Hi there! :)
As you might have already noticed, all the photos used in this blog are stored in Picasa Web albums which was the photo service that, in my opinion, is the winner in a Flickr vs Picasa battle (see the Picasa/Flickr comparison post here). However, I don't have Picasa installed and sometimes I just have the need to download an entire album. An option would be to download the photos, one by one, but, gladly, there is an easy workaround to get a complete album. :)

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)
To do the workaround that I'm going to describe you'll need to have two programs installed: Mozilla Firefox and the Firefox extension DownthemAll. In a short way, here's what you have to do:
  1. Install Mozilla Firefox;
  2. Install the Firefox extension DownthemAll;
  3. Go to the page of the Picasa album that you wish to download and click the RSS link on the right;
  4. When the RSS page opens, add "&imgmax=d", without quotes, to the end of the URL and then reload the page. Doing this will allow you to download the images in their original sizes.
  5. Right click anywhere in the page, select DownThemAll and then the Links tab. The Pictures and Media stuff are just thumbnails.
  6. Make sure the JPEG images filter is selected, choose the destination folder and click Start
After this process you should have the entire album being downloaded into your hard drive. Easy, isn't it? :)

Take care! :)



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Zeitgeist-daemon using all the CPU

Hi there! :)
Some time ago I had a problem in my Ubuntu installation. All of a sudden, I had some weird process using all the CPU, causing the computer to become really slow and hot and making the laptop fans go crazy. Since I use conky, I quickly verified that the weird process causing all of it was zeitgeist-daemon. Zeitgeist-daemon is a process that keeps track of activities on your system (file usage, browser history, calendar events, etc.) and logs them into a central database. It does not only create a chronologic register, but also supports tagging and can establish relationships between activities.
Maybe due to some buggy update it went nuts and was keeping the whole CPU busy.
I tried to kill the process but it would just show up again and keep doing the same.
To temporarily disable it I had to perform a few steps (source):
  1. Add the Zeitgeist PPA to the system:
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeitgeist/ppa
    
  2. Install the latest version of Zeitgeist:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade
    
  3. Restart zeitgeist-daemon
    zeitgeist-daemon --replace
  4. Install activity-log-manager
    sudo apt-get install activity-log-manager
    
  5. Open activity-log-manager and click the "Logging active button" in the bottom right corner of the window to disable logging.
(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)
After disabling it in the activity-log-manager, all the problems were gone and everything was working as desired again :) .
If desired, it can be turned on again by clicking the same button.
It happened some time ago and I have reinstalled Ubuntu in the meantime and I have zeitgeist-daemon turned on ever since and never got the same problem again. I guess it was just due to a buggy update. Anyway, if it happens to you, now you know how to fix it :) .

Take care! :)



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Steve Jobs Biography: must read!

Hi! :)
This post is going to be a little different from the usual posts. This time I'll make a short post about an excellent book that I've just finished reading: the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.
And before you think it, no, I'm not an Apple fanboy nor I am against it. I've been using linux for some years now and I will keep myself as being a proud linux user :P. I enjoy my freedom to do whatever I want with my computer and the feeling of being learning something new (almost) every time I use my computer. :) I will not enter the "Apple vs Window$ vs Linux" domain since this post is about a great book, not about the typical flame wars that flood the internet every day.


Sticking to the title of this post, if you like technology, computing, innovation, and leadership, then you should definitely read this book. Although the name of the book is the biography of Steve Jobs, it is much more than that. You even forget it is a man's biography because it features lots of cool things such as the history of modern personal computers, music players and cell phones. By reading it you'll get to know how it all started, who were the creators and the geniuses behind the great innovations that led to existence of the device that you're using to read this blog today.

Making a Siemens C55 Data Cable

Hi! Recently I've been developing a GSM access control system for eLab Hackerspace using an old Siemens C55 cell phone and, as such, I needed a data cable to connect it to a PIC microcontroller. I searched on ebay for one but it turned out that they were a little expensive and I began thinking about a way to make myself a data cable.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)
Luckily, after searching for a while in my "old power supplies box" (a box where I store all the old phone chargers and power supplies), I found two chargers for old Siemens phones, having the connector that I needed. However, I quickly realized that they only had the VCC and GND pins and I needed a connector with Tx and Rx pins too.
Since I had two chargers I decided to try to modify the connector of one of them to add two more pins and it worked perfectly! :)

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