Tag Archives: folders

Facebook, Fotobounce, Free Software

A Problem with Fotobounce?

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I’ve written about Fotobounce before, here are a couple of links to my older posts: here (Fotobounce explained) and here  (Download a whole Facebook album)

Fotobounce is fairly simple to use and does the job quite well. If you’re into downloading photo albums on Facebook, Fotobounce is pretty much the only way to do it but it does have one limitation that I’ve just discovered. Here’s the problem. When, and if, I get things sorted out, I’ll post an update on this.

The Goal: One of my friends has one album, Wall Photos, that has thousands of images in it. Many of these images are spectacular and I would like to archive them for my own inspiration and enjoyment.

The Problem: Fotobounce cannot download this album. It tries, sometimes for hours, but it can’t seem to get past the spinning wheel that indicates Fotobounce is working on something. Once, just once, Fotobounce got halfway through downloading the album, then got hung up before the job was done. I tried as recently as this morning for one full hour with nothing else running on the computer and Fotobounce failed again.

My Solution: Although I am not a programmer, I have noticed that Fotobounce does not work like other downloaders. I’m not sure why but Fotobounce seems to cache the photos it is downloading in a temp folder somewhere. Yesterday, I deleted my old Fotobounce installation and installed a fresh version. During the installation process, I changed the ‘save to’ directory to one that I made on my desktop. I wanted to keep track of what Fotobounce was doing and this desktop folder is a lot easier to find than the default directory in My Documents.

After Fotobounce was installed, I tried to download the problem album yet again. To test my theory, I also downloaded a smaller, but still sizeable, album at the same time. As Fotobounce was working, nothing was showing in the desktop folder. As soon as Fotobounce declared that one of the jobs was finished, that album popped up in the desktop folder. Even though Fotobounce worked for hours on the massively larger album, nothing ever showed up in the folder. Where are the images that we partially downloaded? I can only assume that they are in a temp folder somewhere.

The computer that I use Fotobounce on is pretty much the latest and greatest you can get. I built it myself and it’s not a slug, believe me. Lots of storage, 3 terabytes, lots of RAM, 8 gigabytes, and a pretty fast quad processor (i5-2500K @3.3 Ghz) plus Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit OS. I doubt that my rig is the problem here. Even if Fotobounce caches the images in RAM, there should be enough room. I am pretty sure the album, although it’s large, isn’t 4 or 5 gigabytes in size.

If you are downloading a torrent, your torrent client writes directly to your hard drive, it doesn’t cache your download. It may use a temp folder but the folder is right there in the directory where you have chosen to put the torrents. Sometimes, if you are downloading photos, you can actually look at some of the photos or play the avi file long before the download has completed. No such luck with Fotobounce. Nothing shows until it’s finished the job and, when the album is too large, it seems that nothing is written at all!

As a writer/experimenter/tech guy, I look at problems such as this from a different point of view than most users, I think. It’s a challenge. Once I find the solution, I write about it. If I don’t find a solution, I write about that, too. This particular setback may not have a solution. It’s frustrating but sometimes these things can be that way. We’ll see what happens. If I discover an answer, you’ll be the first to hear.

Thanks for reading!

Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Fotobounce, Photography, Social Networking

Fotobounce – downloading a Facebook photo album

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I’ve written about Fotobounce before. If you share photos from one social media site to another, Fotobounce is a great tool. It allows you to download complete Facebook photo albums to your computer. What you do with them after that is your business, I guess, but you really should ask for permission if you are going to share anything that isn’t your own. Here is an explanation about what Fotobounce is: Fotobounce Made Simple   (The original post wasn’t named that but it sounds good, right?)

While Fotobounce is a cool app, the actual downloading of albums can get tricky because of the way the instructions are worded. In this post I’ll try to help you figure out the odd English that they use in the selection process. Before I forget, Fotobounce is available here: http://fotobounce.com/

1. Download and install Fotobounce…duh!

2. Open the program and head over to Facebook. Sign in to Facebook with Fotobounce. You’ll have to allow it access but, according to the makers, they don’t save your password. You can always remove the access after you’ve downloaded the albums that are of interest.

3. Find the album you want to download. You have to sort through your friends, your likes and your acquaintances to find the right album(s) but that’s pretty basic.

4. Once you find the album, right click it. You’ll see the ‘Download’ button. Click it and the following menu pops up:

Choose where you want the album to be downloaded.
I've selected Events by clicking on it but I haven't started the download.

5. In this menu, you are choosing the main folder for the download. If you click ‘Select album’, Fotobounce will start the download to, in this case, Events. That’s not what I want. I want to create a sub-folder and then maybe a sub-sub-folder. Let’s do that. We’ll make a sub-folder inside of Events.

6. Click New Album. Fotobounce will show you a new album dialogue, as pictured below, and it will have the same name as the album has on Facebook. We don’t want that. We need to sort out the downloaded albums according to whose they were on Facebook, right?

Make a new album in Fotobounce
Type the new name of the album in the box and hit Enter.

 

7. Instead of Profile Pictures, I want to name my new album ‘Joe Nemechek’. (Joe and I are lookalikes to the point that I get stopped in stores. If I ever headed South and wore a NASCAR jacket then I’m sure I’d eat free wherever I went.) Type in whatever name you want and hit the Enter key. A new album will be created and Fotobounce will give you a notice at the top of the page.

8. Once you’ve found your new folder, click on it and you’ll see the same menu window come up same as before, giving you the option to Select that album or make a New album inside of it. This time you can leave the name the same, if you want. The default name is the same name as it was on Facebook.

9. If that name is fine, click on the Select Album button and Fotobounce will download the album inside of the album that you just created.

This sounds pretty simple, right? It’s not. Here’s the problem, as I see it. When I see the words ‘Select album’, I expect to get a choice. Instead of the normal ‘OK” that everyone else uses, Fotobounce uses ‘Select album’ as the button that starts the download. Unless you make a folder or a folder within a folder, Fotobounce will happily download your albums into the same directory. Good luck trying to figure that out when you’ve got more than a few albums in your collection. You have to create new albums if you are ever going to figure out which album is which. Sure, you could to all of this within Windows Explorer but it should be a one-step process or the wording should be a bit clearer. That’s what I think, anyway.

Fotobounce does a lot more than simply saving albums in Facebook. Check it out. I’ve just scratched the surface here.

Thanks for reading!

Computers, Hard Drives, Windows

Windirstat – What is taking up all the room on my hard drive?

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With today’s huge hard drives it’s sometimes tough to know where all that room has gone. You buy a one or two terabyte drive, use it for a while and then you’re suddenly running out of storage space. Here’s a solution for you!

Windirstat (available here for free: http://windirstat.info/) gives you a real picture of what your hard drive looks like, in terms of which files are taking up all the room. Download the program and install it. I’ll wait. When you’re done, come back to see how to use the program.

Back? Ok. Here’s what you do:

1. Start Windirstat. This is the menu you will see:

Choose the Drive
Select the drive.

Select the drive that you want to take a look at. Usually that is your C: drive. In my case I have three to choose from but most computers have only one or two drives.

2. WinDirStat will nibble away at your drive, setting up an image for you. As it does this you’ll see little PacMans zipping back and forth. It’s kind of cute, actually. Once all of the stats have been collected, here is what you’ll see:

A graphic of a hard drive's files and folders.
This is a graphical representation of my hard drive.

3. Once WinDirStat has collected the information it needs, it shows you this graphic of your hard drive. It may look confusing at first but it’s really pretty cool. On the top right you’ll have a legend which tells you what color represents each type of file. On mine, the blue represents MPEG-2 files from my DVR. Each little section of that blue area is an individual file while the whole blue area on the left is a folder. Each color group represents a folder, each smaller highlighted area is an individual file.

4. Looking at this graphic, you’ll be able to see what files and folders are taking up the most room. If you click on each file, WinDirStat immediately shows you what file it is up on the top left section. If there is one particularly huge file, you can then decide if it’s something you want to save or archive or delete.

5. Some areas that WindDirStat will show you are obviously off limits for deletion. Any of the Windows files, for instance, must be left alone. There are two yellow files on the lower right, as an example, which represent two important Windows files; the pagefil.sys and the hiberfil.sys. These are your ‘scratch pad’ files and are about the same size as the amount of RAM in your system. Don’t touch them.

6. Once you’ve spent some time finding the files and folders that are taking up extra space, delete them or archive them to a DVD. Then you can reload WinDirStat and see what the big picture looks like. I keep pretty good track of what’s on my drives but there are always some files that seem to crop up that I could delete. See what you can find on your drive.

Thanks for reading!

 

Hidden Windows Tricks, Windows, Windows Secrets

Three Fingered Salute

Control/Alt/Delete. Remember that?  It’s the old three fingered salute. It still works, it brings up the Task Manager, if you don’t already know but there’s a new kid on the block, a new three finger trick that will bring up another very handy menu.

The following trick will work in any version of Windows 7. It will probably work in other versions but I can’t test them. It will also work anywhere in Windows, on the desktop or in Windows Explorer.  Try it on your desktop first.

Click once anywhere on your desktop, on a folder or a blank space. Then, holding down the SHIFT key and the CONTROL key, right click your mouse. Depending on what programs you have installed on your computer, you’ll see a menu quite similar to this:

The New 3 Finger Salute Menu
Shift/Control and right click brings this menu up.

The important option for me in this menu is the ‘open command window here’. Using this menu, I can rename hundreds of files in one step as described here: Batch renaming of files.

This simple trick will save you some time if you use the command window frequently. I hope it helps!

Thanks for reading.

Domain Registration, Hosting, Internet, WordPress

Basic HTML Placeholder

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An HTML placeholder is a small file that shows up when someone goes to your new domain name before you have a full-fledged website set up. Consider it a virtual ‘coat on the back of a chair’ at a party. You’re going to sit in the chair, just not yet. The placeholder lets everyone know that your site exists, it works but there isn’t anything there yet. It’s live in other words, just not fully filled out.

Putting up a placeholder is very easy. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open Notepad. Don’t use Word or Wordpad or anything else except a text editor. Notepad is free, comes with Windows and is in your Accessory folder.

2. Copy this text and paste it into Notepad :

<html><head><title>Welcome to suchandsuch.com</title></head><body><h1>Welcome!</h1>

This site is under construction. We'll be up and running as soon as possible. Bookmark this url and come back later. See ya!

</body></html>


3. Type in your domain name where I have ‘suchandsuch.com’ then save the file as an .html file NOT as a .txt. file. (Click on the tiny arrow to the right of .txt and choose ‘all files’.


4. If you accidentally save it as a text file, just rename it as an .html file, ending up with index.html on your desktop.


5. Double click this file to see what it looks like. It’s about as simple as it can be but it gets the message across. You can align the text in the centre, use colors or whatever you want but this is about the simplest .html file you can make.


6. Using FTP or your host’s File Manager, upload that file to the sub-directory that you created in my last post.


7. The index.html file should be the only file there. Once it’s up, open another browser window and type in your domain name and hit enter. There it is! Your placeholder. If you don’t see it, then the file is named incorrectly. Make sure that it is  index.html   (all in small letters, no caps and with the period before html, no spaces).


Once this page is up, you can relax for a while and figure out how to install WordPress. If you want to stick to html, fine but you’re on your own there. I have moved all of my sites to WordPress just because it’s so damn simple to update.


I’ve explained the WordPress installation in previous posts. Here is a link to the first one: WordPress Installation .


Over the next few posts I will revisit the WordPress installation for you but read the old ones for now. Good luck!


Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter: @_BrianMahoney