How to Download all photos from your Picasa account in Ubuntu

Hi! :)

This short post follows my recent post on How to Download Complete Albums from Picasa in Ubuntu. A blog reader asked on the blog's facebook page on how could he download all the photos and after a short research I found the solution.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

To download the entire photo set from a specific user 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. Open the following link in Firefox:
   

   http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/USERNAME?alt=rss&kind=photo&access=public&start-index=1&max-results=1000&imgmax=d
   

   You'll have to replace the "USERNAME" part with the correct username. The last parameter of the RSS link, "1000", means that the feed will have up to 1000 photos. If you have more pictures than that, just change it to a value that suits your needs.
4. Right click anywhere in the page, select DownThemAll and then the Links tab. The Pictures and Media stuff are just thumbnails.
5. Make sure the JPEG images filter is selected, choose the destination folder and click Start

After this process you should have the selected user's complete photo set being downloaded into your hard drive. Easy, isn't it? :)

Take care! :)

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How to Download Complete Albums from Picasa in Ubuntu

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! :)

---

Did you find this post helpful? Do you wish to contribute to other projects regarding computer science, electronics, robotics or mechatronics that will be posted in this blog? If you wish to do so, you can donate via paypal using the button below. Thanks! :)

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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Did you find this post helpful? Do you wish to contribute to other projects regarding computer science, electronics, robotics or mechatronics that will be posted in this blog? If you wish to do so, you can donate via paypal using the button below. Thanks! :)

Lab tip for power connectors

Hi there! Today I'll show you a simple but very useful tip for your hacking sessions in your home lab or local maker/hackerspace.

Probably sometimes you want to power some device from your laptop's USB or phone charger, but the device has a DC barrel power connector and there you go and make a USB A to DC barrel connector. Then, in some other day you actually need the same thing but with a micro USB, or a mini USB, or a USB B, or a thinner barrel connector, or a larger connector, or alligator clips, or a longer cable, or a shorter one, and so on... The problem is that after some time you'll end up with lots of connector converter cables and you'll still find yourself needing a different connector converter cable. Well, I'm going to share with you a simple solution to avoid making lots and lots of cables.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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How to Install LibreOffice 4.0 in Ubuntu 12.04

Hi there! I don't know if you've heard about it but this week we had some great news for the open source community and Linux: LibreOffice 4.0 has just been released. :) I'm not going to describe all the new features and improvements since you'll get a better glance at them by visiting the release notes. I'll just point out four of them which I think to be the most significant:

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

1. Better interoperability - Interoperability with other file formats is a very important feature for any user and a critical one for enterprise users;
2. Remote control Android app for presentations - a month ago I was just discussing with my brother how this would be cool to do and gladly the LibreOffice development team made it a reality. Now you can control and view the presentations simultaneously in your Android phone or tablet;
3. Preetier User Interface - it now supports Firefox Themes. Now you can customize the looks of your Libreoffice instalation;
4. Better Performance - faster, faster and... did I already say faster?

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How to install HeeksCAD in Ubuntu 12.04

Hi! In a previous post where I wrote about the CNC Software Toolchain for Linux I mentioned HeeksCAD, which is a great software to generate the toolpaths from the 3D models for CNC machining. Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 I started having some problems with the HeeksCNC plugin and some features like the pocketing and profile operations stopped working. I tried to reinstall it in Ubuntu 12.04 but then I found out that it wasn't a so straight forward process as with previous Ubuntu versions. As such, I decided to make a small tutorial on how to install it under Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

So, the first trick is that you cannot install the official version from the official HeeksCAD git repository.

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How to locate files in linux

Hi! Have you ever needed to find some files in linux? Here's a quick and easy "How To" on it. To locate files you can use the command "locate" (yes, to locate, use "locate", pretty obvious, huh? :P). If you know the name of the file just launch a terminal and write:

locate "filename" 

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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