The Picasa application isn’t really a photo editing tool in my opinion, although it’s got some tools that are nice for the entry-level and home user. What I believe Picasa excels at is organizing and managing your photos and other graphics.

Part of that organization has now become their facial recognition tool. Picasa will start to recognize faces in your photos and then prompt you to tell you who it is. You then tag those photos, similar to how you would in Facebook, and Picasa begins to learn to recognize that same person in other photos.

I was very impressed with how quickly and accurately Picasa was able to accomplish this task. It doesn’t take long to train it, but the more you tweak and adjust, it gets better and better and more accurate.

Now, the next time you need to find a photo with someone in particular, you can go right to it and find exactly what you need.

I wish I could adjust the sensitivity to recognizing the faces though. It will start picking up faces on clothing, billboards and other displays. Perhaps the most frustrating part is when it prompts you to identify all the people in a crowd. That becomes a real big waste of time.

Overall though, I’m very impressed and really enjoying seeing all my photos in a different way now. Organized by person is really interesting.

Post from: EveryJoe

Let Picasa Tell You Who’s In Your Photos

You realize that a Swiss Army knife prides itself on having what you need, when you need and a quality craftsmanship above all else.

You get all of that same great stuff when you have a computer backpack from Wenger. With computer backpacks, at least in my opinion, it’s all about the different pockets to keep things where you need them and ready when the time comes.

I’ve got just about everything in my computer backpack. The laptop of course, power cables, power strip, external hard drives, headphones, cables, notebooks, folders, digital cameras, cords, Flip video, patch cables, spare batteries, pens and much more.

With all of that stuff, my backpack is pretty heavy. Using it everyday, and travelling from client-to-client I’m really rough on my backpack. A few months ago I finally wore a hole through one of my seams in my old backpack and the strap was starting to break down a bit and twist up.

Knowing that I’d had great experience with customer service on my Swiss Army knives, I thought I’d probably be pleased with Wenger too. I wasn’t surprised. Wenger stepped up, helped me find a replacement backpack and got me a replacement at a great price. I continue to be an ongoing happy customer.

Post from: EveryJoe

Wenger Amazing Backpacks and Warranty

The Security Tool malware virus presents itself as a very believable and helpful application. It uses quite a bit of social engineering to make the infected computer’s owner think they should be clicking on approval buttons and icons to let the software do more “help” on their computer.

What makes this even more challenging is that Security Tool actively denies just about any action you take to try and remove the offending application. You’ve really got to do a couple of different steps to make sure everything is removed and doesn’t come back to infect you later.

The best instructions I’ve found in quite some time to remove a virus, are the ones I found on the Bleeping Computer website (great site name by the way!). Step-by-step instructions, and even the suggestion of printing them out so you have them available through the different restarts that may be required. My only suggestion to you would be to read all the way through things first, download everything you need before you start so it’s available just like the printed instructions. Then get to it.

If you’re infected with the Security Tool virus malware and looking for ways to remove it, visit Bleeping Computer and follow their instructions. It worked perfectly for me.

Image: Bleeping Computer website

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Remove the Security Tool Virus

Twitter Analyzer provides details about your activity on Twitter. Including who you follow, who re-tweets your messages, what you’re talking about and just how quickly is your Twitter network growing since you’ve been involved?

The Twitter Analyzer tool provides a quick resource to find all of this information and once you find it, you can share it with your friends and the world just as easily as you might expect.

One of the interesting bits of information that I haven’t seen available from other similar applications is an identification of what tool you were using to use twitter. The web? another application like BrightKite or Foursquare or do most of my tweets come from my mobile phone?

Get a clue to your Twitter experiences and visit Twitter Analyzer to grab those details quickly and easily.

Post from: EveryJoe

Twitter Analyzer Expands Your Twitter Info

This month I’m starting out with two games for iPhone/iPod Touch. I’ve been stressed out this month thus needed a way to unwind and look for something to take my mind off things. Games are the perfect way to do that. I’m not really a hard core gamer I like simple games but those that are challenging as well. Here are my picks for this month.

iPhone/iPod Touch

1. Flight Control (Price: $.99)

Flight Control Screen Cap courtesy of Fire Mint

Easily one of the best games for the iPhone/iPod Touch that I’ve downloaded. Bang for buck it’s a winner. The objective is simple, to land as much planes and helicopters at an airport before you crash one to another. Simple as it sounds it’s quite hard. It’s a game that a broad audience will enjoy. From a child, a 30 something such as myself all the way to a near 60’s person such as my dad. It’s a game that’s simple, easy to understand, quite challenging and it’s not anchored on violence. Each game you play is different offering hours and hours of fun. For $.99 it’s a steal.

2. Plants vs. Zombies (Price: $2.99)

Plants vs. Zombies Screen cap courtesy of Popcap

The hit game from Popcap is now on the iPhone platform. It brings almost the same amount of enjoyment as the desktop version of the game sans some features such as mini games however, Popcap has done a fine job of porting it to the iPhone platform. It’s fun, quirky and a great time waster. The levels are challenging although I do wish that the adventure part was a bit longer. I finished it in a couple of days and was left wanting for more.

Overall it’s a good game at $2.99 it’s not a bargain but it’s also not that expensive. It’s still a great buy for the price.

Mac

1. Autograph ($6.95)

Autograph Screen cap courtesy of Ten One Design

Autograph from Ten One Design is an application that transforms your multi-touch trackpad into a sort of graphic tablet but targeted to generating digital signatures. You essentially use the trackpad if you want to sign an electronic document. In some applications it automatically inserts your signature after you write it.

It’s $6.95 and is reasonably priced for its purpose. Although it does take a bit of getting used to. Up to now I’m still struggling to make a decent signature. However that doesn’t outweigh the fact that I do want to go paperless as much as possible. So if I can keep things electronically as much as possible then I’m all for it.

This also works with Wacom tablets if your Mac doesn’t have a multi-touch trackpads.

So there you go! Those are my app picks for this month. Till next month! Oh, let me know what you guys think.

Post from: EveryJoe

Apple Apps of the Month

As you can read in the screen captures above, it’s the obvious sex and performance subjects of topic that we’re used to receiving in our email Inboxes. The problem now is the increase in activity on the twitter micro-blogging platform.

The two messages I’ve received multiple times today are the following:

hi, i’m 24/female/horny… i have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name Paris455love@hotmail.com

and

hhey, i’ve been having better sex and longer with this here [link removed]

The massive onslaught makes me wonder if these accounts were really hacked, or if someone they’re just being spoofed. Regardless, we don’t need this junk on twitter. I think this sort of thing can start to significantly damage the increasing usage of the service.

If these accounts are being spoofed, if I had to start weeding through messages where 10%+ started being spam, it would impact my ongoing willingness to fire up the service. With the recent release of Google Buzz, timing on can’t be good.

Post from: EveryJoe

Some Significant Twitter Spam Activity Today

If you follow @timer on twitter, you can send yourself little reminders that are set on a schedule and be notified of that item as you need, when you need it.

With the requirements being straight-forward and simple, you’ve got the flexibility to be pretty creative with the reminders. Don’t count on the service to be absolutely precise though. Remember we’re dealing with the intarwebs here, things could get delayed unexpectedly. I guess that should also serve as a bit of a reminder not to use the service for those absolutely crucial reminders, or at least not solely rely on them. You know, the really serious stuff.

I just used it to remind myself to call a restaurant tomorrow to make dinner reservations for the weekend.

So, go follow @timer, and send them a direct message with the number of minutes from now you want to be reminded and what you want to be reminded of at that time. Can’t be much simpler.

Post from: EveryJoe

Use Twitter As A Reminder Service

The gist of the site is that the folks behind the Please Rob Me site take all the updates from Foursquare and post them together in one place. The idea is that along with telling all our friends where we’re at, we’re also broadcasting to the worldwide public where we’re not at that moment… at home.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

I understand the obvious risks, but I’m wondering if we’re maybe blowing this a bit out of proportion? Has there ever been a robbery or home invasion reported that was spurred on because someone checked-in somewhere else at that moment?

Perhaps I should also let people know my wife just might be a stay-at-home-mom, that doesn’t update her geo-location status and knows how to operate a shotgun. Would that help?

Honestly, I think this could be fixed fairly easily. Allow people to only share updates with their friends that they approve and confirm.

What do you think? Should we all stop using these services? Or just stop worrying about every potential thing that might go wrong in our lives.

Post from: EveryJoe

Please Rob Me – The Sky Is Falling

Yesterday I missed the USA vs. Canada hockey game because it was being televised on MSNBC instead of NBC. I’ll probably be talking about my frustration with that in another post I’ll be writing later.

What I discovered today though as I was catching video highlights of the hockey game was something that I though was brilliant! I’m sure other websites have used and the NBCOlympics.com site isn’t the first, but I love their execution.

Within the controls of the video coverage of the events there’s a “BOSS” button you can click that will immediately display a blank Vista desktop with an empty Microsoft Excel spreadsheet displayed instead of the video so you’re not caught watching online video instead of getting that important work done.

Now, I think if they’d put some dummy data in that spreadsheet (like medal counts or something, event sport times) and would identify what operating system you’re using and display the appropriate desktop.

Post from: EveryJoe

Loving the "BOSS" Button on NBC Online Olympics

If you’re reading this and you’re not on twitter, I think the next chance is that you may be involved in business and you’re wondering how you can use twitter and all these other social media tools to improve your business, your personal brand or to just get your message out to more people.

If that’s the case, then you should pick up a copy of my friend Kyle Lacy’s book, “Twitter Marketing for Dummies“. The book takes all those things that are great about all the other for Dummies books and brings you up to speed and above average on twitter.

When you pick up your copy of the book, you’ll be reading chapters on getting started, planning your strategy (yeah, that’s important), measuring your success, reaching customers, and increasing sales. If learning what to do isn’t enough, Kyle even covers a section on all the great tools available to make using twitter and harnessing its power even easier.

I’ll tell you this once, open a new tab in your browser and go purchase a copy of this Twitter Marketing for Dummies by Kyle Lacy. I’ll guarantee you, you’ll learn something that will more than pay for the cost of the book and your time invested in reading it. After all, the price of being a dummy can be far greater.

Post from: EveryJoe

You Should Read Twitter Marketing for Dummies