CyberCoyote — December 10, 2009

NEWS and NOTES
Next week...

we'll have the long anticipated session on Identity Theft and prepaid legal expense at 2:00 PM in NC-2.

guess where
Photo sharing

George showed us three photo sharing services — BlueMelon, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. He was quite enthusiastic about Picasa, the photo editing software, and the way it integrates with Picasa Web Albums and Gmail (they're all Google apps). The latest version of Picasa has some nice new features, in particular tagging with facial recognition. Flickr is nice too — BlueMelon not so much. [more on photo sharing]

Here's my own $0.02 on what to keep in mind about photo sharing: First, how easy will it be for the people who you intend to share photos with to view, download and print your photos? Second, how easy is it to organize and present photos the way you want to show them off.

Pick a couple of services. Use both of them to edit, correct and upload a bunch of pictures. Then share some of them to yourself (via an alias email account). How do you like the way they're presented? Would it be easy for guests to download, print and share the images? Finally, how well did the service serve your own need for editing, organizing and storing your photos? I use Picasa and PhotoWorks myself. If I was a pro I'd probably use Flickr.

TECH TOPICS
Thunderbird

Mozilla worked long and hard on the latest version (3.0) of Thunderbird, the email sibling to Firefox. The most noticeable change is the addition of tabbed messages, much like tabs in a browser. That means that messages (or whole accounts) can be viewed on individual pages. You can have more than one message open, and also be composing an email at the same time. [download v3.0]

Thunderbird 3.0 makes it very easy to connect with email accounts — Gmail in particular. No more fussing with servers, server settings, etc. Just supply your username and password and it's done. Not only that, but it uses the professional IMAP interface, not POP, so your webmail and Thunderbird interfaces are fully synchronized. [more] [more yet]

I use the portable version of Thunderbird because everything — the program, and all your messages, contacts and settings — are contained in one folder. That makes it easy to backup your email, or move the whole enchilada to another computer.

Windows 7

Now online: my updated notes for the 7 Secrets of Windows 7 presentation series, plus clippings (with links to original articles) about upgrading and moving to Windows 7.

ODDS and ENDS
They don't make 'em like they used to.

There were once more than forty thriving jazz bands in Kansas City. Here's a tribute to one of the immortals who played there from time to time.

I give you Mr. Coleman Hawkins, the man for whom Mr. Aldo Sax invented his horn. —some unremembered impresario

[warmup session]

Authorized repairs...

stop those nuclear leaks — outdoor rated.

That's all, folks.