WhatToDoAbout.com » Computer Stuff

What To Do About UNTAGGING YOURSELF FROM PHOTOS ON FACEBOOK

Tim Mallon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:30:06 +0000

You know how it is… you are hanging out with friends and everyone wants to capture the moment. Everyone wants to take your photo. Then all the photos end up on Facebook or Myspace or some other social networking site.

Sometimes people may feel an obligation to the tag of themselves… you know? It’s like they would feel bad for the friend that tagged them if they untag themselves. To this I say fooey! My, my, we have been using the word fooey more and more often lately.

I mean for realz… we live in a world where everyone has a phone with a camera on it. Your picture can be taken at anytime… not too mention your voice recorded and video of your smiling face captured. In light of that camera flash… you should feel free to untag your fine self from any photo or video that you want for any reason you want.

It’s bad enough that the world has to look at your ugly mug… I mean fine self… so you might as well save some face and detach your name from that photo. Also, since your mug is being continually documented, it may be hard to maintain the level of privacy that you wish, especially when you have to beat down all of your fans. Untagging yourself can help your privacy.

Another good reason for untagging yourself from photos on Facebook is because you like to play tag, freeze tag, and untag and retag. You like to play! I like to play!

So go ahead and untag yerself from dat dere photo. I won’t mind one bit… besides, it’s just facebook and it’s just a photo. Now I must go untag myself.

What To Do About USING RSS (101)

Tim Mallon — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:15:15 +0000

What is RSS and what should you do about it? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or if you are adventurous it could stand for Rambunctious Slicing Sounds or Red Salmon Sandwiches or Random Silly Stories (as is the case many times here at WTDA). So there are many wonderful uses of RSS, but we will only focus on one today due to time and length and that’s all I feel like addressing. Perhaps in another session we will devote more time to the subject.

I find that one of the best uses for RSS is not having to check a gazillion sites each day. Let’s say you actually have friends. Let’s also say that you have lots of friends and they all have websites or blogs or are news reporters or are constantly updating their twitter status. Let’s also say that everyday you get tired of going to each blog or website to see what they are saying. You really want to stay up to date with what they are doing or else you will no longer have any friends. You need to be involved. Along comes RSS.

Really Simple Syndication is basically a simple feed of the latest blog, news, or status of a website. So if you have something to read the feed with, then you can consolidate all of the feeds into one spot. Then all you have to do is check your feed reader to see all of the content from all of your sites or your friends sites. Nowadays most browsers have feed readers built in. So for example, I use the Safari web browser and have a bookmark on my toolbar that says RSS. It looks like this :

That picture is an example of one of my RSS feed grabbers that I use. So that way I will know when any of those blogs or sites update their content. AND I can read it right there without visiting the site. See the number on the right of the name? That is how many new updates there are to be read. Quite handy huh. All you have to do is find a website’s RSS feed and bookmark it in your reader (in my case a folder on my toolbar).

So there you have it. I simple and easy way to use RSS for the everyman… and everywoman. As you will notice, WhatToDoAbout.com also has an RSS feed right here! Also it is up in the right hand corner where it says subscribe to RSS. Just in case you were ever wondering what that was, well, now you know. We also have handy updates via email which, as I said, are handy. These are different from the WTDA Weekly where I send you a featured WTDA along with some silly commentary or banter. Happy RSSing.

What To Do About IMAP VERSUS POP

Tim Mallon — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:20:00 +0000

I am no tech guru or anything… but I know what I like. I had been using IMAP (internet messaging access protocol) as my mail protocol. My desktop interface was Mac Mail and I was using .Mac’s mail service (Apple). I got tired of paying for .Mac and so I canceled my account and the only thing I missed was using the IMAP protocol instead of POP.

Recently Google integrated IMAP into Gmail … well, I am not sure how long Gmail has had IMAP capability but it didn’t when I switched to it about 6 months ago. Boy am I glad. With IMAP everything is in sync as it should be. When I was using POP it was like things wouldn’t be deleted or moved to the correct folder. The ‘picture’ of my desktop application was never the same as the web browser. No matter how many of the settings you change or configure, POP never works as nicely as IMAP in my opinion. I was constantly updating the folders and locations of the messages.

Now with IMAP in place, everything I do on my desktop is done online as well. Much nicer. I will say that Apple Mail through .Mac was better than Gmail… but the way Gmail now has IMAP, it functions pretty well, and it’s FREE… that is impressive. Way to go Google.

If you have no clue about what I am talking about and you just don’t know what to do about IMAP vs. POP then hopefully this article made you either want to know, made you want to change to IMAP, or made you continue not caring. If you set it up there are some decent instructions from Google, afterward I would recommend this article on Chinhdo.com as it gives some good tips on using your new setup.