Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Stop Picasa from Filling Your Hard Disk with Unwanted Screenshots [Picasa]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5520271/stop-picasa-from-filling-your-hard-disk-with-unwanted-screenshots

Stop Picasa from Filling Your Hard Disk with Unwanted ScreenshotsPicasa is a great photo manager with loads of features and a very high ease-of-use factor. If you regularly take screenshots however, you've likely noticed an annoying "feature"—a disk-gobbling screenshot function you can't turn off. Let's fix that.

Whenever Picasa is open if you press the "print screen" button to snap a screenshot with another screenshot application, Picasa will double up on the effort and save a roughly 2MB BMP file in the folder /My Documents/Picasa/Screen Captures/. There is no toggle in the Picasa options menu to turn this feature off—or make any adjustments to it for that matter—when Picasa is running it will always snap screenshots. Sure you could "solve" this problem by always turning Picasa off when you want to snap screenshots or map your favorite screenshot application's hot key to another key besides "print screen" but both of those solutions are hardly ideal.

I initially sought to remedy this problem simply because it annoyed me. I hated the little Picasa screenshot notification popping up in the lower right side of the screen every time I used my other screenshot app. It wasn't until I actually found a solution and went to delete the screenshots that Picasa had been taking all this time that I found Picasa had chewed up nearly 7GB of disk space with useless screenshots. The following hack will disable the screenshot function in Picasa and halt the build up of disk-hogging BMP files.

A bit more detail for XP Pro/Vista Pro [Ed. Note: Works fine in Windows 7]
1. Locate the screen shot folder that Picasa creates. Something like My Docs\Pictures\Picasa\Screen Captures
2. Right Click on it > Properties >Security Tab
3. Goto Advanced > Then in the permissions tab click Edit.
4. Un-check the "Include inheritable permissions from this objects parent"
5. A pop up will ask you if you want to do this and if you want to copy or remove the permissions. In this case you want to "remove" them.
6. Apply everything and check that you no longer have access to the folder.

Some info for Xp Home/Vista Home
1. Goto this link on information about how to get a security tab, so you can edit these settings. The easiest is to boot into safemode.
2. Follow the directions for XP Pro.

When you're done the permissions menu should look like this:

Stop Picasa from Filling Your Hard Disk with Unwanted Screenshots

Once you remove Picasa's ability to use the "Screen Capture" folder it simply gives up on taking screenshots—problem solved! If you ever want to use the screenshot feature in the future just reverse the steps, adding permission to access the folder instead of taking it away. Thanks Jeffery Klassen!

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Winscape Turns Your HDTV into a Window [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5520386/winscape-turns-your-hdtv-into-a-window

Mac: You know the movie version of the future where instead of real windows, we've got virtual ones that offer beautiful views of anything we want? Application Winscape pairs your Wiimote with a flat panel TV (or two) to do just that.

It's a seriously geeky project, and it's one that would require a pretty big commitment, but the results, which you can see in the video above, are actually incredibly impressive. The app is free to try, and costs $10 if you want to stick with it after 30 runs.

Winscape Turns Your HDTV into a Window

Hit up the Winscape homepage for more details on this crazy but cool project (including how they built it). You'd be crazy to replace an actual view with a virtual one, but this seems like the perfect (if impractical) project for a window-less room—if you're sitting on a pile of cash, that is.

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Universities Banning iPads Left, Right and Center Due to Bandwidth Overload [Ipad]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5520120/universities-banning-ipads-left-right-and-center-due-to-bandwidth-overload

Universities Banning iPads Left, Right and Center Due to Bandwidth OverloadYou'd think iPads might be banned by schools because they distract students, but George Washington University and Princeton University have both put the kibosh on them because their Wi-Fi networks are way overloaded since the launch.

Bandwidth overload is a problem we've all encountered, but you've got to really feel sorry for those students trying to access internet—for proper school reasons—from their laptops, but are booted off because all their peers have now got 'Pads.

Princeton University has blocked around 20 per cent of iPads from being able to access the network, and George Washington doesn't support any Apple products, apparently. Cornell University's information-technology director Steve Schuster said they had similar problems when the iPhone launched, but is "working to ensure the iPad does not have devastating consequences to our network."

This comes after an entire country banned the iPad: Israel has found that the iPad's Wi-Fi broadcasting works at higher levels than is normally accepted in Israel. [Fudzilla via TechRadar]

Image Credit: Jesman

UPDATE: Commenter Cintax has pointed us towards this Princeton report, which explains the problem they have with iPads on campus (22 of the 41 iPads, to be precise) are related to DHCP client malfunctions, which causes interference with other devices.

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The Page: An E-Ink Newspaper That Won't Smudge Your Fingers [Eink]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5520154/the-page-an-e+ink-newspaper-that-wont-smudge-your-fingers

The Page: An E-Ink Newspaper That Won't Smudge Your FingersFor some reason I'm skeptical that the one thing keeping newspaper readers from switching to E-Ink readers is the form factor, but that doesn't make this semi-transparent E-Ink newspaper display concept any less cool.

The key word, of course, is concept, but flexible/foldable displays aren't anything new. Nor are interactive content or E-Ink. It's bringing these concepts together in a workable package that might take some time. Meanwhile, though, here's how it would ideally work (without all the wobbly images):

I like it! Except what's with all this New York Times business? Show me what Garden and Gun looks like on this bad boy. Then we'll talk. [Cargo Collective via Design Boom]

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Apple's 4th-generation iPhone revealed

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/19/apples-4th-generation-iphone-revealed/

Well, we told you so. The fourth-generation iPhone prototype that leaked its way out into the world over the weekend has found its way to Gizmodo, and they've examined it exhaustively enough to prove that it's the real thing. Not only does it show up in iTunes, Xcode, and System Profiler, but it has different product identifiers than the 3G or 3GS, and it's packed with Apple-labeled components inside. Unfortunately, they couldn't get it to boot out of recovery mode, but a number of new features and changes are evident just by holding it. Obviously, it's thinner than the 3GS, with smaller internal components and a larger battery inside the metal frame. There's also a front-facing camera, a larger and better camera with a flash on the back, a higher-res display that's slightly smaller than the current models, a second mic for noise cancellation, and that new back, which Giz seems a bit confused about but we're fairly sure is glass or ceramic. It's also three grams heavier than a 3GS, with a 16 percent larger battery and the same new MicroSIM slot used in the iPad.

We're also told the phone was found running iPhone OS 4.0 but that it was remotely killed before Giz could actually see it, and that they can't get it to boot because it requires a bespoke build of the OS. We're assuming Apple's hot on the trail of this thing, so hit the source link while you can and check a couple more pics after the break.

Continue reading Apple's 4th-generation iPhone revealed

Apple's 4th-generation iPhone revealed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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