That's a lot of pictures...

So, today I learned that we have about 229GB of digital photos from over the last 15 years.  Every year the pictures keep getting larger in size (I want more megapixels).  What do you do with all these photos?

Well, I have been storing them in various places around the house:

1. There is a directory on the desktop computer where we unload (offload, upload, I don't know) the cameras to.  We have a directory for each year and we plop the digital media we create into there as time moves on.
2. Then I run Microsoft SyncToy every now and then to backup the camera photos (and a bunch of other stuff like documents and such) to a NAS I have sitting in another room of the house.  The sync is one way, so no pictures will ever be deleted from the NAS.  I tried to schedule SyncToy to run on a schedule but I had no luck, no matter what I tried it won't see the NAS when it runs via Task Manager.  Time for a new computer anyway so I'll probably switch to using something else (see #4 below)
3. The NAS is 4TB in size, but really only 2TB of usable space since I have the two drives mirrored.  I've had the NAS for a couple years, lost one drive so far, ordered a replacement, told it to rebuild and we were back in business.  Not so sure will be able to find a replacement drive again so easily next time so might need a new (bigger) NAS.
4. About the time I lost the drive in the NAS, I figured it was time to back that up.  To I bought a 3TB external drive.  I use FreeFileSync to copy the NAS to the external drive once a month from the desktop computer (where everything came from).  I keep the 3TB drive near our grab bag so if we need to leave in a hurry it's near all those important papers we would want with us.  I have a calendar reminder to tell me to pull out the drive once a month, plug it in and sync the NAS to it.
5. In addition to all of that, my wife backs up the original directories that sit on the desktop computer to DVD ever so often, at that time deleting the older years files after she backs them up.  This way we only have the last few years of photos on the desktop computer.

I've been using Picasa to  index all the files.  I like the face recognition feature in it and it makes it easy to scroll through all those pictures files in various folders.  If we were better about tagging things it would also make it easier to find certain events.  But right now I know if I want a photo of person X, I can scroll through most of the pictures Picasa thinks they are in.

I only just learned I have 229GB because a bunch of those DVDs my wife made from so many years ago were not part of the above process.  So I just spent some time loading all those DVDs of photos onto the NAS.  My calendar reminder should pop-up in a couple weeks and tell me it's time to pull that 3TB drive out of the closet and back up the NAS again.  Then all the photos will be in at least two spots.  Not going to run picasa on all the photos I just copied off DVD, like I said, time for a new computer first. 

I also learned that I can't really keep up with a blog post a day when I had a very busy week at work.  We'll see how it goes moving forward.

Property taxes

I live in NJ and today I learned what I need to do to appeal my property taxes.

First I need to figure out the fair market value of your home based on neighborhood sales. You
must have 3 sales of comparable homes of similar style, size, and condition to base this value on.

The sales must have been done the last October to October.  And the big AND in the room is the sales may NOT be foreclosures, short sales, estate sales, divorce sales, relocation sales, basically anything that forced the price to be below market value or that were made under duress.  Of course in today's economy these 'comps' are not always an easy thing to find.

Second you need to determine if you property is under or over assessed.  There is a list of each town's average tax ratio published by the state, so you need to find the ratio for your town:

• http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/lpt/lptvalue.shtml

So you find your town in the list and then find the Average Ratio Assessed to True Value.  Let's say it's 80%.  Now the fun part, there is a margin of error you must apply here of +/-15%, which basically gives you a 30% gap to play with.  So that means we have 68%, 80% and 92% to play with in our example.

So you take what your current assessment is and you apply each of these percentages to it.  Let's assume your house and property are currently assessed at $100,000 for taxes.

• +15% Average Market Value = $100,000/.92 = $108,695.65
• Average Market Value = $100,000/.80 = $125,000
• -15% Average market Value = $100,000/.68 = $147,058.82

This is what the town believes (based on math) what your house is really worth, within a +/-15% range that is.  In our example above, $125.000.

If comparable homes in your neighborhood (those three you found at the beginning) are selling for less than the +15% Average Market Value amount, then you should probably consider filing an appeal of your assessment.  So in our example, if based on the local 'comps' you come up with your home value is really $102,000 you should probably file the appeal.  With a the lack of recent sales data, because houses are not selling, your data might just not be good enough.

Does this mean you will get it your taxes reduced?  Nope, from what I read, most appeals are denied.  Could be the 3 examples of sales you provided were not valid or good enough.  Could be any number of reasons, because remember, your town doesn't want to loose this revenue.  Remember the burden of proof in all of this is on you, the taxpayer.

I'm not providing you advice, just explaining what I think I learned today, I might learn more tomorrow which changes some of the above, so please go learn for yourself.

Sleeping on the floor

So today I learned that spending the night on the floor of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia with a whole lot of  Cub Scouts is not as bad as I thought it would be.

It was a well planned experience by the museum and their staff was great with the kids (and the adults) plus the kids really enjoyed it.  I think they learned some science without really knowing they did.  Because as a parent, if I tried to show, explain, point out any specific aspect of science or science related fact I was somewhat rebuffed.

You get there around 6PM and start the check-in process for your group.  You can bring or order in (we had pizza) your dinner (some folks got Philly Cheese-steaks, that's next time).  They show you in which exhibit room your group will be spending the night and let you know the rules and plan.  You eat your dinner and then the fun starts with some lectures (Carnival of Amazing Machines), events (Design Quest Challenges) and an I-Max movie ("Space Junk" was on the docket for our visit).  Then we were off to report to our assigned campsite (The Giant Heart Exhibit) for the night. 

So, when laying on the floor, here was the view from our camping spot (literally taking the picture, just sitting up after waking from atop the sleeping bag),  Yep the big walk-in heart.  Just a note, you are not allowed to camp in or under any exhibits.

And then, here is the picture of our campsite when it was time to rise and shine.  I'm attempting to hasten his rising with some camera flash. 

 

They suggest sleeping with your head close to the wall, so if someone trips on you at night, it's your feet and not your head getting kicked.  They shut off most of the lights so the light at night while attempting to sleep is from the uncovered windows (Philadelphia) or the safety lighting.

And, thank you, they shut off most of the exhibit.  Yes, that huge heart BEATS loudly when the museum is in session.

Lights out about 11:30PM, but you can head for the eating area (no food near the exhibits) for some pre-sleep snacking.

Next morning they flip on the lights at 6:45 so you can start your day.  You need to pack up your camp site and stow your gear (if you have a car in the parking garage, pack it).  Then off to the breakfast they provide, which is OK.

Then a nice planetarium show (Liam Neeson narrating "Black Holes" and making cryptic Star Wars references) and then free time to finish up your exhibit exploration.

Was it a good time?  Yes I think it was.  The kids really seemed to enjoy it and the only part that I didn't love was sleeping on the floor.  I think some better gear and remembering to bring some Tylenol might help with that (wicked headache from allergies).  Am I in a rush to do it again?  Nope. But my son would, in a heartbeat (no pun intended), and that's all that really matters.

One other thing, if you go, try to get to camp in the "Changing Earth" exhibit, they have a section with an awesome spongy padded floor which would be perfect for sleeping!!!

how shutdown windows 7 without applying updates

So, since I got my new laptop with windows 7, one thing has plagued me.  When you want to shutdown, and there are windows updates that need to be applied there is no way to just shutdown without applying the updates.

When you are in a rush to get out of the office on a Friday night is usually when this hits.  Then your options are hibernate/sleep and deal with it later or wait for the updates to apply.  And depending on how many updates there are is how long you might need to sit around and wait.  I suppose you can let it apply the updates while you are carrying it with you, but I don't think that's a good idea.

Finally learned the workaround: log-off first.

Once you log-off, there is an option on the login screen to log-off without applying the updates.

Yippie!!

Google Apps 25GB Email Storage Limit

So today I learned that when you use Google Apps (like we do at work) for Business and someone hits that 25GB limit on what's in their Mail (Gmail) account, you can't increase it.  But if you have a private (free) Gmail account you can pay to increase your mailbox size.

Seems a little backward?

So, when your boss has the problem you need to figure out what to do.

Option 1: in the short term, delete dome mail.  Start searching for

• big emails "larger:20M"
• with attachments "has:attachment"
• before a certain date  "before:2010/1/1"
• with movie attachments "filename:(mov|wmv|mpg|avi)"
• from a certain domain or a certain user "from:(report|alerts)@domainreports.com"
• you can combine them and there are a bunch of others, go here for advanced email search filters: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

Personally when I have a good search that finds a bunch of stuff I want to delete I setup a Gmail Filter into a Label that starts with an "X" like "X-mailinglists" so when I think about it I can just open up the "X" labels and start doing some cleaning.

Option 2: Google Apps Vault (have not checked out the pricing yet) it let's you archive your email so it's still searchable, the details are here:  http://support.google.com/vault/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2462365

Option 3: archive offline (you may archive messages locally in a mail client like *cough* outlook)


Option 4: get another email account and setup mail delegation (under "solutions" on this page: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1186436) but basically change name of your current account, give new account old name, delegate mail permissions so you can switch to your old account and search at any time.


Read a bunch of stuff tonight and there are a lot of people bitching about the lack of this feature.  I can add space to Google Drive but why not email?  Why can't I archive my email to Google Drive?  Excellent question, and I'm glad you asked and I plan on trying out these two Chrome extensions tomorrow to move some email data to Google Drive:

Archiver for Gmail is a script that will seamlessly analyze your inbox and move all the big attachments to your Google drive:  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archiver-for-gmail/bohfahbhaioeaildanonpalaengldgfh?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

emails2docs automatically puts emails including their attachments from your Google Gmail into your Google Docs/Drive:  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emails2docs/mokbchipfpaaoioeljkgpojddoecnbce?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

We'll see how this plays out.

Firefoxing with AdBlock Plus and Ctrl+Shift+V

So, I run the AdBlock Plus extension in Firefox (actually in every browser I use) and it's been annoying me for a while that in Firefox when I try to use "Ctrl+Shift+V" to paste unformatted text that it doesn't paste anything but brings up the AdBlock Plus "blockable items on current page" list instead.  Leaving me with no way to paste text in a "plain text" manner.  So it appears that AdBlock Plus hijacked the "Ctrl+Shift+V" key press, but did it?

So a quick google search and I learned today that you need to change the value of the "extensions.adblockplus.sidebar_key" property.  Looks like the default settings are if something is using "Ctrl+Shift+V" already (which Firefox is) it should change to "Ctrl+Shift+U" as a backup, but it doesn't.  Not sure who's problem that is, but apparently it has been mine.

So how to fix it?

1. In Firefox (I'm using version 19.0.2 currently) you enter "about:config" into the URL bar (of a tab where you won't mind having the contents replaced).  You will get a little warning, but for those that don't know, this is what let's you muck with the configuration of Firefox.
2. Once you have the configuration manager up, enter "extensions.adblockplus.sidebar" into the "Search:" box at the top of the page.  Now you can just look at the one setting we care about at the moment.
3. You sill see the Name, Status, Type and Value displayed for the property.  Double click on the property line and you can edit its value.
4. It was set to "Accel Shift V, Accel Shift U" you want to change it to"Accel Shift U"
5. Hit the OK button to apply the change, then you need to restart Firefox for the change to work.

So, it was set to tell AdBlock Plus to use "Ctrl+Shift+V" if nothing else was, to do this action.  If something was using it, then use "Ctrl+Shift+U" instead.  For some reason it doesn't seem to count that Firefox is using that key-press. So we just said to use the "Ctrl+Shift+U" and leave the other key-press alone so that pasting unformmated text works.

Here is a link to all the details of AdBlock Plus Preferences, you can look up "extensions.adblockplus.sidebar" if you feel like it:
https://adblockplus.org/en/preferences

The Vista of a Blue Screen

What did I learn today.  Mostly that windows vista annoys me more than I'd like to admit.   Desktop started blue screening again.  I could spend time researching the error or just run a chkdsk like I always do, which seems to clear up the problen for a month or so.

Problem is that this time it won't even boot up all the way before turning oh so blue.  Waiting for it to boot now to see if the disk check got scheduled before it crashed.  Yes!  Looks like it made it, so wait a couple hours for that to finish and will see if it boots.  In the mean time I guess it's time to start looking for a new computer.

Didn't make it or I traveled through time.  That was the fastest chkdsk I've ever seen.  Guess we'll play this game again & again.