Picasa 3.5 People Name Tagging

One of the most cool features of Picasa 3.5 is the name tagging feature. What Picasa does is go through all of your pictures, identify faces, tries to group them into similar faces, and lets you name the faces, so that later you can find pictures of specific people easily. As this is something that I used to do manually, using the labels, it is going to save me a lot of time in the future.

I’ve been playing with Picasa 3.5 for a couple of days now, and I’m very impressed with how easy it is to find and tag a large number of faces. I already have 4000 labeled pictures of my son, 3000 of my daughter, and a few thousand of various relatives.

The way it works is very nice. You start identifying people. As you identify more pictures for a certain person, Picasa “learns” this and suggests more pictures of the same person. So, for example, if I identified 300 pictures of my son, I already had 800 suggestions for other pictures of my son. You still have to go through these suggestions manually, as there are misses, but this is done very quickly.

Even today, after I think that most pictures of my son and daughter were identified, when I go through the Unnamed list (of 18,000 faces!), I sometimes find pictures of them, identify them, and afterwards Picasa suggests more pictures of them.

So currently I still have to go through 18,000 faces, to ignore the ones that I don’t care to tag. There are were funny moments too, where I have found faces of statues, a drawing on a shirt, people from scanned DVD covers, a sphinx, and so on. This part is going to take some time to complete. There is no quick way to do this, and the pictures are not grouped in high numbers (usually 2 pictures per thumbnail).

There are other new features too, such as integrated geo-tagging, and Adjust Date and Time, which I believe is new, but so far, People Tagging is the best reason, at least for me, to upgrade to the new version.

Internet Explorer Market Share Decline

While checking my humble blog’s statistics, it was very interesting to see how Microsoft IE’s market share declined over the last few months.

At the beginning of the year, the IE visits on my site were at about 50%. Let’s take June for example.

July showed a rather huge decline of about 10%, which went mostly to Firefox.

August had an interesting results – an exact tie (what are the chances of that!).

And now we are in September, and although the month isn’t over yet, I wanted to check the status of this contest. As you can see, currently Firefox has taken the lead. However, Firefox has taken only some of the IE market share, and the other browsers have enjoyed this decline as well.

I know this isn’t an exact science. I don’t have too many visitors, and the sample data in each month is different (luckily I get more visitors these last few months), but still it is saying something.

WeGame - Beware of Spam

Just got a message from wegame.com saying "itai sent you a photo. Want to see the photo?"
As much as I love photos, it seemed to be a little suspicious, so I've searched "wegame" on the web and found some interesting stuff. First of all, if you just search for "wegame" you get their official site, and a few other, safe looking sites. However, if you search for "wegame spam" you get a few more interesting sites. I have not investigated this very thoroughly, but as far as I understand, in order to see the photo you need to sign up, and as part of this process, you may end up emailing everyone on your address book that you have sent them a photo. I don't know how it's done. Perhaps you give them your user name and password for your email, or they may do this in another way.

The main point is that if you get an email from wegame.com, don't click on any link, even if it's from someone you know.

If I'm completely wrong, please let me know.

Cannot Access Amazon Due To Anti-virus

For the last two days, I cannot access amazon.com due to this warning:

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 for Windows Workstations claims that the site is infected with “HEUR:Trojan.Script.Generic”.

That’s annoying.

Adding Pictures to the Windows Desktop Backgrounds in Windows 7

If you like the default Windows 7 backgrounds, but you want to add more pictures to that collection, here is a simple solution:

The Windows Desktop Backgrounds are located in the folder C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper. You can simply create a new folder and place your images under it. Here is an example for a new “Chipset” folder:

The folder in Windows Explorer

The new pictures in the default Windows Desktop Backgrounds

Upgrading from Windows 7 RC to Windows 7 RTM

So, the time has come to upgrade to the final version of Windows 7. Out of the box, you cannot upgrade from RC to RTM. There is a simple hack that enables you to do so, but I decided I wanted a clean install. I still needed to retain my files and settings, and I needed to install Windows on the same hard disk, as the second hard disk contains Vista.

So, I decided to use Easy Transfer to make the transition. I ran Easy Transfer on Win7 RC. I’ve selected all the files and folders that I needed to retain, including program settings. The results was an 8GB file, which I saved on the second hard disk. Afterwards I booted using the Windows 7 RTM install DVD. I ran setup and chose the custom installation. I formatted the Win7 partition, and made a clean install on that partition.

After Windows 7 RTM was installed I ran Easy Transfer. I selected the Easy Transfer file which was created from the RC version, and after a few minutes all of my files and settings were back.

Now I still need to install of my applications. I’ve installed most of them already, and I still need to move files from my Vista installation (which wasn’t used at all since Win7 RC) to Windows 7.

That was an easy transfer!

Wii Internet Channel is now free

I’ve just purchased the Nintendo Wii two days ago, and was disappointed that the Internet Channel provided was only a demo video, and that the real channel isn’t free. Today I was surprised to see that the Internet Channel is now free! Thanks, Nintendo!

As for my Wii experience, my shoulder is sore. I guess I better switch hands.