How to Change the Upload Date of Flickr Photos

About a year ago, I upgraded to Flickr Pro which comes with unlimited storage.  I wanted to remove the 200 photo cap on my account and also use Flickr as a photo backup system (I’ve since purchased Mozy for backups).

flickr

This is the old flickr organizr

So I upgraded, and started uploading pooploads of photos (marked private) from years gone by.  Things went smoothly except for the occasional crash of the various 3rd party bulk uploaders (maybe this is a way to help curb excessive storage).  One of the annoyances, however, was that I now had thousands of photos in my photostream that prevented me from seeing recent, non-backup photos.  After some internetting, I found a decent solution–you can change the upload date of your photos (you can also change the “taken on” date of your photos in the same fashion).  It seems like there’s some intentional pushback from Flickr to include this as a real feature, so for now here are two mildly unfriendly but usable methods:

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Reader Overload

My Google Reader needs to be dealt with. I have over 100,000 unread items across 288 feeds. I use Google Reader as a sort of delicious for blogs or anything with a feed. Having such an overload of information led me to pare my daily reads down to just a few blogs: Swiss Miss (design, brooklyn), Delete Yourself (hipster webish fuckerage) and Serious Eats New York (food). If you ever see my computer in a compromising position, it would be a cruel yet liberating joke to “mark all as read” for my entire account.

Here are the feeds in my Reader:

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The Vendy Awards Website

The 2009 Vendy Awards, a huge street vendor cookoff-fundraiser, was held this past weekend.  For the last two years I’ve been their web dude–designing and developing the site and then updating throughout the year.  I’m wasn’t able to attend on account of a last minute trip to Puerto Rico, but the great folks over at Serious Eats did a wonderful job of documenting it.

If you’re ever in need of a jack-of-all-trades web consultant/designer/developer, drop me an email at gregtakayama@gmail.com.

vendys

How to Save Your (Friend’s) Gmail Account from a Hacker

A while back, my buddy Kris gchatted me:

Kris: i think am in love
Kris: will you marry me?
Greg: no way dude
Greg: your face
Kris: it’s true
Greg: areyou proposing?
Greg: if so
Greg: ok fine
Kris: go to churches
Kris: i’ll mary you
Kris: kiss you
Kris: and fuck you
Kris: :D

This seemed peculiar as 1) Kris is actually a dude, 2) He’s never gchatted me…ever and 3) He’s already married so I don’t see how he could marry me and fuck me with out getting into big trouble with his wife. At one point I thought he might be really drunk and making a lot of mistakes with a lot of friends:

Kris: I’m very sorry
Kris: i think..
Kris: i am intoxicat
Kris: intoxicated
Kris: beer
Greg: proove it
Kris: noooooooooooooo

But, it turned out that someone had hacked into his gmail account and was using it for probably the most inane thing you could use a hacked gmail account for–chatting with the person’s friends. This hacker must have been pretty dumb. He ended up giving me Kris’s email and password:

Kris: I’m hacker
Greg: nah
Greg: kris is a hacker
Greg: so you’re a hacker
Greg: so you are kris
Kris: no
Kris: kris.*****@gmail.com/[password redacted]
Greg: oh rad!
Greg: now i can be kris too.
Greg: lemme try

Click "details" to get more info and log out sessions.

Click "details" to see session information and to log out all sessions.

I remembered reading on the Gmail blog (yep, I’m a nerd) that you can see all locations from which your gmail account has been accessed as well as signed all sessions out. So, I put this feature to the test, logged into Kris’s account and signed out all the sessions, then logged back in and changed his password before the guy had a chance to log back in. I was eventually able to get a hold of his then fiancée, and the day was saved!
Here are instructions on the Gmail blog about how to log out all active sessions. »

Going to Puerto Rico

Two days ago, a JetBlue email landed in my inbox for their crazy cheap end of summer fares. I saw $79 to exotic locations and thought hmmm….that’s totally doable. A day later, I’ve found a travel buddy and booked flights to Puerto Rico for late September. I haven’t taken a real vacation this summer or even escaped the city (to the beach or Hamptons as most normal people do). It’s easy to go stir crazy being stuck in a 90 degree, humid, smelly New York City. Definitely looking forward to getting away.

JetBlue’s Bikini Sale.

Seemed like a deal to me.  Oh the power of email marketing.

Seemed like a deal to me. Oh the power of email marketing.