that album's address in Chrome (there's a command to copy album link or something)
• In Chrome, open the photo you want to get the address of. You should be seeing only this photo, not the album.
• Request desktop site. The site doesn't seem to change.
• Press and hold on the photo. Now you'll see the photo's address, and "Open Image". This is your final photo's address.
• IMPORTANT: for privacy reasons, it seems you can't trace back the shared album with the individual image URLs. EXIF and geotag data seems to be removed.

Another step backwards is, there is no way to manually sort photos OR albums in Photos. No wait, it's worse. THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY to sort photos and albums. Photos seems to be sorted by date taken, and albums by newest photo. This one-size-fits-all mentality is really stupid.

Google Invents New 802.11 Protocol

Google has repeatedly listed the Nexus 5 has having "802.11nc", which is a protocol nobody else has. Wow. Many wireless. Such invent. Wow.

Email Filters

Since I use a smartphone, I get immediate notifications for emails, like SMS. I've decided I don't want to be notified when Groupon has a new deal, or Amazon has special offers, and only want to be notified of emails personally directed to me. For all other emails, I'll check them at my convenience.

So, I've decided to start using filters. Here's my hierarchy, in increasing priority:
TRASH

1. Emails from senders I don't want - straight to trash. This is usually for sketchy companies that don't have proper unsubscribe functions. Use sparingly - try to use only for addresses, not whole domains. Same as blocked addresses in Yahoo email.
2. Emails from senders I want to read, but don't want to be notified of - Bulk Mail. Skip Inbox. Check often in case important emails get directed here (a receipt instead of an advertisement). Tip - some companies start such emails with ADV or such emails contain "unsubscribe" in their content. You can use these to filter.
3. All other emails - to Inbox.

INBOX

Update 26 Oct 13
Ok, you know how things seem to happen after you mention them? You might say it's confirmation bias, but I know this: after I started using filters, I got at least 2 emails from new senders - an "inaugural" newsletter, and an Etsy newsletter. I haven't bought anything from Etsy in 2 years, but they decide to start sending me a newsletter NOW.

Update 28 Oct 13
Ok, seriously? I just got an email from a restaurant I've only been to once, and that was more than 2 years ago.

Update 19 Dec 13
I decided to start using a "disposable" email address, and noticed something funny - Gmail doesn't have such a feature. It's odd because it's quite a well-known feature, so they must be intentionally leaving it out. I suspect Google is eschewing anonymity and disposable address in favour of good filtering and spam detection, which is why their filters are so much better than Yahoo's. Another sign of this is they're slowly forcing people to use their real names in different places, such as on YouTube comments.
Well, Yahoo has disposable addresses, but I chose an impractically long base name in the past, and it seems you can't change it (despite what searches say), so sadly I can't use it. But Yahoo DOES allow a second email address, which is meant to be more permanent, but I can still change twice a year, so it's practically the same for me. Speaking of Yahoo's filters, they're terrible:

• For blocked addresses, you could block entire domains in the past, now you can't
• At least you can filter entire domains to Trash, but sometimes my filters don't work
• You're supposed to be able to sort filters according to the order you want them applied, but they keep jumping back to the order they were created

Google Storage

Google has finally combined all their storage (Drive, Gmail, PWA or Google+ Photos). It was such a mess previously. They also seem to have given me something called an "Early adopter bonus", which effectively doubles my storage space. I wonder what the conditions to receive this are?

I thought with the 90GB bonus I didn't need a plan. Nope, the 90GB bonus is gone if you cancel the plan.

Google Takeaway/Takeout

Some observations when using Takeout:

• There doesn't seem to be consistent naming. The page title is "Takeaway", but the address is "Takeout".
• There seems to be a limit of around 20 albums a day. This is reset around the same time every day, around 12 midnight Mountain View time or 3 pm UTC+8.

Previous posts:
How To Download Albums From Picasa Web Albums Without Installing Picasa 9 March 2013
Picasa Web Albums And Backup 6 July 2012

Picasa Web Albums and Google Drive

A few observations on PWA and Drive:

1. PWA: If you hide locations from viewers of an album and allow downloads, downloaded files seem to be stripped of location data - good! This wasn't the case in 2010. Hopefully it stays this way.
2. Drive: There is no way to allow non-Drive users to download entire folders, which seems like a very basic omission. http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/drive/-OCAzt9B0v8/discussion
3. Drive: Right now there seems to be a problem preventing people from even sharing folders with non-Drive users (error 500) http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/drive/G55YW9qnn2A/discussion
4. Google Groups are a mess. The URL is productforums.google.com, what's the difference between Groups and Google+, I can't find a way to bookmark/save/favourite topics (hence my posting them here), what's the difference between starred and favourites?

Google image search

?

YouTube's copyright protection system

Naturally, I first wanted to host my video on YouTube. However, after I uploaded it, YouTube said my video contained copyrighted material from WMG and muted the audio. Obviously it automatically matches audio in uploaded content with source songs. I'm trying to find out what triggers the system here.

• Uploaded same video in 176x144 3GP format - NOT ALLOWED. Looks like they check all qualities, and are able to match even if audio quality is not very good.
• Uploaded first part of my video (Love Story) - OK.
• Second part (Just The Way You Are) - NOT ALLOWED. This is the source of the problem.
• 32 second clip was not allowed, while 31.16 second (.16 is a decimal point, not number of frames) was allowed. Looks like the limit is around 32 seconds. I added 20 seconds of silence to a 31s clip and it was still allowed, showing that it needs the time to identify the song, and it's not just checking songs over a certain length (since a 50 second clip with 30 seconds of music wasn't recognised).

Now to the interesting part: changing speed

• Speeding it up to 101.7% causes the video to be allowed, while 101.5% isn't enough.
• Similarly, slowing it down to 98% makes it ok, but 98.5% isn't enough.
• These values clearly depend on the length of the video as well, since when I uploaded the whole video at 102%, it wasn't ok, but 105% is. Interestingly, at 105% it says "matched third party content", but didn't mute the audio.

Coloured bullet points

In my last post (below), I thought having the whole text green or red was overkill, so I found a way to change only the bullet's colour.

Normally, to change the whole line's colour, you'd use:
<ul>
<li style="color: lime;">text here</li>
</ul>

This changes the colour of the bullet as well. To make the font white, simply change it back!
<ul>
<li style="color: lime;"><span style="color: white;">white text, green bullet</span></li>
</ul>

Change display avatar for People in Picasa Web Albums

Face detection is now standard among photo management software. Facebook, iPhoto and Picasa Web Albums have it. I believe if you're going to spend hours organising and tagging your photos, they should be permanent, that means you should be able to share/export them, and they shouldn't be in a proprietary format (bye, iPhoto). Otherwise, the software may become outdated or you won't be able to share photos with other people, which defeats the purpose.

To that end, I am using Picasa Web Albums to tag my photos. The system seems very good - for each person, you have a name, nickname and email address. You can share all a person's photos with them at once. They say the contacts sync with Gmail, but I think that's only for the email address, you can't sync the photo yet.

One problem I've discovered is sometimes you're stick with a goofy looking photo as the avatar for a certain person. I think the avatar used is the first photo tagged. I couldn't find a way to change the avatar online, but I discovered another method.

Here, I'm not happy with my avatar. I'd rather use the last picture.

Click on the picture you want, delete the person, and add a new one.

In the People tab, select both people and click on merge (at the top)

 Save the new contact's information

 Edit the resulting contact to add the information

Done!

Evolution of the search engine

Some observations I've made on how search engines have improved:

1. The search engine
2. Ability to correct spelling mistakes, different spellings or sounds-like e.g. colour and color. Very useful for searching for something you don't know how to spell!
3. Autocomplete is invented. People have fun seeing what mistakes machines can make, or what weird things people search for. I use it to see how widespread the things I search for are.
4. The latest innovation is searching as you type, but I don't find it very useful for now.

Picasa Web Albums wish list

Living post

• Option to order all your photos on DVD/flash memory for a fee. This would be great if you wanted to download all your photos or keep a backup.
• Fix the search (search by filename). Google is a search company!

Some Blogger comments

Blogger doesn't work as well with Firefox. In this field where I'm typing this, the cursor is often at the wrong place. Command+left and right, which I use as Home and End in OS X, don't work.

I've found some features in Blogger like reactions and pages. Pages seems quite useful, but I can't think of any pages to write right now. I've enabled reactions but I can't see the options. I wonder what's wrong?
Ah, I needed to reset my widgets by http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/08/bloggers-new-reactions-feature-how-to.html. It's a good thing I'm using stock widgets. It seems the reactions is well implemented - you can have multiple reactions, and you can even "un-reaction".

It seems Tumblr is a popular microblog site now. I wonder if it's more suitable for me? I think Blogger is more suited to the occasional large post.

Sent messages in Gmail

In most email programs, when you send a message to yourself, you end up with 2 copies: the sent copy in your "sent messages" and one in your "inbox". If you're sending that email to backup something, you can delete 1 copy to save space or get organised.
I just found out that in Gmail, there is only 1 copy. It appears in both "sent messages" and "inbox", but they are links to the same message. If you delete either one, the other will disappear as well. The good thing is you don't need to delete a copy if you send messages to yourself.

Picasa deletes EXIF data

http://www.google.as/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=0d1f649e5114b394&hl=en

Using 3.6.7 for OS X, I found that my photos were missing some EXIF data after adding captions using Picasa. This is very disturbing.

The uploaded photos have data like:

When it should be:

From what I can see, the data missing are: ISO, focus distance and lens model. Should I re-upload all my photos, in case I need the EXIF data later? Is the data still retrievable from the file? Bad Picasa.

Mouseover changing pictures

2 things about changing pictures on mouseover:

1. Need different names for different images on the same page. A naming scheme like date+serial number works.
2. Names can't start with numbers, it seems.

This page's width and Picasa's pictures

The picture above is exactly 770 pixels, and it just fits into this page (the grey border just shows). I suspect the column width is 780 pixels, and the border is 5 pixels wide. Just in case anyone is asking.

Another thing, it seems Picasa Web Albums will resize your pictures on demand. For example, the URL of the picture above is https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyWTJS_OUQ4_uq3ZmUq0eVM0zkpwMPFTE4PYhF-gO1OLhyFo84OF6KYQ1sFnPtkHt34GdFvUZqP-sFvIxAim-ObMFEv_QEGKFleC54oakZ6puzFy4_P8cckkBDYWHZtnBHZfPcLIPuGA8/s800/DSC_0300.JPG However, you can change the "s800" to anything from "s1" to "s1600" and it will give you a resized picture. I don't think it stores 1600 versions of the picture, I think it's resizing it based on the URL you request.

Lastly, there is another picture setting when posting here. I can control the size pictures are displayed at. For example, the picture below is 200 pixels wide, using the trick above, but I'm making it display at 770 pixels.

For best image quality, the actual image resolution should be higher than displayed.

Using Blogger to take notes

Last semester, I took notes in class by making comments in pdf files. I'm considering using Blogger (this site) to take notes next semester for these reasons:

• Automatic saving and backup
• Easy searching by date or tag
• Automatic archiving - I don't need to scan notes or upload them

But I'm being wary of these:

• Requires Internet access
• Cannot draw diagrams easily (applies to all notes on computers)
• Must ensure blog is private

Picasa Web is down

8:32 pm
Does this happen often? It seems to be my account only. After I reset my browser, I can see the log in page and search just fine, but can't open pictures from my albums.
I had a window open on the website and opened the web uploader program. I think it went down once the program started to connect and search for existing albums.

8:44 pm
Hey, it's back up!