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Tech Tips For Us

Tech Tips | Reviews | Tutorials | Occasional Rants

Bulk Image Processing: How to shrink a bunch of images using iPhoto on OS XYesterday

Here’s a real quick tip. Let’s pretend that you took a bunch of nice big photos with your nice digital camera. But your friend wants copies… and you can’t email them because the files are huge! How do you shrink down hundreds of images quickly? Let iPhoto and Mail help…

See the video for this tip in action, or follow these simple steps:

1. Open iPhoto and highlight the images you want
2. Choose to Mail the photos by clicking the Mail icon at the bottom of iPhoto.
3. Choose the size that you want for your new images.
4. When the new Mail message opens up, you could actually send the message at this point (assuming that Mail is configured correctly to send and receive messages), OR you can select all, then drag the message contents over into a desktop folder.
5. You can zip up the contents of the Desktop folder and be done!

Add Watermarks to Photos Online for Free with PicMarkrNovember 29

Any time you put a photo on the Web, you run a risk that someone will claim it as their own. If you are okay with this, then please ignore this post. However, you can easily add protection against image theft by adding a watermark.

Sure, many photo editing programs (such as Photoshop, GIMP, Picasa) can add watermarks to images, but in a pinch you can just use your browser to upload photos to PicMarkr and easily add a watermark online.

Adding watermarks using PicMarkr is a simple three-step process.

Step One - Upload

First, you need to get your image(s) into PicMarkr. Using their browser upload tool, you can upload up to five pictures at once, with a total file size up to 25 MB.

PicMarkr - Upload

If you’re a Flickr user, you can also grant PicMarkr permission to login and grab images directly from your Flickr account. Sweet.

Step Two - Set Watermark

Once PicMarkr has your image(s), it’s time to create and set your watermark. You have three choices here:

Text

Checking to See if Packages are Installed in PHP or PerlNovember 27

I have this love/hate thing with open source technology. It’s great that it’s free, bugs are openly discussed instead of hidden away, and ultimately I think the open source technologies are more robust.

But here’s what always gets me: the packages and their dependencies.

Perl

At the bash prompt, you can type:
perl -e 'use Some::Package'

If the package is installed, nothing will happen. The one line script executes without complaint. But if you DON’T have that package installed, you’ll get an error like this:
Can't locate Some/Package.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi
[...]
/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8 .) at -e line 1.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at -e line 1.

If that’s the case, you need to find and install that package. With Perl, the way to go is to get familiar with www.cpan.org — yes, it’s a fugly site, but you can search for packages and read up on them. If you want to download them, I recommend using the CPAN command line tool. You run this utility by simply typing cpan on the bash command line. Take the time to understand this utility! It will save you SO MUCH TIME.

PHP

PHP is nowhere near as verbose as Perl when it comes to error messages and debugging; it’s also a bit more mysterious when it comes to its package struc

Fix Common Fedora 10 Linux IssuesNovember 27

I’m a big fan of Fedora Linux and have been a user since the Red Hat days. I cut my Linux teeth on Fedora Core 1 (I still have the install discs). Though I’ve tried many other distros, I tend to return to Fedora.

Fedora 10 was released a few days ago. I just installed it, and decided to address a few common issues typical users may face. A few of you may remember that I did the same thing for Fedora Core 6. Here we go.

For the purposes of this guide, I’m using GNOME on an i686 machine.

Add the RPM Fusion Repository

First and foremost, install the RPM Fusion repository to gain access to a lot more software. You can do it graphically or via the command line (please see their configuration page). Copy and paste the following code into the Terminal:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

Don’t skip this step. It makes most of the other steps much simpler. Many of the remaining steps will also utilize the command line, but if you prefer a gr

µTorrent Mac Beta Finally ReleasedNovember 27

I just received this e-mail from the μTorrent Mac Team:

Psst…

You asked us to tell you about µTorrent Mac developments.

The beta is out. It’s Leopard and Intel only right now, but we’re working
to expand support soon.

Get it here: mac.utorrent.com/beta

Remember it’s beta software, so there may be bugs and annoyances. Please
help us make it better by contributing to the conversation in the forums
(forum.utorrent.com).

- The µTorrent Mac Team

This is great news. µTorrent is an excellent torrent client on Windows, and I’m excited to give it a try on Mac OS X. Yes, it’s still a beta, but I look forward to seeing how it compares to my reigning favorite client - Transmission.

0.9.0 is the current version.

Here’s the main screen:

And some Bandwidth preferences: