I have been playing around with the Linux version of Picasa for the last week or so, as the need to organize my pictures in some way became more urgent.

Installation

The Linux version of Picasa is available for download on this page. There are several options — rpm, deb and bin packages, each with instructions. I had no trouble downloading and installing the deb package on my Ubuntu 6.06 setup.

Unfortunately, Google does not include instructions for using the package manager on these pages; they are to be found in the FAQ instead and if I were to do this over, this is how I would install:

Add the Google Picasa for Linux repository:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free

and now apt-get can be used:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install picasa


The Good

When Picasa starts up, it immediately begins to scan the hard disk drive for pictures. It will scan everything for anything remotely image-worthy. This can lead to some interesting results as it will pick up images used by various installed applications.

Under the Tools->Folder Manager menu, I found a dialogue to mark which directories to look at or ignore. I can tell it to scan particular directories once or always; or to ignore them altogether. I chose to have it continually scan only my home directory and this got rid of many of the spurious images.

The really cool part was finding photos I had completely forgotten about and which were lost in the general directory disorganization resulting from having migrated from about three or four hdd’s and two or three computers in the last seven years.

One thing I like quite a bit about Picasa is that it leaves the original images alone (except for red eye fixes) unless I tell it otherwise. (Some people will file this under “The Ugly;” it’s going to be a matter of personal opinion.) I have discovered, in going over something like seven years of pictures that having the original “raw” (not to be confused with RAW format) upload makes all the difference in recovering the original quality of the pictures.

Pictures downloaded from digital cameras are in JPG, which is a lossy compressed format. The practical consequence of this is that each edit to a JPG file (depending on the software used, sometimes even something as simple as rotation) usually results in loss of quality in the saved version. So I want to always keep the original files around as the baseline for going back to especially if I mess up a series of edits.

I organize my pictures by year, with each event or topic getting its own sub directory within that year. Last year, I started including a “raw” directory which is supposed to be where I upload all the camera images and then copy them over to the organized sub directories. So for example, the year 2005 might contain the following directories: raw, january family dinner, easter, home improvements, fourth of july, rome trip, thanksgiving, and christmas. The “raw” has all photos taken, ever, in 2005; the remainder are the best pictures for that event, sorted out, rotated, color corrected, with blurry or bad pictures omitted. Now I admit I’ve been a bit piecemeal about that approach, but after working with Picasa for a while and being able to see all of my photos over the last seven years at a go, I’m an enthusiastic convert now.

Picasa works perfectly with this approach. Let’s say my next set of pictures is from my brother in law’s birthday party next weekend. I’ll upload all the pictures into my “raw” directory, and then go over them with Picasa — correcting, rotating, etc. Then I will export the chosen pictures into “A’s B-day” directory within the 2006 folder. Voila!

Picasa arranges the photos it finds by date, within the name of the folder it’s found them in. This has some drawbacks, as it creates a flat list. Therefore several of my directories which each had “web” subdirectories (holding smaller versions for various websites) showed up as multiple “web” folders in Picasa, which is a bit confusing. But either I can rename the directories themselves, or tell Picasa to use a different name for the folder. Still it can be a bit confusing to see multiple instances of the same filename occurring. This was especially bad with one set of trip pictures I had — the main directory was named “Red River” and then under that it had a directory for each day we were there, and then under each day-directory, there were three folders, one for each photographer with a camera, since we pooled all our pictures together. So in the end, I had multiple folders each with the photographer’s name. Each “leaf” directory within a particular year should have as unique a name as possible, or else the folders can be renamed in Picasa.

Picasa supports tagging of each picture, and that builds up a list of labels above the folders. Clicking on any of the labels (tags) pulls up all the pictures so tagged, which is a great way to help keep pictures organized.

When viewing individual pictures, Picasa offers a number of “editing” options. As I’ve mentioned, changes aren’t actually made (with the exception of red-eye fixes) to the files themselves. These corrections are more like overlays maintained by Picasa and include the basics like rotation, color correction, fill lighting, saturation and so on. It’s very fast and snappy when working with files, and it does a very good job at cleaning up files. I found the “I’m feeling lucky” button to work particularly well when involving photos of statuary and paintings. If I want to save these changes to actual files, all I need to do is to export them to another directory.

The Bad

Because of issues with driver support, Linux Picasa cannot burn to CD. This isn’t a show stopper for me; I prefer to use my own software for this, but it’s a pity this isn’t integrated into Picasa since it’s usually a timesaver.

Also related to the lack of uniformity across Linux installations, Linux Picasa is a bit wobbly with handling some issues such as which browser or email program to use, or how to access directories and files. There are template files intended to provide such specific information on what to do in a particular installation. The FAQs reference these files in passing, but unfortunately not in detail. They are:

picasa/desktop/picasa-hook-filemanager.sh.template
picasa/desktop/picasa-hook-urlhandler.sh.template
picasa/desktop/picasa-hook-email.sh.template


I first had to find the template files in question. Finally by using

locate picasa | grep desktop

I was able to determine the files resided in /opt/picasa/desktop. The file is not terribly helpful though. I copied the template file into my own ~/bin directory and played with a couple of settings. I tried a couple of things, here’s my final list:

#/usr/bin/nautilus "$1":h
#/usr/bin/konqueror --profile filemanager "$1"
#nautilus `dirname "$1"`
nautilus "${1%%$(basename "$1")}"

I did google for any examples anyone else may have constructed from these files, but the best I found was this, which was interesting, but not the level of detail I was looking for.

But the real problem wasn’t the contents of the script. The problem was in getting Picasa to recognize and hence execute the script! Like a good little unix weenie, I copied the file from its opt home into my local bin directory, chmodded it to 755, made my additions, and restarted Picasa. Nada. Checked my path with printenv. The bin dir was listed. Executed the script directly with a couple of path names, everything started up fine. In desperation, tried copying the file back to the picasa/desktop directory, still no dice.

The only thing that finally worked was to drop the script into /opt/picasa/bin. However, the Google documentation on this point is at best misleading, since it implies that the file need only be somewhere in the path, but clearly it’s only looking in one of a few places such as the bin directory. Grrr.

The Ugly

For some unknown reason, the Linux version of Picasa does not come with an export button to the Picasaweb site. As a result, I’m forced to upload pictures manually using the browser. Which is rather like shovelling coal in the nuclear fusion age.

I also found out that it’s not a good idea to change permissions on directories (or to rename or move them) after one has made extensive “changes” and tags to those directories. Ahem. From Picasa’s point of view those files are gone, and so it discards the meta data it’s got on those files.

However, I can’t really think of a good way for Picasa to handle this kind of thing. If a directory is suddenly inaccessible, what else can it do but assume the files are gone? The only way around this would be for Picasa to store the metadata (tags, etc) with each picture file itself and I can’t see that being done. It’s a possible argument that Picasa should at least save the edits to the file but there are two ways around that: either export a modified folder to a physical folder or tell it to save the actual changes to those files. If the metadata is saved within each folder, all that has to happen is for someone to move the files to another directory, rather than renaming the directory.

So it seems to me to be a fairly nasty situation with no good work around. And since the real issue is the meta data, I don’t even consider this a side effect of the no-modification-to-original philosphy that people either love or hate because the meta data question remains whether or not edits are saved to the files or not.

Flickr versus Picasa Web

Ironically enough, since Linux Picasa does not have the web export button that Windows Picasa does, it’s much easier to upload pictures to Flickr. Since overall I prefer Flickr’s options and interface to Picasaweb’s, this turned out to be a plus for me. To send pictures to Flickr is quite easy, especially when I use my gmail account. In the past few days I’ve sent almost 2000 pictures to Flickr!

I first set up an email address at Flickr. The folks over there will generate a random email address for their users. I can email pictures to this address along with various options in the subject line and they will show right up in my Flickr photo stream.

Now I select the pictures I want to send. I can send up to six pictures at once if I have set the email options (Tools->Options->Email: from here, set the gmail account, size of picture and so on).

Since Picasa is a google product, it interfaces very nicely with gmail. Once I log in with my gmail password, I can select up to six medium sized pictures, choose File->Email (or the handy ^E). I can tab through gmail’s known email addresses to the Flickr-generated one, choose that, and then set the subject line to what I want as the title for those pictures. I then add after the title (still in the subject line) a tags: tag1 tag2 which lets me set the tags for those pictures. Then I clear out the message body and either leave it blank or write something appropriate to all the included pictures and send it off.

Voila!

In contrast, the only alternative way I could find to upload to my Picasaweb site was a browse/upload page provided by picasaweb itself which was so painfully slow, I don’t want to bother with it again. I’ll revisit Picasaweb once the upload button is included in the Linux version of Picasa. On quick scrutiny, though, Picasaweb has very few features at the moment and not very much storage space as compared to Flickr.

Oh, you wanted to know where my Flickr photostream is? Right here If I know you in real life, drop me a note and I’ll add you as a friend contact if you really want to see all 2K pics . Otherwise, feel free to look over my public photos and add me as a contact if you like which I will reciprocate. I always enjoy browsing pics…

Summary

Overall, I’m impressed with this program despite the fairly extensive “bad” and “ugly” sections. I do not understand why some features were left off the Linux version, and I hope that this will be fixed in the future.

One thing I find fascinating is the way in which browsers have gone forth and multiplied over this world. It’s not immediately obvious, but some browsers are actually quite closely related. What follows is a rough chronology of the more well known browsers. There were (and are) many more, of course, and a browse through the sources listed at the end may be of interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Overview

Now, it is with some chagrin that I admit I didn’t cotton to rss/atom/other feeds until earlier this year. When Google released its Google Reader, I played around with it, since I tend to check out most of their toys anyway.

Well.

Whether you’re a geek like me or not, it’s worth learning how to use feeds. And yet, since I brushed them off and didn’t even consider their utility for some time, I’m writing up about them here to clarify why they’re so handy and how they can be used.

There’s two concepts to cover here. First is the feed itself. Although I see them called “RSS” or “Atom” or “subscriptions” and so on, technically they’re just “feeds” — rss, atom, xml, etc are different formats for the feed. Think of a feed as a broadcast of a web page. Instead of a user going TO a webpage, a user looks at a broadcast FROM the webpage. What’s the distinction? I can tell all the particular feeds I’m interested to come to a single place (i.e., aggregate) and I can then read them in that place, all together. Since any kind of webpage can broadcast a feed, there are feeds available for blogs, online news sites, photo sites, podcasts, and even video blogs (known by the awful “vlogs” contraction). Since most blogging software comes bundled with setups for feed broadcasts, chances are a blog I find interesting I can add to my collection of feeds.

Which brings me to the second part, the feed reader (or feed aggregator). A feed reader will take my list of feeds (or my subscription list) and fetch their latest broadcasts and then present them to me. The resulting presentation will not look like the original website pages but are instead a simplified layout. I can even opt for synopsis rather than full articles. I actually find this simplification to be a blessing in many cases; not only to avoid some horrible layouts or clashing colours or lots of adbling, but also with a standardized reader layout I can concentrate more on the content of what I’m reading. Depending on the particlar feed reader, I can browse through lists of the subscriptions, lists of their currently unread articles (by title or by title and synopsys), or at the unread contents. The exact options and layout varies by reader, of course. In some cases, only a synopsis is actually broadcast. In other cases, everything is sent, down to images used for the particular article, and I can choose whether to display these as a synopsis or in their entirety. Which I can choose to do therefore also depends on the sort of information the feed contains.

To give a scenario: I have a collection of subscriptions to daily comic strip publications. So I group these subscriptions into a single folder or group (also called outlines or tags or categories, etc). I also mark them for full display. Now when I choose to see my comics subscriptions, I get a single page with all of the latest comic strip publications laid out one after the other. I can just browse this single page, reading nothing but the exact comic strips I want. It’s better than the newspaper comic page!

There’s a fairly dry summary here and a bit more of an interesting summary here, especially in the Usage and History sections.

Read the rest of this entry »

Overview

So in Windows and Mac, there’s this so-called regional settings that only “allows” you to change your regional settings five times before “locking” it in, courtesy of the entertainment industry determined to dictate every choice to their customers and squeeze every penny out of them into the bargain. Ah, the fresh smell of capitalism in the morning.

The way it works is that DVDs which are “Region 1″ (2, 3, etc) are CSS (content scramble system) encrypted. The settings on the computer indicate which “region” it is, and that will refuse to play those DVDs not matching the set region. This is a result of collusion between OS companies (eg, Microsoft, Apple), DVD drive companies (Panasonic, Sony, etc), and assorted software programs. It’s an ongoing legal tangle, and also when OpenSource is tossed in, gets interesting fast, as OpenSource will not generally “respect” the encryption and simply play DVDs regardless, although such a user generally will need to install a few extra programs and such to make it all work so in the end, everyone winds up having to work around this issue.

Oddly enough, it’s almost simpler when discussing DVD players. For these, just google up the brand name of the player, along with the terms ‘region free” etc, and it’s possible to find, for most players, the codes necessary to convert the player into multiregional or region free players. Once that’s done and it’s hooked up to the TV set, playing any DVD is not a problem.

Approaches

But back to DVD drives in computers: there are several ways around regional restrictions. One has been to hack the firmware on the DVD drive. This isn’t an especially good idea since such hacking can render the drive dead a certain percentage of time. So I’d toss that out.

A second option is to copy the DVD first, stripping out the CSS, and burning the altered copy to a blank disk and using that DVD instead. This works, but is a little cumbersome — having to copy each encrypted DVD before viewing it.

Finally, there are software programs that simply bypass the operating system restrictions. These can be built into the dvd players themselves, or be a separate program functioning on its own, allowing the user to use whichever favorite software for viewing the disc’s contents.

Windows

For Windows users, most of the options center around the third one, although a number include the ability to use the second approach as well. For example DVD Region + CSS Free and DVD Region Free Master (both very reasonably priced shareware). The programs work at the software level to bypass any restriction on the computer’s dvd drive, whether or not it has been locked (changed more than five times) and without altering its allowable changes.

DVD Shrink allows users to copy commercial dvds to blanks. The program allows for copying and compressing and/or eliminating parts of the original dvd, including stripping the CSS encryption.

Mac

For Mac users, the picture is a little different. There are some programs out there but there don’t seem to be that many (and which seem to be for older versions), which puzzles me because OSX is Linux based, more or less. Some of the issues seem to revolve around which Mac one has, and which dvd drivers it has. VLC may work for some Mac users, but does not work for all. I did find this article which summed up the issues for mac users and described one solution the author worked out. I have also seen speculation that Mac’s new Bootcamp software might allow Mac users to run the Windows region free software + dvd playback to obtain similar results (but I did not find anything written up by anyone who’d tried it to see).

There’s a program called MacTheRipper which allows copying of DVD’s minus the encryption. Also check out DVDBackup to back the DVD up on the computer.

Of course with the new Intel chips, a dual boot WinXP and mac, or dual boot with Linux and Mac and move back and forth as needed.

Linux

As an Open Source operating system, Linux’s difficulties with CSS encryption stem from the proprietary nature of the software. In most cases, what a Linux user needs to do is download the additional software and codecs to view DVD’s. Most distributions will have instructions available somewhere on how to do this: googling on the distribution name and region free will in most cases uncover instructions specific to the distribution. For example, googling on “ubuntu dvd region free” (without the quotes) will uncover tutorials such as this.

There are a wide variety of players, such as mplayer, Xine, Kaffeine, Ogle, and Totem. Most distributions will come with one or more of these, the trick is enabling the play for encrypted DVDs as covered in the previous paragraph. Of these, Kaffeine is generally considered the best of the lot. The rest may not have a full gui interface, or sync properly, be somewhat buggy, or have other limitations.

As for creating region free DVD’s: one method is outlined here and another nice overview is here. The basic idea is as with the mac: create a copy or backup on the computer, and then burn selected portions to the blank disc.

Cross Platform

One name that kept popping up was VLC which has versions for Linux, Windows, and Mac. I have not tried this myself, but the user feedback/ratings look pretty good.

Further Information

Check wiki for more overall information on DVDs, DVD software, and dealing with CSS.
For complete informatin overload (but well written and easy to skim for specific questions), check out the DVD faq.

Legal Issues

Notes about legality. It’s becoming a bit more common to find notices such as this one even outside the U.S. Not only do laws vary from country to country but they appear to be in the process of changing, as more attention is paid to this issue. I should stress that this article is provided for informational purposes.

Also, I am not a lawyer, but this is my view: When I purchase a book, I am entitled to read it, whenever and whereever I want to. I can read it as many times as I want to. I can do anything to the book itself — write in it, tear pages out, laminate it, store it, throw it away, give it away, or sell it. I may not make copies of it, with the exception of small excerpts and such under “Fair Use” doctrine (eg, quoting passages in a review, that kind of thing). Extending that concept to a DVD, I personally find the encryption and regional restrictions problematic, as these may prevent me from enjoying something I have paid for the right to view. I therefore view getting around the encryption to be a legitimate exercise in being able to make rightful use of a product I’ve paid for.

The gray area is, obviously, when DVD’s are copied. And here it’s unclear: for example it’s been established as acceptable for users to make personal copies of audio tapes or CD’s — for example making a cassette tape for personal use, because one’s car does not have a CD player, or “timeshifting” where one makes a VHS copy of a broadcast to view later. No reselling is involved. So making a copy of a DVD for personal viewing ought to fall into similar categories (watch a DVD on laptop), but the companies are nervous because at this point, redistribution of copies is ridiculously easy over the Internet (not as easy to make VHS tape copies and distribute, nor audio cassette copies and distribute). That, in a nutshell, is why DVD copying is an “issue” and why the conventions are inconsistent between book, tape, and CD/DVD.

In general, the programs and tools I use revolve around a couple of considerations:

1. I need to use them at home/at work (or more precisely, from different computers)
2. I want to use the same tool regardless of the operating system I’m using (I have linux at home, but must use Windows elsewhere)

Ideally I’d like my data accessible from anywhere, and I don’t want to have to learn new applications just because I’m on a different operating system. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules because some programs are just too useful not to have around even though they only run on Linux. (Don’t let the mentions of Linux scare anyone off here. Everything I discuss is either a web application or works on Windows as well as it does on Linux.)

In practice, this means I gravitate toward browser based utilities and open source cross platform utilities. In the former category are many of the Google tools: Gmail, Calendar, Notebook, plus others such as Bloglines, Meebo. In the latter category are Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Gimp. Sometimes there are programs near and dear to my heart that I take the trouble to locate off platform versions of them, such as vi (yes I know I’m depraved) but this last category I’m not addressing here.

I’ve actually known about Meebo for some time, but I’ve started experimenting with it only in the last few days. I have no complaints whatsoever with Gaim which is what I normally use. However, when I was travelling for a few weeks last year, it was very cumbersome to download it, unpack it, use it, and then delete it. I should have made use of Meebo then although I’m not sure how usable it was at this point. Right now, it’s pretty sleek, works very well. Could use some more bells and whistles (I do not mean this literally in the sounds sections) — I have a hard time telling when I’ve got a new message in, for example. But it’s got a good interface, looks very smooth, and is worth checking out. It also offers a one stop place to log all your conversations, which could be a good thing or a scary thing, depending (completely configurable, never fear).

Feed aggregators have been interesting. There’s plenty of computerside clients, of course, but for this one I definitely want a web based one! Google Reader and Bloglines seem to be the main contenders out there. I tried Reader first, but it has an inherent disorganization that makes me want to scream. You get fed a steady stream of all the new articles that have come out. And if non has, no problem, it will show them to you over again. You wind up completely uncertain of what you’ve seen, where you’ve seen it or even when you’ve seen it. You lose all context since a post from that political blog might be followed by a post from that comics blog and then your little sister’s journal entry. No thanks. Yes, there’s kind of an edit subscription mode at the top you can turn on that helps organize the information, but there’s no settings to turn that on or anything. Bloglines is much better organized, although their frames setup makes me want to scream. They could set the sidebar up without frames, I’m sure, and make a much nicer interface. Still, the organization of the subscriptions into orderly files is wonderful, and they have several API’s for accessing the feed list which you can turn to nefarious purposes on your own website and so on. My particular favorite has been to assemble a comics folder, in which I placed all my comics subscriptions — rigorously selected to actually display the comic (some will just give you links to go to your comics — no thanks!) — and in the morning i just flip that folder on, go to wide view and jump down each one almost like a regular newspaper. I love it! And of course all I need is a browser and I can go thru my feeds.

Different web utilities can be combined in sometimes unexpected ways. Here’s one that’s proved very useful (via LifeHacker) if you use Google Calendar and you want to track the daily weather: Go to Weather Underground and find your zipcode or area of interest. When you get to the page in question, you’ll find a green ICAL link in the upper right hand area of the screen. Copy the link location for this ical file (in FF, right click and choose copy link location) and then go over to your Calendar, click on Settings, then Import Calendar and paste the ical address in there. What’s cool is that the next seven days or so have weather information in them, which gets updated. It cleans up after itself: the weather information is always eight days including yesterday. Plus, as the weather info updates during the day, the info box also updates in the calendar.

I’ve been using Delicious for several months now to collect my bookmarks in a completely accessible fashion, although I use DR’s delicious account more for “reporting back” here, so with that account I take the trouble to copy or type up some notes with each link. Either way, Delicious offers a way to access your bookmarks from anywhere, and through the different utilities and API’s that it has, you can do all kinds of stuff with the bookmarks you make, besides go searching or browsing through them at Delicious itself. They finally took the smart step of adding private entries to this utility, which is good for people who want to keep certain work links or personal links private and yet keep everything together. I experimented with Magnolia as well, which could be another alternative, but I have enough links on Delicious that exporting/importing isn’t an attractive proposition. Oh, and you can save an xml export of the Delicious bookmarks, although at present I don’t know of any utilities that work off of it (even Delicious itself!). Still, you can download that to your personal computer for backup.

The final sort of online utility I’ve been considering but have not actually used yet, is an online password saver. I’ve looked at this one, but I have serious reservations about saving passwords online. At the same time, if they are saved on my personal computer, I’m really screwed if I can’t remember something while away from my computer. (As an aside, I should note that I’m very strict about setting FF and other browsers and utilities to never remember passwords. Even if someone should get on the computers I actually use, they will find that nothing has my passwords: not my ftp or ssh utilities, not my browsers, nor my mail clients. Nothing logs in automatically and so on. Perhaps the constant need to remember my passwords will keep Alzheimers at bay, who knows…)

I don’t think I need to extoll the virtues of Firefox here, but it sure does have good extensions, which would make a post in of themselves. I’ll confine myself to the latest one I’ve nabbed: the copy as html link firefox extension which is a boon to bloggers everywhere (along with Google Notebook) in cutting and pasting links (how often have you copied the address, come back here, pasted it, gone back, copied the title, back here, paste, and so on ad infinitum?). With this, you highlight the text you want, right click, choose the copy as html that is now present, and go back to paste in one step. This is one of those tiny little utilities that fix something which was truly headdesking and yet never addressed till now and you wonder why it wasn’t done this way to begin with. This is functionality that should be built into browsers.

Thunderbird is a very well thought out program, and I do like how it’s set up. However, while it meets my criteria for operating across different platforms it still renders my mail inaccessible if I download mail with it onto a particular computer. So although I prefer its interface to Gmail’s, I primarily use it to retrieve and archive my email, from Gmail and IMAP clients (had to leave the pop ones alone). Still, if you use something like Outlook (shudder), you should definitely be looking at something like this. Plus, Thunderbird also has cool extensions like Firefox does, to help you customize it exactly the way you want.

I was initially somewhat dubious of Open Office’s Write as I’d tried converting a few files a couple years back and had too much trouble with tables, but the OOo team seems to have been hard at work and I’ve been very pleased with the results this time around. No trouble with any of my files so far. Ditto Gimp — I coudln’t figure out how to do anything the first go around, and this time I transitioned right off Photoshop with nary a hiccup. I’m particularly pleased that the interfaces on the Windows version are the same as in Linux. Saves me a lot of bother. Plus which the applications are smaller, faster, and somewhat cheaper than the Windows counterparts Even if you’re not a Linux user, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of use of these programs. They keep getting cast in terms of substitutes for Windows programs, but in reality they’re full fledged programs with a good deal more functionality plus interoperability.

If you’re not off internet cafe hopping, Gaim’s a great application. It combines all the major IM interfaces into a single program. Yahoo IM, AIM, Jabber (which hooks up to Gtalk), and others are all represented here. You don’t have to have multiple programs running if you’re talking with people on different IM’s. It’s got a slick interface, tabbed conversations, and it can do group chats as well.

There. That should be plenty of toys to look over…