Mission of this Blog : Part 2

As this blog is written, it becomes clearer on what needs to be accomplished.  The contents here will not make you an expert on the computer; the goal here is to you make you a more informed consumer so that you can ask the right questions, and provide the appropriate answer when talking to someone who is more knowledgeable.

Just as driving a car does not require a deep understanding of the internal combustion engine, so using the internet, the web, and computers does not require deep knowledge of these topics.  Instead enough information is needed to get your job done and to use it effectively.

So in addition to How To and What Is topics, upcoming articles will include those that begin "How to Get Help with.." such as "How to Get Help when my Internet is not working?"

What do you think of this as a goal?  Please put your questions and comments here.  No question coming from my cohorts will be considered unimportant and trivial.

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How does Picasa recognize faces?

Picasa has a facial recognition capability which attempts to match faces in different photos. Given an album of photographs and told to "Add Names", Picasa scans through the whole album or through all the albums looking for things that look like faces and groups the same face (as far as it can tell) together, and shows them to you in groups so you can name them, and identify those that Picasa identified incorrectly.

Please note that at this time, if you cannot identify a person from a picture, neither can Picasa, although it can try to make a guess and provide you with what it thinks are promising candidates. In fact there are situations when even if you can identify a person, Picasa is unable to do so. So, if you expect it to identify any face automatically, you will be disappointed.

Sometimes Picasa identifies as faces things that are not faces - for example, it has presented elbows, chair corners and even lighting effects as faces. In that case, you can tell Picasa that those are not faces, or to skip identifying them, or to ignore them.

It is of course possible to correct mistakes, and if you give two different names to the same person in different photographs, you may merge the pictures together to one identity. It is possible to associate email addresses with each face, and to identify the preferred photo to show for a given face. Finally, it is possible to find all identified instances of a face in the albums so you can find all pictures with a given face.

So, while it will not provide 100% accuracy for identifying faces, I have found that it has picked up on faces that we would normally skip over because they are small, in the background, or generally not the focus of the photograph.

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How to contact ACSian Blogger?

If you are on the Yahoo!Group for the ACSian class of '66/'68, there are enough clues to make contact, otherwise you can mail to that group email. If you are from the ACSian class of '66/'68 and not in the Yahoo!Group then you need to contact somebody from there whom you know in the network, or add a comment to one of the entries in the blog.

If all this sounds inconvenient, and it seems silly not to provide email addresses on the blog, there is a very good reason. Any time an email address is published on a public website or a blog, it can be collected by web crawlers (sometimes aka spiders) and sold to spammers who then proceed to email you about body enhancement products, performance enhancement products, making $1m from $5 in 3 weeks, Russian mail-order brides, and other things which you may or may not be interested in. That is also the reason the Yahoo!Group itself is closed, so its existence is not announced on the web, membership is by invitation only, and only members are allowed to post to it.

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How to set up my own blog?

Setting up a blog and adding entries to it is easy if you have someone show you how. If you are doing it on your own, you will be overwhelmed by all the choices, capabilities and services provided. However, if you are interested in writing short articles for publication, and really do not want to learn the mechanics of setting up a site and managing, I can help set it up for you and get started. A set of 8 to 10 articles relevant about something you care about and may be of interest to our cohorts will get you going, and after you see them in print, may trigger other ideas. For help contact ACSian Blogger.

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How to control Picasa Photo Slideshows?

The photo slideshows are actually hosted on Picasaweb, which is owned and managed by Google.
The high speed at which the pictures move is due to the default speed of 3 seconds per slide. Some slideshows start running immediately, while others require you to click the triangle in the circle in the middle of the picture. This behavior is not inconsistent browser behavior - it is behavior determined by the person putting up the slide show on the blog.

To start and stop, and go forward or backward manually, move the cursor over the lower edge of the picture, and a control bar will pop up and become visible. That control bar has buttons for pause, forward and backward.

To see a larger version of the slideshow on Picasaweb, click on the center of the slide show, and you will end up on Picasaweb, where if you run the slide show, it is possible to see it in the full screen. It is also possible to change the pause between slides.

If there are any questions or comments, or something is not quite right, please add it to the comments link at the end of this message.

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