Your Kodak Gallery Photos Will Be Deleted Unless You Buy Something

Kodak Gallery (Ofoto) is an online photo sharing site where anyone can upload pictures for free just like Flickr.

The service is especially popular among Kodak digital camera users since these cameras ship with Kodak Easyshare software that can directly upload photos from the camera to you online Kodak Gallery.

Now if you have been using the Kodak Gallery service to store all your precious digital photos, here’s some not-so-good news:

Kodak will delete all your pictures unless you buy something from them.

Kodak has just revised their Terms of Service and the new policy states that Kodak Gallery members must make an annual purchase else their photos will be deleted from the photo gallery. Here’s the requirement:

1. If your online photos use less than 2 GB storage, you must make annual purchases of at least $4.99 from Kodak.

2. For everyone else, the minimum purchase requirement is $19.99 and this is annual.

How to Download Photos from Kodak Gallery

It’s good to have a business model but forcing people to pay for your service is a bad practice. Kodak Gallery is a closed service and so there are no tools or APIs that will help you move photos from Kodak to other free services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums.

There’s however an inexpensive workaround. You can opt for a premier gallery that costs around $2.5 per month but offers you an option to download full-resolution photos from all your picture albums. Once you have a copy of all your images on the hard drive, cancel your Kodak subscription and upload them to Flickr.

The other more expensive alternative is the Kodak CD - they will burn all your uploaded photos on a CD and each photo will be saved in the original resolution. Hat tip Sharath Bhat.

Nominate Yourself for the Microsoft MVP Award (India)

Microsoft awards the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status to select individuals who are seen as active participants in technical communities like blogs, Internet forums, user groups, wikis, conferences, etc.

You neither have to be a geek nor an expert in Microsoft specific technologies to win an MVP award. For instance, a technology blogger who writes about web applications or consumer software can be a perfect MVP candidate. You can check the MVP directory to know all about the current batch of MVPs and their area of expertise.

Now if you are based in India and like to become a MVP, please go ahead and fill the nomination form available on the MVP India site before April 18.

The MVP awards are announced every quarter so if you are not selected in the first attempt, you can re-nominate yourself in 3 months.

I have been a Microsoft MVP for the past three years (2007, 2008 & 2009) and it definitely helps because you can try software betas even before they are released to public, you get access to private newsgroups and there’s plenty of learning material (including ebooks, webcasts, etc.) to enhance your existing skills. This PDF has more information about the Microsoft MVP Award.

Simple Stretching Exercises to Prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

This video demonstrates some simple hand and wrist stretching exercises that may help you prevent the carpal tunnel syndrome that can otherwise cause acute pain.

You’re working at your desk, trying to ignore the tingling or numbness you’ve had for months in your hand and wrist. Suddenly, a sharp, piercing pain shoots through the wrist and up your arm. Just a passing cramp? More likely you have carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful progressive condition caused by compression of a key nerve in the wrist.

BoingBoing author Richard Metzer says he and his wife have been following the instructions in the video and could see a difference within few days.

Give it a try if your work involves sitting in front of the computer for long hours.

Extract Text from Images & Scanned PDF Manuals Online

If you are on a budget, the built-in OCR engine of Google Search is almost a perfect option for converting scanned PDFs to text - just put all your scanned PDF images onto a public website and wait for Google spiders to convert them into editable digital text.

Obviously there are two drawbacks associated with the original idea. The PDF conversion process is not real time and second, you need access to a public web server where you can upload the PDF images so that Google bots can find them.

If you aren’t willing to wait that long and need to perform instant OCR without downloading any of the software tools, try OCR Terminal - it’s an online Optical Character Recognition service where you can upload scanned images, multi-page PDF documents or even screenshots and convert them into searchable text documents.

The conversion results, as you can noticed in the screenshot above, are pretty accurate and it also preserves the document formatting and layout. You may download the extracted text as RTF or a Word Document. The output is also available as a PDF image though I didn’t find that option very useful.

OCR Terminal is a free service but you are only allowed to convert up to 30 scanned pages in a day and allows for text extraction only from English language documents. They are developing a desktop client that will allow users to convert scanned PDFs or TIFF images and get them back as formatted Word files without the web browser.

How Microsoft put Apple owners on the defensive

Her name is “Lauren” and she’s making the Apple (AAPL) guys nuts.

She’s the young, hip, Volkswagen-driving redhead who stars in the latest Microsoft’s (MSFT) TV campaign. Told that if she can find a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000 she can keep it, Lauren ends up — to the Mac aficionados’ dismay — with an HP (HPQ) running Windows Vista.

“I would have to double my budget, which isn’t feasible,” Lauren says as she drives away from an Apple Store, where 17-inch notebooks start at $2,799. Then she sighs and delivers the ad’s coup de grace: “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

Ouch.

The ad first aired Thursday night, and the Apple press has been taking pot shots at it ever since. Among the complaints:

• “Lauren” is an actress, not the ordinary American shopper the ad claims
• The Apple Store scene was faked; before-and-after photos suggest that she never actually went into the store to try the computers
• The $699 HP Pavillion dv7 she chose over a $999 MacBook is a mess. “It is the epitome of what people dislike about PCs,” writes Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub. “It runs Vista Home on a slow AMD mobile processor … its screen is abysmal … its networking is five years old … it is loaded with crapware and trial antivirus software that will have to be purchased or wiped off the machine.” (link)

One Gizmodo reader even offered to give Lauren his old 17-inch Powerbook so she do a comparison without worrying about cost. “I do believe,” writes Mitch Gewirtz, “everyone on this planet is ‘cool enough to be a Mac person’.” (link)

Crispin Porter + Boguksy, the agency that produced the ad, has clearly hit a nerve. The campaign goes directly at what may be Apple’ biggest vulnerability: the growing differential between Macs, which have largely held their prices throughout the recession, and PCs running Windows, which have been engaged in a brutal price war that forced the industry’s ASP (average selling price) down more than 13% in the last quarter of 2008 alone. (See here.)

“Apple, right now, is a fine-tuned machine that targets specific audiences,” writes VentureBeat’s MG Siegler. “It doesn’t care about selling a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000, because those machines have nowhere near the profit margins of the machines it does sell.” (link)

Perhaps most thoughtful analysis of what makes the ad so effective — and so infuriating to Mac users — was provided by Fox News’ Clayton Morris, who devoted nearly 9 minutes of air time to a discussion of the spot by a panel that included SquareSpace’s Anthony Casalena and Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky.

Topolsky is especially trenchant. “This is almost a red-state-blue-state ad,” he says. Not only does it hammer home the issue of cost, but it embeds that message in a subtle bit of Apple bashing. “‘I’m not cool enough’ is so pejorative, says Topolsky. “This is the stigma of the Mac user as a pompous jerk.” (link)

The ad is on heavy prime-time rotation, but in case you missed it, we’ve pasted the YouTube version below the fold:

Extract Files from RAR, ZIP, 7z and other Compressed Archives Online

You don’t need an external utility (say WinZip) to uncompress .zip files but unfortunately, the built-in decompressor of Windows Explorer cannot handle other popular zip formats like 7z, RAR, Z or TAR.

If someone sent you an email attachment, or you downloaded a file from the Internet, that is compressed using one of these formats, there’s still no need for you to install a new software to extract the contents - just head over to WobZip, upload the compressed file and you’re done.

WobZip will help you upload a compressed file under 100Mb in size. You may also use the tool to uncompress zipped files that may be protected by a password. Internally, they use the popular 7-zip utility to perform the decompression.

Now what I liked most about WobZip is that it can extract online zipped files as well. So if you happen to come across a .zip file on some website, you can simply pass the web address (URL) of that file to WobZip without having to download the file on your local drive - I am sure I’ll use this tool a lot to browse the source of WordPress plugins.

An online unzip utility like WobZip may be very handy for mobile phones as well that have a web browser but there’s no tool to uncompress zipped files.

Note that WobZip advertises itself as “in development” and “not guaranteed to be bug free”, so it may not be a bad idea to double-check the deflated archives.

Search High Resolution Videos on YouTube

If you are looking to download some high-res video clips from YouTube for your next presentation, try this easy trick that will only display high quality videos in the search results.

Go to Google.com, type your search phrase and append the following paramters your search query.

site:youtube.com "watch in normal quality watch in high quality"

To illustrate this with a real example, a search for "cnn hologram" related videos on YouTube would look something like this on Google:

cnn hologram "watch in normal quality watch in high quality" site:youtube.com

This works because YouTube adds a small "watch in high quality" link beneath their video player if the video you are watching is available as high resolution.

When you click that "high quality" link, it is replaced by "watch in normal quality" so the two strings are really close in the HTML source and that helps us filter low quality videos from search.