Memories on the Cloud

The Cloud companies are competing for end users for allowing them to use their services to store their memories(mostly photos/videos) in the Cloud (Ahem! remote harddisks that scale). Its the era of the cloud and sharing.

Pictures are the fastest way to capture a moment. A picture is worth a 1KB of words (but sized about a few MB). Sharing and saving photos, videos are getting famous and easy with cloud storage from each of Adobe, Amazon, Google, Dropbox along with Flickr (now providing free 1TB of storage). Google Glass makes it very easy to snap photos. (Article on Wired). (Don’t forget to read through the most boring parts of Disclaimer and T&C before using services).

Adobe Revel::

Pricing: Free | $5.99/Month – Unlimited Photo Upload during 1st month

Works On: Mac, iDevices, Web

Uses: Amazon EC2 servers

Amazon CloudDrive::

Pricing: Free (5GB) | $10/year (20 GB) | $25/year (50GB) | $50/year (100 GB)  | $100/year (200 GB) | more …

Works on: Android, Mac, Web

Flickr::

Free 1TB of space (1000/1024 GB) (with Ads when browsing)- Announced on 21 May 2013

Pricing: Free | $49/year | $499/year

Works on: Web

Dropbox::

Free 3GB or 5GB space for photos/videos – Announced early 2012

Pricing: Free 2GB + 250MB/invite | $9.99/month (100 Gigs) | $19.99/month (200 Gigs) | $49.99 ( 500 Gigs )

Works on: Web, Android, iDevices, Desktop

PicasaWeb / Google+ Photos::

Pricing: Free with 5GB / 15 GB (15 GB now with Google Drive) | $4.99/month (100Gigs) | $9.99/month (200 Gigs)

Works on: Web

Box ::

(Nothing special for multimedia content as per advertisement)

Pricing: 5GB Free | $9.99/month (25 GB) | $19.99/month (50GB)

Works on: Web | Windows

Using search engines to identify fake vs real

I was browsing through a forum late last night and I came across a thread that allgedly states ‘Jagan’ built a big house (bigger than that of Ambani’s house in Mumbai) . There is some investing that is ongoing on the ownership and the money behind it. That topic is out of the scope of this blog.

So, the pictures that were posted only have pictures of bedrooms (as identified by one user) and a glance at them made me feel like they belonged to various hotels since there is no single theme(just a thought). I took the url of a picture and put it on tineye ( a reverse image search engine ) . Looking at the results made me realize that the images displayed were fake. 

A reverse image search engine gets the images based on the image as input like Google does it for text. The image is read and it will try to match the image. This is a sample use case.

Google’s First Wallet Customer 🙂 

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

How to fix bookmarklets for broken Google Reader when using multi logins

Fixing the bookmarklets in the ‘Goodies’ tab in Settings Page of Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader/view/#overview-page . It’s broken for users using multi login. 

javascript:if%20(typeof(_IS_MULTILOGIN_ENABLED)==’undefined’){var%20_IS_MULTILOGIN_ENABLED=false};var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain=’http://www.google.com’;if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(‘script’));void(z.src=’http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js’);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}

Note in Reader » (Drag link into bookmark bar)

 javascript:if%20(typeof(_IS_MULTILOGIN_ENABLED)==’undefined’){var%20_IS_MULTILOGIN_ENABLED=false};var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain=’http://www.google.com’;if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(‘script’));void(z.src=’http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js’);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{location=’http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)}

Subscribe… (Drag link into bookmark bar) 

Information borrowed from some google groups forum.

Email Aliases save the day!

Till date, I have been trying to get mail to all of my users ( for some, users I have not authorized ) and talk about the bloddy spam mails in Russian from Pakistani servers. Accidentally, found out that there was an option/feature to ‘add email aliases to existing users’ after using Google Apps for good 3.5 years . For one thing, I feel stupid, for the other, I feel happy. Now its just aliases and filters baby !

Email Aliases save the day!

experts exchange hack

Technical questions(for computers) searched on google usually point to experts-exchange.com (i would give a 50-50 chance for this site to appear in the top 10 links when searched via Google) is a site which has the experts who exchange solutions, which requires registration which is not necessarily cheap.

So, how would you view the solution ? Solution is as simple as seeing it from Google.

You use the Google’s cache. Using Google’s cache illegal ? No, of course not, its been provided by Google for free. Experts-exchange is identifying Google bot when requested for a webpage content and responding with the actual data that is not shown to a normal user unless registered. You might need to scroll down to the end of the huge categories section to find the actual solution in experts-exchange. Pretty cool ha !

If you want to view a cached page that is present with Google, simple use “cache:http://blog.sair.am/” in Google Search

Happy Hacking !