< One Byte at a Time />

How to make photo albums non re-shareable in Google+

sachinsawe — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:23:33 +0000

Social networking concepts are pretty new to many of us. I am still catching up with some of the concepts and learning how what I post on any of these networks is seen or viewable by people in my network OR public for that matter. Do you know if you post a photo or share a photo album link on Google+, that link can be further shared by someone. In Google+ terms the album you create is by default “unlocked” so that it is shareable by anyone you share it with. But there is a way to make it non re-shareable. When you view an album there is a link in angular brackets on top of your album that shows if your album is presently locked or unlocked. It looks like the one shown below:

If you click on this link, it will show you list of people you have already shared this album with and a button below to “Lock Album” if you wish to. If you click on “Lock Album” it will give you explanation on what “Locked” and “Unlocked” means:

At this point you hit “Save” and it will lock the album so that is further non shareable by everyone you share it with. Hope this tip helps you secure your albums that you do not wish to be seen or potentially exposed to unlimited chain of people!

~srs

How to force eject stuck CD/DVD on a Mac

sachinsawe — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:09:52 +0000

What do you do when your CD/DVD gets stuck inside CD/DVD drive. On a PC I would first try hitting the button located right on CD/DVD drive but on MacBook there is no such thing on the CD/DVD drive itself. In Mac, you would usually see an icon of mounted disk. One would then click on eject button next to the icon in Finder OR by right clicking on icon on Desktop and selecting “eject”. But what if both of these are not present? That is exactly what happened with me. Sometimes CDs are unrecognizable for whatever reason and Mac does not even mount them. So you do not see image of a mounted disk whether on Desktop or in Finder.

Little did I know that a simple terminal command could save you hours of frustration. Simply type “drutil tray eject” inside your terminal and that’s it. Your disc shall be ejected the very next moment!

hth

~srs

Starbucks will offer free Wi-Fi!

sachinsawe — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:30:40 +0000

Starbucks shall offer free Wi-Fi in its US stores beginning July 1, 2010 ! Check this out:
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2010/06/14/daily4.html

The Fuss about Google Buzz!

sachinsawe — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:02:11 +0000

What’s the fuss about Google Buzz? Hmm, one would think of some new cool feature Google Buzz brought all of us, ain’t it? Nope! This truly is a controversial “fuss” about Google Buzz! Has any of you noticed that all your “Buzz” is by default publicly searchable on web? I realized that it is indeed the case.

Very recently, I buzzed about an article inside my gmail hoping to share some information with my friends. Little did I know that this “Buzz” along with all the follow up chat I had with my friend would be publicly available on the web. I only realized that at a friend’s place the other weekend when he googled my name while showing off his brand new iPad. All my “Buzz” conversations were public and searchable on the web !! There is a way to make these posts private. So next time you post a “Buzz” make sure you select “Private” option right at the time you post a “Buzz”. By making the post private, you can choose a group of friends you would want to share the post with. Also in case you have inadvertently buzzed something that you think should not be public there is no way to edit its visibility. The only way out is to delete those posts.

I am not quite sure why Google would keep the default option “Public on Web”. That is the controversial part in my opinion. So next time you “Buzz”, Be careful and Happy Buzzin !!

How to open a KeePassX url in a specified browser

sachinsawe — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:11:03 +0000

Tools can be as good as your ability to use them. Sometimes its your laziness to find out more about what a tool can do and other times it could very well be the limitation of the tool itself. In either case, there are always work arounds in getting the job done when the tool does not provide a feature that you are perhaps looking for. You would be surprised if you explore a little more you could find a hook (extension or an opportunity to do something different with the same tool) that a tool provides you with. I discovered such a hook in KeePassX. KeePassX is a free utility for Mac/Linux users to save their passwords in one safe place. To know more about KeePassX visit http://www.keepassx.org.

In KeePassX database, you typically store a username, password and a url of websites you want it to remember for you. Later when you need to logon to any, you just right click on a given entry and select “Open Url”. This action opens up url in your default browser. What if you have more than one browser and want to open this url in a specified browser instead of the default one. In my case, I wanted to open the url in Safari. Here is how you do it. Under Preferences > Advanced Tab in KeePassX, set your Custom Browser command to

“open -a Safari %1″

and you are all set. “open” is a native command on Mac to open a given resource with given application. “-a” above tells “open” command to use “Safari” application to open first argument “%1″. Instead of “Safari”, if you type “firefox”, it will open it in firefox.

Spring web service call using secure proxy per connection

sachinsawe — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:56:11 +0000

This post is a follow up of my original post: http://onebyteatatime.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/spring-web-service-call-using-proxy-per-connection/.

Many readers asked if there is a way to set proxy credentials. Yes you can. On HttpClient there is a object called HttpState. On this object you can use a method setProxyCredentials to which you can pass AuthScope and Credentials in the form of UsernamePasswordCredentials.

You can find details on how to do this programmatically at http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/sslguide.html. Just note that this link illustrates deprecated setProxyCredentials method. You should be using the method that accepts AuthScope and Credentials as parameters. Once you know how to do this in code you can simply repeat those steps same way as I have described in my original post and carry out the wiring in spring context.

hth

~srs

How to use VOIP service on existing home phone jacks

sachinsawe — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:48:03 +0000

Change is inevitable! Ain’t it true? With the advent of internet so many day-to-day activities that all of us did changed quite drastically. Phone is one such example. Many of us now have a digital (VOIP) phone line at home instead of a regular landline. When you use a digital (VOIP) phone service you have to connect your phone equipment to the VOIP adapter that plugs into your internet router at home. Your VOIP service provider usually has WARNING in setup instructions that you DO NOT CONNECT VOIP equipment to your landline jack. This is very very important for safety reasons. However this limits the use of your VOIP service to use the phone equipment that is connected to your VOIP adapter only. Typically your residence is already wired to carry phone signals and if you were using landline you would have plugged in your phone equipment directly into one of the phone jacks available in your home. What if you want to use one of these jacks to carry your VOIP signal !! Wouldn’t that be nice? I bumped into this article provided by Vonage Support. This article talks about how you can achieve the same. Please do follow the article carefully, use caution and do this at your own risk. I use the words ‘caution’ and ‘risk’ because you really would want to know what you are doing in DIY stuff especially when it comes to dealing with electricity and voltages running on cables in your home. Nevertheless I thought this article was really helpful understanding point of view. Here it is, read on…

Wire your home telephone line for use with Vonage

~srs

Coming soon Ubuntu 10.04 !

sachinsawe — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:14:53 +0000

Latest Ubuntu is two days away !! Highlights of this version are

Linux Kernel 2.6.32
Removal of HAL from boot process making it faster to boot and resume from suspend
New default open source driver for nVidia hardware
Improved support for proprietary nVidia graphics drivers
One file syncing

and much more… have fun

IBM Creates world’s smallest 3D Map

onebyteatatime — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:00:03 +0000

Scientists at IBM have created world’s smallest 3D Map to the resolution of 15 nm. Check it out at YouTube link here.

Human touch to google translate

sachinsawe — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:51:42 +0000

Google has added an excellent new tool, “Google translator toolkit” to its bag of tools. Earlier you could translate a url or a document using Google Translate. This was a machine translation of a given document. But what-if, machine translation is not good enough? What-if it is missing the originality of the language / context. Now you can fix those finer points by editing the machine translation using Google’s translator toolkit. Checkout the Google Blog to learn more about it. It is quite impressive !

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/translating-worlds-information-with.html