It is with great sadness that the Picasa API has been shut down by Google. This renders kPicasa Gallery completely useless. The project is now dead. Thank to the 70,995 of you who downloaded my plugin over the last 12 years!
This website remains up for prosperity!
I had a little fun and laid out how every device in my home are linked together. The ultimate goal behind this setup was to be able to play music in the living room. The music is stored on the DiskStation NAS and it’s able to stream to the AirPort Express that is connected to my amplifier. I can control the DiskStation with my iPhone, iPad or any computer. They all have access to my full library.
A few weeks ago, I was notified by my credit card company that they had detected fraudulent charges on my credit card. I was surprised because I use that card like 2-3 times a year and it had not been used for almost 6 months, but knowing that they would reverse the charges without any hassle, I didn’t really think much of it. But then they also told me that the person who did this had enough information on me to call them, answer correctly to the standard security questions and have my address changed in their system. That freaked me out.
I have no idea how they got that information. Was it a malware on my computer? As far as I know, my computers are clean. Did they break into one of my online accounts and got a bunch of information? Did they hack an online store where I had purchased stuff before? Who knows. That also freaks me out. Especially since I use the same 3-4 passwords everywhere.
So I decided to blow the dust off good old KeePass, which I had tried before. I generated new random passwords for all of my banking accounts, email accounts, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I installed MiniKeePass on my iPhone/iPad so I can access my accounts when I’m on the go. Synchronizing the master file between my computer and the iPhone/iPad isn’t as easy as it should, but it should be improved in an upcoming version.
That is now the most important file on my computer and needs to be backed up religiously. It’s automatically backed up to my NAS, but I’m screwed if the whole house catches on fire. So I configured Syncplicity to backup that file as well. But again, what happens if my house burns down – I need my KeePass file to retrieve the password to access my Syncplicity account to retrieve my file! So I’ve scheduled a daily backup to a server at work. Our sysadmin will send me back my file if I ever loose everything else.
Am I missing something? What’s your strategy?
I called Fido to change my address and my phone number because I moved to another province. I remember seing ads on TV where Fido proudly said their customer representatives are now easy to reach. This is total bullshit, I called 611 and chose the option to change my address but I seemed to be in a dead end: I was told to wait but after a few minutes of holding I wasn’t even sure if my call was still in the system, I didn’t even had background music to let me know the line is still alive. I called back repeatedly but couldn’t find a way to talk to a human being. I abandonned out of frustration.
After looking on the internet for a way to talk to get to a human, I called back and tried again the option to change my address and I finally ended up in a queue.
A nice guy picked up my call and apologized for the trouble. He changed my address but as he was looking for a new number in my area, the line cut off for some reason. Grrr. Fortunately, he called me back as I was dialing back 611. I noticed that the caller id was not 611 but rather a regular number, but didn’t think twice about it. The representative was helpful, but unfortunately Fido don’t have any local numbers in my area so I’ll have to switch carrier when my prepaid credits expire.
After hanging up, I try to log into my account on their website and I get Java timeout errors (their website is so unstable it could have a blog article on its own). After trying back 15 minutes later, I finally get it working but WTF, my balance now shows $0.00 and my account status is deactivated!!! I had about $25 before I called them!!! And to add insult to injury, I was charged $4.60 for long distance when the customer representative called me back because I am out of my current local calling area!!! What kind of shitty system is this??? And lucky as I am, customer service is now closed for the day.
I just want to scream out of anger!
Last week, I bought myself a Synology DS110j along with a 1 TB hard drive. I also took the opportunity to upgrade a segment of my network to Gigabit speed with a cheap D-Link switch. My computer and the NAS are now on that segment.
Now, I still haven’t decided what my strategy is gonna be. For now, my computer contains all the “master” files and a scheduled job synchronizes my computer with my NAS every now and then. This method has a few important advantages:
The only drawback is that my files are not live on the NAS. This means that if I download a video and want to watch it immediately on the media box in my living room, I have to run the sync job manually.
This also means that if I turn off my computer before the sync job runs, new files won’t be sent to the NAS until the computer is turned back on.
Because of that, I tried to switch roles: the NAS would store the master files and my computer would only keep backups. In normal usage, I would never use the files stored on my computer, I would always work on the NAS. All the different My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, (etc.) folders would be mapped on the NAS. This has a few drawbacks:
However, I also found out that Windows 7 won’t let me add networked folders to Libraries. So I would loose that functionality, which I actually like.
So I’m back to my original strategy: masters stored on my computer and files backed up to the NAS on a regular basis. The NAS will always be a bit “behind”, but that’s the best solution I found.
Do you have a NAS? I would like to hear different point of views on that subject.
There are countless tooltip plugins using jQuery. But not many of them use title attribute. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I based myself on vTip and added live() support and tweaked a thing or two.
Download it here (2.25 KB)
By default, it will only show custom tooltips for images, but you can tweak the jQuery call on line 74 to suit your needs. You can also edit lines 40-42 to change its appearance.
Last but not least, you can also edit line 17 to edit the default values for the delay and offset position.