Picasa 3 !!

Picasa 3 is the latest release of the software from Google, and comes as a much amped up successor to Picasa 2.7. Some features have been added, and some functions have been changed. Overall, it is an improvement, with a markedly better upload (a lot less failures), some nifty new features, but a slightly bugging and confusing interface. It is a pain to add pictures, the automatic scanning goes haywire on your hard drive (we recommend not setting Picasa 3 loose on your hard drive to scan the folders automatically), and adding folders manually mysteriously fails from time to time. However, the hosting facility is one of the best free ones around, so this is taking you through some of the interesting stuff you can do with the software.

View All Portraits

This is a really interesting feature in Picasa. You can view all the photos across all the albums with faces. To the left of the search bar, on the top, click on the face icon. Click on the icon again to get out of this mode, or click on ‘back to view all’. This is a filter, the other filter for photographs available is all the pictures that are starred.

Upload A Slideshow To YouTube

Select the ‘Movie’ button in the bottom bar of Picasa. The first slide will be a text slide to introduce the slideshow. Rearrange the photos, add captions, select a music, select the transitions, and preview the slideshow a few times. Once you are done, click on save movie, and then use the YouTube upload button in the interface to put the movie on YouTube. Needless to say, you need to have a Google account and an Internet connection for this feature to work.

Sync Picasa3 Software And Web Albums

On the top right corner, above the album or folder is the sync button. Using this feature automatically saves all changes you have made to your copy of the album to the version of the album on Picasa. This works for changes to the file, the tags, and photos added or deleted to the album. This does not work for re-ordering the photos around in the album and changes made to the file names.

Touch Up Photos

This is used to remove spots from the surface of the lense, artefacts caused due to dust particles or water droplets, and scratches and dust from old photographs.

Double-click on an image once it is added to an album. Under the ‘Basic fixes’ tag, select ‘Retouch’. Use the ‘Brush size’ slider to select a brush size. Ideally, you should select a brush size a little larger than the size of the artefact you are trying to remove. Click once on the blot, and click to a similar place elsewhere in the picture. The smaller the brush size, the less noticeable the patch up will be. Hovering over different parts of the picture, you should see the blot getting covered up. You can undo a bad patch in this window itself. Once you are done fixing everything, click on apply.

If you want to undo your changes, you cannot automatically redo them.

Screencapture Album

As long as Picasa is running, taking a screenshot of the screen using the [Print Screen] button will save the image and add it to Picasa.

Improve All Your Photos

This feature works to different degrees of effectiveness for different photos, but is one of those buttons that looks like magic. If you trust Google more than your photography skills, select an album go to Picture > Batch Edit > I’m feeling lucky. There is no explanation for exactly what this does to your photos, but some photos were improved, some were horribly damaged. Copy all your files to another folder before you try this though, before something goes horribly wrong.

Collage

The collage view in Picasa is a interesting little feature to give previews for your Web albums. On top of the folder or album, next to the play slideshow button, is the Make Collage button. Click on this button, and you will be taken to the collage window. The default collage option is the picture pile, with three border settings, no border, white border, and instant camera border. If your pictures are captioned, the captions will show up next to the photos in the collage. There are five other collage options available, mosaic, frame mosaic, grid, contact sheet and multiple exposure. The mosaic arranges pictures in blocks of random sizes. The frame mosaic displays one image in the centre, and frames it with the other photos. The grid and contact sheet have cells of equal sized images, and the multiple exposure mosaic is a strange option to superimpose all the images in an album on top of one another. Do not use this option even by mistake in an album or folder with a lot of photos unless you want to crash your computer.

Search For Photos By Colour

This is an experimental feature in Picasa 3, that lets you search for all the photos with a color scheme. Google searches for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple and BW photos. We wish they would have included a colour picker for this feature. Go to Tools > Experimental, and search for and click a colour. The orange search returns everything from red to yellow. The green and blue searches are most accurate. The black and white searches returns all pale and grey colors, not photos that are strictly black and white.

Customise The Bottom Toolbar

Picasa 3 allows you to remove the rarely used features from the bottom toolbar. Go to Tools > Configure buttons, then remove, add or re-order the buttons as per your requirements and save the settings.

Get Rid Of Duplicate Files

To get rid of duplicate files, go to Tools > Experimental > Show duplicate files. Then select one copy of the files and press the delete button.

Copy protect your photos

To automatically add a watermark to all the photos you upload to Picasa, go to Tools > Options and then select the ‘Web albums’ tab. Check the ‘Add a watermark for all photo uploads’ checkbox and edit the text in the field. The photos uploaded to Picasa will have the watermark, but the photos on your disk will be untouched.

Adding A Watermark To All Photos

To automatically add a watermark to all the photos you upload to Picasa, go to Tools > Options and then select the ‘Web albums’ tab. Check the ‘Add a watermark for all photo uploads’ checkbox and edit the text in the field. The photos uploaded to Picasa will have the watermark, but the photos on your disk will be untouched.

gOOgle Chrome !!

Google Chrome is another milestone in Google’s grand plans of world domination — and they are finding very few people who complain. Chrome is an extremely fast and lightweight browser. It packs in a ton of features in a minimal interface, and introduces some novel ideas to the whole idea of browsing. The top bar and the menu bar have been omitted completely, leaving a rather large space for browsing.

Inspect Memory Usage

Chrome has some advanced options for inspecting memory usage. Right-click on the browser tab in the start bar select ‘Task Manager’. You will get a window showing how much memory is being used by each tab in the browser. Now click on ‘Stats for Nerds’ and a new tab will open in the browser, with a process ID, name of the site, memory and virtual memory usage. The great thing about this feature is that if you are using other browsers at the same time, then the tab shows the memory usage by that browser as well.

Bookmarks

To bookmark a page, click on the star icon next to the address bar. To access the list of bookmarks at any point of time during browsing, key in [Ctrl] + [B]. To make it disappear, use the same shortcut again.

Incognito Mode

Chrome has a secret mode that allows you to surf the Web anonymously. On the top right corner of the browser, to the right of the address bar is the page control button. Click on it and select ‘New incognito window’ or [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [N]. The sites surfed using this mode will not appear in the history, and the cookies they store on the system will be deleted as soon as the tab is closed.

Make Google Chrome Your Default Browser

Click on the ‘Customize and Control Google Chrome’ button to the right of the address bar, click on ‘Options’ and under ‘Default browser’ click on the ‘Make Google Chrome my default browser’ button.

Navigation Tips

Right-click on the back and next buttons to go through a recent history of visited Web sites. Drag and drop any tab from the browser into the desktop to start a browser with just that tab open. To open a tab you have just closed by mistake, use the keys [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [T]. Use [Ctrl] + [1] to [9] to cycle through tabs from the keyboard.

Expand Text Boxes

This is a very useful feature for use in any kind of site that requires you to fill in text in a text area. When you come across a text area in a forum or a form in a Web site, just click on the bottom right corner of the text area, click and drag it as per your requirements.

Inspect Memory Usage By A Site

Right-click on any empty space in the Web page, click on inspect element. This is, by the way, how you view the source code of a site on Chrome. Once here, click on the first line of the HTML code, which will effectively select the entire site. Then click on resources. This shows up the usage of memory by each element in the Web page. You can sort the elements by time or by size. If you reload the page, every image and script on the page shows up in the graph and gets plotted in real time.

Double clicking on folder or drive opens search !!

This type of problem normally occurs because some virus called ‘PET32.exe’ , or it can also occur due some other virus which disrupt the windows registry.
Fix:
If search opens when you double click on folder in windows explorer, then see the fix below:
We need to repair some registry entry damaged by virus corresponding to windows shell. Follow either of the steps below:
First :
1. Open Start >> Run or press Window Key + r , this will open the run prompt.
2. Type “regedit” ( without quotes ) and press Enter.
3. Navigate to key
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell
4. Double the registry key named Default and set the value to none.
This will restore the normal windows explorer behavior of opening a folder when you double click a folder rather than opening windows search.

Second :
1. Open Start >> Run or press Window key + r
2. Type “regsvr32 /i shell32.dll” ( without quotes ) and press Enter
After the command run successfully, you will see a message saying DllRegisterServer and DllInstall in Shell32.dll succeeded.

Drives open in new window on double clicking !!

On double click on any of the drive to open, it opens automatically in new window.
As we all know the expected behaviour is that each drive opens in the same window until a user has explicitly set the option Open Each Folder In Its Own Window. under File menu >> Tools >> Folder Options in General.
Why It drive opens in new window?
It happens when a program or virus tries to edit the File Folder or Drive shell entries to add more context menu items and set them as default for double click action.
Fix:
First Method:
1. Open Start >> Run and type regsvr32 /i shell32.dll
2. press ok
3. You will see a message DllRegisterServer and DllInstall in shell32.dll succeeded
4. that’s it

Second Method:
1. Open Start >> Run and type regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Directory/Shell
3. Double click the default key type none and press ok.

Third Method:
If you don’t want to play with the registry ,you can run the following command instead at
Run Prompt: ( Open Start >> Run )
“reg add hkcr\drive\shell /ve /d none /f” (without double quotes)

Fourth Method :
Its Brontock !! Check out the below post or link http://trickymachine.blogspot.com/2009/03/pc-restart-on-booting.html

PC restart on booting !!

If your PC restart automatically and there after doesnt boots and just restarts again and again :-
Try restarting it in safe mode. Press at startup, and select the safe mode option. Safe mode starts your system with a minimal set of drivers, so you can better troubleshoot your PC.
1) Use System Failure Settings to Stop Automatic Restarts.1. Click Start and Open the Control Panel2. Go to System and Maintenance, Click on System.3. Select Advanced System Settings and choose Advance tab.4. Under Startup and Recovery, click on Settings.5. Under System failure uncheck Automatically restart.

2) It is possible that ur computer is infected with a worm called Brontok and it has reached the peak. If you are willing to format the system, go ahead & it will bring the system back to normal, but if that is not what you want; Download the latest version of Hiren's boot CD from the following urls:
http://rapidshare.com/files/31932355/HBCD9.ziphttp://
www.divshare.com/download/501194-5ea
http://www.sendspace.com/file/cyb97pYou can use any of the download mirrors, the file is like 75mb. when you finish downloading the zip file, extract and u get an iso. file. Get a blank disc and burn the iso. file using nero. the option on nero should be "burn cd image". After burning completes. Boot from cd on the infected computer, the cd offers virus deletion and many other useful utilities. When scanning the computer, select automatically delete all viruses found, this will surely delete some important windows files but will not stop the computer from booting. After that, I would advise you to repair your windows installation using an XP cd.Otherwise; you can install a fresh copy of windows on the same partition as the former windows installation, this will make it possible for your computer to boot and then you can use a brontok cleaner to remove the virus. You can download Brontok cleaners from the following links:
http://www.compactbyte.com/cav/cav-0.91-package.ziphttp://www.gdata.pl/~szczepionki/eng/download/remover.exehttp://www.sophos.com/support/cleaners/brontgui.comhttp://jeruk.padinet.com/~ertanto/software/bw-beta.ziphttp://download.bitdefender.com/resources/files/Download/en/AntiBrontokA-en.exeNOTE; that this brontok washers can only work when you have installed a fresh copy of windows. Remember not to delete the partition or you may loose your data, just install on a different folder.
3) Shut it down completely and check if aftr 15-20 minutes . If it starts normally or in the safe mode then check it out if the problem occurs again .If it does its a hardware problem.Either the fan or the SMPS is corrupted. Get it changed.
4) Check the RAM; if possible use a new one of the same configuration to see if the system will still behave that way. If it does then use the Operating System (Win XP) CD to repair the OS. You can do that by booting from CD and selecting Repair. Try it, it will surely work.

Cyber Stalking

Cyber stalking   involves following a person's movements across the Internet by posting messages (sometimes threatening) on the bulletin boards frequented by the victim, entering the chat-rooms frequented by the victim, constantly bombarding the victim with emails etc.

The behavior also includes false accusations, monitoring, the transmission of threats, identity theft, damage to data or equipment, the solicitation of minors for sexual purposes, and gathering information for harassment purposes. 

Key factors identified :- 
(1) False accusations -  Many cyberstalkers try to damage the reputation of their victim and turn other people against them. They post false information about them on websites. They may set up their own websites, blogs or user pages for this purpose. They post allegations about the victim to newsgroups, chat rooms or other sites that allow public contributions

(2) Attempts to gather information about the victim. Cyberstalkers may approach their victim's friends, family and work colleagues to obtain personal information. They may advertise for information on the Internet, or hire a private detective. They often will monitor the victim's online activities and attempt to trace their IP address in an effort to gather more information about their victims

(3) False victimization -  The cyberstalker will claim that the victim is harassing him/her. Bocij writes that this phenomenon has been noted in a number of well-known cases.

(4) Attacks on data and equipment -  They may try to damage the victim's computer by sending viruses.

(5) Ordering goods and services - They order items or subscribe to magazines in the victim's name.