Ola Lindberg

I usually use web based disposable e-mail adresses from Mailinator to avoid giving away my adress. I have noticed that some companies don’t let you register using a Mailinator adress. Today when I registered to download TimeSnapper (classic) I got this funny note.

TimeSnapper funny note when register with a Mailinator address

That made my day ^_^ Easy amused I guess.

I usually use Rsync for my incremental backups but since I moved to Vista it’s a bit of pain to get it working. I tried to install it using both Cygwin and DeltaCopy but couldn’t get it to copy international chars (i.e. åäö) via either Samba or SSH. So I looked into a tool called robocopy which is included in Vista (you can get it for XP as well). It worked fine and was easy to use.

To mirror a folder from one folder to another I put the following to a bat file (all on one row):

robocopy "D:\Pictures"
"\\MyOtherComputer\Backup\Pictures" /MIR

I did some different bat files for all folders I wanted to backup. At last I created one bat file that calls all the other. It looks like:

call BackupPictures.bat
call BackupCode.bat

Look into the robocopy help for more configuration options.

I have been playing around with Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) some days and it’s really great for stitching several images to a panorama! The only thing missing is a way to open images in ICE from Picasa without needing to locate them in Explorer.

I created a button that you can add to Picasa that opens the selected images in ICE. It’s available for automatic installation or manual installation. If you choose manual installation copy the file to <your user folder>\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\buttons. If you want to remove it from Picasa you can delete the file from that directory. The pbz file contains two zipped files; one XML-file and one icon file. See Picasa Button API for more information about Picasa Buttons.

Prerequisites:

• Picasa Installed. I used the version 3 beta.
• Microsoft ICE installed. Note! It must be installed to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor

Issues / TODOs:

• There are a hard coded path for the ICE executable. I tried to find a registry key for ICE but I found none so you must install Microsoft ICE to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor
• The icon and text on the button doesn’t look quite alright. It works but looks a bit lame.
• Try to send a path where ICE should save the stitched image so it defaults to the same location as the unstitched.

I’ll try to fix the above issues. See my post in ICEs forum.

If you are using Flickr you might also want to check out picasa2flickr and if your are using Gimp the Gimp Picasa Button!

Don’t miss the Alt.NET “unconference” this Saturday!

Some years ago I wrote about how to create a Windows Rescue CD. Today I was stuck with a similar problem. I wanted to merge all data from one disk to another without needing to re-install my computer.

My first thought was to create a new rescue CD that I could restore to my new drive. But that didn’t seem like the easiest solution so I looked up a tool called Clonezilla. I started out by setting up similar partitions using GParted and boy am I glad I did? It turned out that you can use GParted to copy one partition to another. It took some minutes, I rebooted and it didn’t work.

I was a bit clueless until I remembered that you need to write a Master Boot Record (MBR) to the disk before it’s possible to boot from it. I booted up from an old DOS cd and wrote fdisk /mbr. Rebooted and still no luck so I fired up GParted again and saw that I had forgotten to set the bootable flag on the drive. I rebooted and everything went fine.

When knowing about MBR and the boot flag it’s a no brainer and I can’t recomend it enough! At least if you aren’t on a mac where Carbon Copy Cloner is available!