Computing & Internet

Photo Nose – Media Recovery Software

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I am sure, if you are a digital camera user, that you would have had the very unfortunate experience of accidentally deleting media from your memory cards or flash drives. There have been times when I changed my mind after deleting an image! Sometimes, such media somehow gets corrupted or damaged, hence could not be read or retrieved.

If this happens to you as well, you may want to check out Photo Nose, a Photo Image Recovery Software that could help you to recover deleted or corrupted images and video files. The good thing is that this is not only very user-friendly but device and format friendly and you could try it for free.

Photo Nose comes in two versions; Standard and Professional. Of course, Professional offers more features and could even recover media in more formats. The price difference is only US$10 so I don’t see why one should not get hold of the Professional copy.

Right now, I could think of some photos that were erased from my memory card after I have transferred the photos to my computer but then somebody formatted my hard disk without backing up my files. Those deleted photos, numbering a few hundred, are somewhat important. Maybe I should try to recover them with Photo Nose.

If you have used photo Nose before, do let me know how you like it.

*** This post was brought to you by Acute Tools ***

Computing & Internet

Clicking On Blog Ads

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Recently, there has been a blog ad that has been appearing on my blog. I am pretty interested in it and would like to learn more about it BUT I could not click my own ad, right?

So I went to the blog ad company’s website hoping that they have an updated page of advertiser with their current advertising campaigns sop that I could click on the ad from there but then they do not have such a page. Sure they also have a couple of blog ads on their blog but no matter how many times I did, the ads that appeared are of something else that I have no interest in.

So I went to a friend’s blog and voila, there’s the ad because basically, this friend’s blog has way too many ads on his site and the load time was horrendous. I waited till everything loaded and clicked on that ad but then was returned a BLANK PAGE. Hhmm I don’t know if this problem is blog specific or ad problem. This also makes me wonder if my own ads are clickable, directing us to the advertiser’s website and not a blank page.

Having said this, till now, I am unable to visit the website of the advertiser and that means that the advertiser’s campaign is ineffective.

Also, this makes me recall the incident that I read a long time ago where a blogger clicked on ads on her own blog because she wanted the coupon codes herself. Well, that certainly makes sense. If one gets an advertisement on her one blog, surely the first person the ad is sold to is the blog owner herself? However, as I understand it, she was banned from the network.

Computing & Internet

CloudShout

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I recent learnt of CloudShout, a new blog tool that is an Izea innovation, from someone who posted it on Twitter. If memory serves me right, I have heard (or read) of this name “cloud shout” before. I think it was during a brainstorming session where IZEA was born. Anyway, CloudShout is still in closed Alpha but one could request for an invitation from their website.

The website introduces CloudShout as a blog tool that enables “real time conversation and community across the interweb” but it looks like me like any other blog widget or gadgets that bloggers embed on the sidebar of the blogs.

You know, I have just stripped most of my blogs from a lot of fancy elements, including stuff that make money, mainly because I am trying to speed up the loading time so I will not be installing this CloudShout widget anytime soon. It’s still in closed Alpha so you can expect lots of glitches.

Moreover, I hate to have these “community” widgets like Blogger’s Follow because, I am sure I mentioned it before, I hate to have my blog visits tracked and I will not subject my blog readers to the same. If you know of my blogs, I am sure you would notice that I did not use any of these on any of my blogs.

While some people feel the need to see who has dropped by, I don’t, simply for the fact that I couldn’t care less if none of the people I know or do not know visit or not.

Blogging

Blogger Timestamp Glitch

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Blogger had an issue with their timestamp last evening until this morning, for almost more than twelve hours. I was not alone but with three active Blogger “beta” blogs that I tested, only one was affected.

I did a search on the internet and although some Blogger users also had the same problem, some had it worse than others in the sense that while I was able to manually input the current date and time just before publishing my post and I do not publish my post in advance, someone was thrown an error message with the dreaded bX-code when he tried to manually adjust the timestamp. Boy, was I glad that my issue was not as serious or I would have popped a vein!

Anyway, I was glad that later in the morning, everything was fine with my affected Blogger blog and I could publish my post normally. Phew!

One thing about using Blogger blogs, even though I have been facing more glitches recently that all the years that I have started my Blogger blogs, is that should a problem crop up, we just have to report it and sit tight and be patient unlike self-hosted blogs, where we have to sweat bullets trying to fix whatever glitch or beg people in the know to help out!

Computing & Internet

Faster, Better Hotmail

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I received an announcement from Windows Live Hotmail yesterday regarding their improvements on their email service, popularly known as just Hotmail.

According to the team, they plan to make Hotmail 70% faster than what we have now, in terms of loading and less clicks to reach our inbox. Please just give me a direct landing page to my inbox and headline news on one side so that if I have the time to read online news, I could access it on the side and not have them thrown in my face.

Anyway, I hardly access my Hotmail directly on the web because I use Outlook Express or via my iPhone. I get all my email without the frills. But one improvement I really would like to see with Hotmail, because it is my primary email, is faster load times and no more missing email! I know that each email passes through a couple of servers, or maybe more, but the culprit is highly likely Hotmail. If I get ALL my mail without delay, I am very happy already.

Blogging

Be Careful Of What You Blog

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Last evening, blogger Syed Azidi Syed Abdul Aziz or more popularly known online as Kickdefella or Sheih to his friends, was arrested. I think in this case, it is not so much as a “crackdown” on bloggers because this guy works for the opposition and he happens to be a blogger and used his blog as a machinery to spread messages like flying the Malaysian flag upside down to protest against certain Government policies.

I did not actually read that post; I think it’s still on his blog, but I think that what he meant was putting up a banner of an upside down Malaysian flag on our blog or something like that. I am not sure how successful his campaign was because of all my blog hopping to Malaysian blogs, I have never actually seen anyone put up such a banner. Maybe I did not go to enough political blogs, or blogs of politically aware bloggers, or blogs of Kickdefella’s supporters, or maybe Kickdefella actually meant flying a real Malaysian flag upside down?

One thing though, as a blogger of three years, I know that there are always spies going around blogs, reading and making notes of our “wrongdoings” and maybe even purposely misreading our meanings. And then some people may even hold our readers’ comments against us. Whatever the case, we must always be careful because once a post is published, it will be cached and I have read that search engines like Google will remember your text forever.

Of course, if we are somebody “powerful” or with real political background and backing like Dr. M or Uncle Kit, then it’s different. Being armchair politicians, it’s better to watch your words. And I always believe that it is not necessary to show ones true feelings in words or in real life.

Computing & Internet

DPM Najib Goes Cyber

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Did you already know of our DPM’s new website? A few months ago, just before the General Election, he commissioned someone to set up a website for Pak Lah, now he thinks that he should have one himself.

If you do not know it, here is the address. http://www.1malaysia.com.my/
Some people think that the website is unfriendly.

Just out of curiosity, I went to check what the website is all about. Oh, yes, it’s a website not a blog. Someone should tell him that blogs are all the rage now, and not a static website.

Anyway, right smack in the middle is a video of him with a welcome message. I tried to stream it but the buffering is terrible until I feel nauseous. Maybe there are too many people all trying to watch his video.

If you expect more, I have to tell you that you would be disappointed. It’s a bare bone website with just that video on the landing page, his biography in .pdf format, which I purposely mention because don’t we chronic web surfers just hate to open up web pages in .pdf format without prior warning?

And there are a few pages of photos and photos of him, as if this is a photo gallery. Hey, Flickr does this better. I would also like to mention that there are two pages of comment forms, one in Malay and one in English. Is that even necessary? I checked, there’s no comments page in some other foreign Asian language.

Check it out and let me know what you think? Like RTM, right?

Random Thoughts Off My Mind