category archives: computers & technology

how to use google authenticator for facebook’s two-step authentication

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Google Authenticator in a world where more and more of our personal life is taking place on the web, a strong password is the very least you can do to keep your stuff safe from others.
about a year after an online journalist had his entire digital life deleted by hackers, many online services including google, facebook, dropbox, and lately even apple, microsoft and twitter, have implemented two-step authentication (or two-factor verification). this means that there’s an optional, extra step that you can activate to verify your identity during login – using a special, variable code that’s e.g. time-coded or individually texted to you.

if you don’t have two-step authentication activated for your email, online banking, google account, apple ID, and even your social media accounts, you should do so right now. [more...]

[categories: android, computers & technology] [tags: ]

captivate: custom picasa button to fix image captions for facebook, wordpress and others

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if you’re using picasa to organize your photos, and upload them to your wordpress blog, facebook and/or google+, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the picasa caption doesn’t show up on the web.
the reason for this is apparently a number of metadata fields (e.g. caption, description, and title fields in either EXIF, IPTC or XMP metadata) that are used differently depending on the software you use.

to solve this problem, i’ve created a custom picasa button that will copy your picasa caption (caption-abstract) to the relevant XMPC:title field that is used (amongst others) in wordpress as the attachment title. the most important line of code is the following exiftool command:

exiftool.exe -overwrite_original -"xmp:description>xmp:title" *.jpg

[more...]

[category: computers & technology] [tags: , ]

how to embed google+ photospheres in your wordpress blog using shortcodes

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if you’ve been following the feature additions to android over the past few months, you’ve probably heard of photospheres: they’re google streetview-like interactive 360 degree panoramas that you can easily record with your smartphone running android jellybean 4.2+.
now, google has finally provided us with a way to embed photo spheres from google+ on other websites, including your self-hosted wordpress blog!

stunning views from seegrube, innsbruck

here’s a little function for your wordpress theme’s functions.php, which will enable the shortcodes [photosphere URL] and [ps URL]: [more...]

[category: computers & technology] [tags: , , , ]

gopro hero3 time lapse auto-exposure problem: customer support explains cause, promises solution

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setting a gopro hero3 camera to time lapse mode and a very short interval (0.5 or 1 second) will lock the entire time-series’ exposure to that of the first frame.

example: a recent sunrise time lapse attempt

gopro hero3 auto exposure problem in time lapse mode: customer support explains cause, promises solution depending on the situation, the result may be an SD card full of overexposed/washed out or drastically underexposed pictures. this is obviously problematic for time-lapse recording of relatively fast-changing scenes (esp. with changes in lighting), but even more so if you just want to do action photography and not think about pressing the shutter button manually (i.e. while whitewater rafting or skydiving).
 

Sorry for the inconvenience, would you believe that’s a feature rather than a bug?

gopro customer support just explained in a response that the problem is not actually a software bug: “the skydiving community requested the feature”. they are, however, working on making it an option in the settings menu: [more...]

[category: computers & technology] [tags: , ]

will carbonite delete your backup files if you’re offline for 30 days? the answer is no.

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will carbonite delete your backup files if you're offline for 30 days? the answer is no. i recently signed up for carbonite’s cloud backup service, and it’s great. on-the go access to all your (backed up) files from any browser is very vaulable! so is the flat rate starting at 59 USD per year, which includes unlimited storage.

one thing that has been bugging me, is their 30 day file retention limit: they delete backed-up files after 30 days, it says on their website, but it wasn’t clear to me whether that just applies to deleted files, or all files if you don’t connect within 30 days.
customer service was kind enough to clear that up for me. [more...]

[category: computers & technology] [tags: ]

how to print a timestamp with periodic output from WinWedge

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how to print a timestamp with periodic output from WinWedge WinWedge is a simple tool to obtain periodic readouts through a serial RS-232 or COM interface (e.g. from an analytical balance). unfortunately, though, obtaining a timestamp for every data point is not as intuitive as it could be.
here’s how you can automatically add a timestamp to your periodic output with WinWedge (tested with WinWedge32 Std. V3.0).

let’s assume that you’ve already configured the basic communication (“Port” – “Settings”) and timer settings (“Define” – “Serial Output Strings” > “Interval (ms)” and “Timer Controlled Output String”). [more...]

[categories: computers & technology, science] [tags: , ]

light sensitivity comparison: sony rx100 vs. samsung galaxy nexus

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these pictures were taken right after another, using the two cameras i had with me: the samsung galaxy nexus (back camera) and the new sony rx100.
granted, it’s unfair to compare a camera to a smartphone (even though it’s “optimized for low light conditions”) – but it does give you a pretty good idea what the rx100 is capable of.

light sensitivity comparison: samsung galaxy nexus light sensitivity comparison: sony rx100

pictures are completely unaltered (except for downsizing and the watermark).
 

and now, to celebrate that low-light sensitivity and embrace my new-found tripod laziness, here are three recent, handheld night photos: [more...]

[categories: computers & technology, photo] [tags: , ]
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