Automating date change on Flickr photos with SikuliX

I recently migrated several gigabytes of photos from Google Plus photos (formerly Picasa) to Flickr. Flickr provides a generous 1TB of data, allows full resolution images and videos and has a thriving community. This was a great opportunity to backup and showcase my photos. I began migrating photos but I hit a serious usability issue. The Flickr photostream is sorted according to the date on which photos are uploaded. There is no option to organize the photos by date taken. This meant that my entire photostream was organized by a single date (the date on which I uploaded all of these photos). The fix was to change the uploaded date to the date the pictures were taken. This meant that I would have to go thru thousands of photos and videos and manually change the date. This was a daunting task that would have taken me the entire weekend. Being a QA/Automation engineer in my day Job I thought surely there must be a faster and easier way to do this.

I found Sikuli a visual automation tool, which can be used to quickly automate things like filling forms, clicking buttons etc and has a much easier learning curve when compared to Selenium or iMacros. With Sikuli my workflow mimicked what I would have done manually.

1. Click on You>Organize menu item & then on the “sets & collections” ta
2. Click a photo set to edit, double click on the first photo in the set
3. Switch to “Dates” tab.
4. Copy the date in the “Date taken” field
5. Paste the copied date into the “Date uploaded” field
6. Check the “go to next item when you save?” box if unchecked
7. Press save and advance to next photo.

With the Sikuli Script All I had to do was select the set, bring up photo properties, switch to date tab. Edit the sikuli script and update the total number of photos in the set. Run the automation script. What should have taken days took me about 2 hours flat. Take a look at the video below to see it in action.

SikuliX & Flickr demo

SikuliX can be downloaded at http://www.sikuli.org/

Del.icio.us link checker

Being a Internet pack rat has its downsides, you squirrel away all these links in your del.icio.us account over time and then you check on a link one day and find out that it is dead.

Fresh delicious is a neat tool that remedies exactly such a situation. Fresh delicious is written in Java and runs on any platform that supports JVM. Once you enter your username and password fresh delicious will check each and every link in your collection and report back on pages that have been moved. This is the best tool that I have seen so far that allows you to organize your bookmarks and weed out ones that don’t work anymore. The official del.icio.us Firefox extension should have a feature like this.

Creating custom screensaver with Flash 8 and screenswift

There are hundreds of programs on the internet which allow you to create custom screensavers using your own videos, photos and music but all of them lack the ability to really personalize the screensaver the way you want it.
Flash 8 provides an easy way to create custom movies with what ever multimedia elements you want and then using screenswift you can easily convert the flash movie to a windows screensaver.

If you are savvy enough to use flash then you can easily learn hoe to use ScreenSwift as it is completely user friendly and allows quick creation of screensavers.

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FON Heralds the Free WiFi Revolution

FON a startup with a very simple idea is taking the world by storm, FON wants you to share your internet bandwidth. Owners of broadband internet connections and compatible WiFi routers (currently Linksys WRT54G (pre-v5), WRT54GL, WRT54GS and WRT54GSv4, or Buffalo WZR-RS-G54, WHR-HP-54, and WHR-G54S and FON claims more are to be supported in the near future) can participate in the FON network by installing FON’s firmware on their routers. FON is also shipping routers that have the firmware pre-installed for $29.95 including shipping. Currently FON users can either choose to share their bandwidth freely or can choose charge other FON users for access to the internet thru their routers. FON currently supports three kinds of users.

Linus: Linuses are users who share their internet connection freely without charging for it.

Aliens: Aliens are users who do not share their internet connectivity and get charged $3 to access the FON network when available.

Bill: Bills are users who get a share of the money paid by Aliens and do not have roaming access. these users do not share their Bandwidth for free.

Participating in the FON network might sometimes conflict with the terms of use of some ISPs, but FON has entered into agreements with some ISPs to allow DSL-sharing.

FON recently inked a deal to bundle its “La Fonera” router with Skype’s WiFi wireless phone Bundle.

The company which was founded in 2006 has received backing from big players like Google, Skype and eBay.

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