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Email: Make your Inbox to Zero

Organizing Digital Photos

Lifehacker carries a very informative and detailed look at the various ways folks use to organise their photographs for storage and for viewing.The article is linked to Organize photos with your OS in 5 easy steps- DLS Imaging Tip by Download Squad

Digital photography makes for a lot of photographs and to add to that the pictures that emanate from the the ever feature-ful camera phones (I have a Sony Ericsson w810i), really shoots up the picture count. At last count Picasa showed for year 2006, a whopping total of 3996. Whoa!! This is briefly the way I have organised my pictures.

I recently bought the SimpleTech 160GB NAS hard drive and forthwith organised and stored my 2006 pictures there, accessible via password security from any computer on my network. With a printer USBed to the NAS, printing is a cinch.

Organiser/Viewer:
I have Picasa installed on my computer. The Picasa install points to the ‘Photo’ folders on the NAS drive for a ‘scan once’. If you have more than one computer, as in a home network, you will need to install Picasa on all computers and have each install point to the folders mentioned.

Storage:
The storage folders are organised by Year. And then sub-folders based on the date of the series of pictures.
Subfolders are named [YYYYMMDD][Event].
A further label can be added, if required. [Camera] clearly indicates, which camera was used or the name of the person who actually shot the picture. Eg: [20061231][New Year’s Eve Party]

So the file path would as:
NAS Drive > Photos > 2006 > [20061231][New Year’s Eve Party] or
NAS Drive > Photos > 2006 > [Canon IS2][20061231][New Year’s Eve Party] or
NAS Drive > Photos > 2006 > [JoeBlogg][20061231][New Year’s Eve Party]

My edited – Photoshopped/Gimped – pictures get into a separate folder under each year named: [20060101][Misc]. (amazing word that, ‘Misc’, huh?)

EXIF Data Editor:
I make sure the Exif data is correct. This helps in Picasa organising the pictures in the correct chronological order.

For older photos or photos from the kids’ cameras where the date may not be in sync, I used ‘Exifer‘ to edit the EXIF data.

Organising the photos in a chronological order also helps in keeping a sort of photo-journal of events that took place in each of the family members’ lives. This also makes it very easy to create the customary ‘ooh and aaah’ – value photobooks around the end of the year. A personal family yearbook of sorts.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ll troddle along and sort, organise and store my 2005 photos.

Virus / Trojan Warning!

Submitted by: Rakesh
On: July 26, 2007

Hello all,

Recently there have been many emails that have been flying around, supposed to be ecards from Buzzle.com. DO NOT FOLLOW THE LINK and try to open the ecards. By opening the link, you will be letting a Trojan Horse (Virus) into your computer, which can cause a lot of damage and security issues.

The email your will receive will be as per the following image:

The link in the email – http://www.buzzle.com/cards…… – actually leads to another site = http://buzzle.e-colorcard…..
(i am not putting in full links since some of you may accidently click to check the site and without a good anti-virus software, would then download the Trojan Horse). When you click that link and go to the ‘alternative’s site, a software program is automatically triggered to start and it will then download the Trojan Horse into your computer.

I have no one in my address book who I would expect to send me an ecard. With suspicion, I followed the link. I have an efficient anti-virus software (http://www.avast.com ) so I knew that my computer will not be infected.

PLEASE NOTE:
I have looked at the buzzle.com site and it appears to be a legitimate and genuine site. What appears to have happened is that some malicious people have created a copy of the site – a clone – making people think it is a genuine site, just so that when you click through the link, you believe it to be safe. This is called ‘Phishing’.

Phishing:
In computing, phishing is the act of attempting to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business with a real need for such information in a seemingly official electronic notification or message (most often an email, or an instant message). It is a form of social engineering attack

On clicking the link, by anti-virus software, as expected, detected a Trojan Horse (see information below). Clicking the link was letting the site download a small file – a program (it ends with .exe; in the image below it is the filename) that can potentially cause a lot of harm to the computer and also cause a security issue, by being able to transmit the keys that are pressed when you enter any online passwords, pin numbers or security codes, especially during online purchases with credit cards and while doing online banking.

Here is the image of the virus warning:

Here is some information:

Trojan Horse:
What’s a Trojan Horse virus?
A Trojan Horse is an email small program (virus) usually released by an email attachment. If opened, it will scour your hard drive for any personal and financial information such as your social security, account, and PIN numbers. Once it has collected your info, it is sent to a thief’s database.

Trojan Horse cannot be considered the same as a virus. Virus has the ability to infect a computer, replicate, and then with files being transferred between computers, carry on infecting a whole network of computers.

A Trojan is a program that appears to be legitimate, but in fact does something malicious. Quite often, that something malicious involves gaining remote, surreptitious access to a user’s system. Unlike viruses, a Trojan does not replicate (i.e. infect other files), nor does it make copies of itself as worms do.
Virus:
A computer virus attaches itself to a program or file so it can spread from one computer to another, leaving infections as it travels.
Much like human viruses, computer viruses can range in severity.

Worm:
A worm is similar to a virus by its design, and is considered to be a type of a virus.
Worms spread from computer to computer, but unlike a virus, it has the capability to travel without any help from a person. A worm takes advantage of file or information transport features on your system, which allows it to travel unaided.
The biggest danger with a worm is its capability to replicate itself on your system, so rather than your computer sending out a single worm, it could send out hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, creating a huge devastating effect.

The Trojan Horse imaged above may just be harmless, but then, I would not be willing to take the risk to find out.

Please take care of which emails you open and which links you follow.
No bad luck or good luck will trouble you if you do not forward this email to anyone. Should you consider it ‘forwardable’ it can only help in letting people know and be aware.

Rakesh

Dealing and Cleaning up FWDs – Forwarded email

All of us constantly get FWDs in our email inbox practically daily. Have you noticed these emails besides the content? Most forwards (FWDs) that are received give out more information that necessary and also are pretty untidy and cluttered. This only makes the receiver not really pay attention to the FWDs and put it in the ‘read it later’ or ‘delete’ section!

Some tips on how to deal with FWDs before forwarding them on to others:

• Within the message that you received, delete all the email addresses. Share the message, not the email addresses!
• Remove any unusual and unnecessary symbols like ‘>’. This can be a little tedious and will require a little patience, depending on the length of the email message.
• In the subject box, remove all those ‘FWD:’ labels, Eg: FW: Fwd: FW: The Bracelet should be changed to: The Bracelet
• Send the message to yourself. In the TO: box insert your own email address. This way the FWD message will be sent back to you.
• Add the email addresses of people you want to forward to: Add these addresses in the BCC: box. This is the Blind Carbon Copy. Each receipient of the forward will only see the TO: (which will be your own email address) and his/her own address as the receiving email. All the rest of the email addresses are hidden.

If you carry out the above steps before sending out the FWDs, you will send out clean, tidy, pleasing to read email FWDs. More importantly, you will also safeguard email addresses of other people, who really may not wish their email addresses to be advertised to the whole internet world. As these FWDs with the email addresses zoom around the WWW, the email addresses are picked up automatically to send out SPAM messages to.

A few steps worth taking?