Got a Digital Camera? Here's Great News!

If you have a digital camera, then you have been looking for a good photo program to go with it. Take a look at "Picasa". This program has been described as "the program that should have come with your digital camera, but didn't". Picasa has been around for a long time and was previously a "shareware" program but the good news is, it was just purchased by Google and the full program is now FREE (a price I really like). Picasa has the ability to scan your hard drive for all the images you have and to organize them into albums by date or by an album name that you supply. It can be configured to recognize duplicates and only load them once. You can even fix some photo errors in Picasa without changing the original photos, such as cropping your photo to a size you like or red-eye removal, just to name a couple. In addition, it comes with a program called "Hello", also FREE which will allow you to send photos via Email. Hello will even allow you to upload photos to a website just as easily. Why not check it out? Just click on the title line of this posting. It's a live link that will take you to the Picasa website. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

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Addendum: Wednesday,January 26, 2005

Picasa 2.0.0 (much improved) has been released today. Just download the new version right over the old version and have some fun exploring all the new things you can do. FREE doesn't get any better than this!

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Perhaps A Safer Browser Is For You!

If you still feel less than confident about your computer's security while you browse the web, then maybe a browser without many of the security problems of Internet Explorer is for you. If you think this might be the case, read on!

Mozilla.org has released their new browser "Firefox" for public use. It is, of course, free to download and use and is very easy to customize for your own personal use. I have been using it on an experimental basis for some time now and I must say I like it a lot. So far I have not found anything that Firefox will not do and do well. At the moment I am using Firefox as my default browser and only time will tell if I continue to do this or move back to SlimBrowser.

Comparatively, Firefox seems to be faster than either SlimBrowser, Internet Explorer or Netscape. Just thought I'd let you know that this browser is out there and may well be worth taking a look at.

If you're interested, click on the link to go to the Firefox download site. Have fun!

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Did You Back Up?

It's probably not well known but it's not really IF you will have a hard drive failure but rather, WHEN. With this in mind, I refer you to my entry regarding the available backup tool for Windows XP Home. If you're not using Windows XP Home then try to find a backup program compatible with your operating system and use it!! Alas, a friend of mine did not do this and his hard drive just failed unexpectedly and he has lost everything on his computer including his operating system. Now he must have the operating system reinstalled and then try to remember all the programs he previously had and their passwords so that he won't have to pay for them all over again. Even if he succeeds he will still have to set them all up the way he wanted them to be before the system failure. Not fun at all and this one's going to cost him money.

So, I repeat again: Rule #1 - Backup, Backup, Backup. "Nuff said!

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