Today I received email about closing Yahoo! Photos:
For some time now we’ve supported two great photo sharing services, Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to focus all our efforts on Flickr – the award winning photo sharing site that Time Magazine has even called “completely addictive.”
I don’t have any photos on Yahoo! Photos. So, it isn’t something important for me. It was clearly from the beginning when Yahoo! bought Flicrk that only one of the two – Flickr or Yahoo! Photos will be alive! My prediction was that it’ll be Flickr 
I upgraded Smart Home Blog to the latest version of WordPress 2.2. As usual the upgrade procedure is extremely easy. But there were a few troubles with that version.
1. Dashboard didn’t work properly. It gave a error
You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/index-extra.php on this server.
The solution is to create a file .htaccess in the directory wp-admin and add there following lines:
GeSHi Error: GeSHi could not find the language conf (using path /var/www/vhosts/stepanoff.org/htdocs/wordpress//wp-content/plugins/codesnippet/lib/geshi/) (code 2)
2. I use excellent plugin Flickr Photo Album which allows to insert photos from Flickr into your posts. So, after upgrade the image upload form disappeared.
Solution: change the line 208 from wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/class-admin.php
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if (!ereg(’^2.1′, get_bloginfo(’version’))) {
to
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if (!ereg(’^2.2′, get_bloginfo(’version’))) {
3. Post preview area was removed. Instead of that the new link ‘Preview’ was added right after form controls. It opens the post in the new window. IMHO, this is not the best improvement in that version. Personally, I prefer the old preview functionality.
Yesterday Movavi launched Movavi Online – a web-based service that enables users to convert video from one format to another for sharing, podcasting, cellphones, iPods, and more. The service is free but with some limits such no DVD ripping, no merging many video files to one, no possibility to improve uploaded video by apply special filters and tools. But you may get those features and more just setup paid account.
The service supports a range of popular video formats, including AVI, MP4, MPEG 2 (PAL and NTSC), MPEG 4, iPod at 320×240, iPod 5G at 640×480, PSP, 3gp and 3gp2 for cellphones, MOV for podcasting, and FLV Flash video.
From companion sites Movavi also offers at no charge six different widgets with which bloggers, designers, developers, individuals and companies may embed a line of code in order to offer video conversion services from their own Web sites, blogs and social networking pages.
Recently I spend some time to find video converter to convert my video from one format to another. Finally I found some shareware tool for Windows but it was not perfect. Let’s image you’re Mac OS or Linux user (I don’t speak about MPlayer ). So, era online services and tools is coming quickly!
Recently Google announced a Linux version of its Desktop. It allows to search in local files and internet from one interface. Google Desktop supports many types of files such documents, images, music etc (it takes information from service data I guess). Moreover, you can make a search in your search history (sounds funny – search in the search, but I use that feature often) and GMail. Full list of features is available here.
Google Desktop is multilingual application. So, you may use it with your native language. Google Desktop for Linux can be downloaded from here.
Since WiFi is available for home users it’s time to make WiFi network more secure. Daily Cup Of Tech explains how to build WiFi home network with good security. There are four steps which should be done:
1. Locks down the WiFi connection
2. Secures the wireless firewall
3. Restricts Internet access to pre-configured users
4. Segments home computers and servers from wireless users
For more information, please, have a look the article.
KDE4 is gonna be perfect: cool 3D effects, amazing usability, good performance. So, even application crash will look impressive (see picture above). But hope we’ll see that screen very rarely
Twitter is extremely interesting thing in the web world. It can be used both for fun and for serious tasks such home automation. Today I discovered another its application – mosaics. On Twitter Mosaic you may find cool stuff created from Twitter users icons. So, if you use Twitter you can add Twitter Mosaic as a friend and your icon will be presented on the future canvases
If you’d like to control your Linux PC using voice commands than Perlbox Voice is what do you need. It’s a pure Perl application which features:
- Text to speech (Thanks to the Festival speech synthesizer)
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Voice control to open user specified applications. For example, if you say “Web”, the Perlbox-Voice Control will open the browser of your choice.
- Desktop plugins to control your Linux desktop using only your voice. You can switch virtual screens, cycle through desktops, invoke the run dialog, quick lock the screen. Currently there is a plugin for KDE.
- Custom commands are fully supported, and you can add commands on the fly.
- ‘Pseudo Commands’ allow you to enter commands that the speaker should say. For example, if you say “Good morning”, the computer voice could say “And good morning to you”. It’s all up to you.
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The best thing is that you don’t have to train the listening agent. The sphinx2 backend can be used by multiple people on the same machine without reconfiguration. It is also robust to background noise and ambient sound.
- Easy to use and attractive interface built with Perl and Perl-Tk.
- Uses to Festival Speech Synthesizer backend for text to speech and speaking functionality.
