O hai! U Found Me? Srsly?

Do you have a smart-phone (or a modern camera with GPS)? Do you take pics with it? Do you ever upload them on the internet (social networking, tweeting, forums, email) or text them? Well did you know there is (probably*) hidden data in those pics that anyone could use to track your location. Scary isn’t it?! The hidden data is referred to as EXIF (or sometimes just Meta-data) and contains information like the camera make and model, the image dimensions, and yes: GPS coordinates…

I knew about this (at least to some extent), but I didn’t realize how easy it was for any individual to access that data and use it to track you down, until today. Take a look at this video:

So what to do now?!

1. Well, if you’re worried about pictures you’ve already uploaded, you might consider trying to remove them or at least try to change the privacy settings to try to limit who has access to these photos.
2. The next step would be to disable the geotagging feature of your camera (on the iPhone open Settings and go to “General->Location Services” and turn the Camera toggle off) so that no more GPS data will be tagged on the pics.
3. Finally it’s time to remove the GPS data from existing pictures, I’ll show you how to do that next…

Removing GPS Data (Geotags) From Pictures

I’m going to show you the FREE way, but keep in mind if this scares you (we’re going to use the command line), then there are other options out there (but I don’t have time to find them for you, sorry… the command line / terminal isn’t that scary, really)…

Step 1: Install Jhead

Get Jhead and install it on your computer. It is available for Linux, Mac, Windows and even FreeBSD.

If you are using Ubuntu you can get it straight from the repositories using this command:

Otherwise you will need to see the “releases” section on the main page: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

Installation Help
(Note: if you installed it from the repos on Ubuntu, you can skip to the next step)

This is a command line program, there is no GUI (no point-click, no pretty pictures or icons, etc.), so you need to make it easy to access and use.

Mac OS X
If it goes anything like my download did, it might have a “.txt” extension on the end, and it will be in your Downloads folder. Do whatever you like, but I moved mine to a folder I use for command line utilities like this: /Applications/Utilities/NoGUI/ is my directory of choice. Assuming your situation is like mine, here are the commands to make the file executable, rename it, and move it to that destination:

note: if you get an error about there being no such directory, then it’s because you don’t have a NoGUI folder yet, so make one like this:

now it’s not going to be much fun typing out: /Applications/Utilities/NoGUI/jhead every time you want to run the command… so let’s make an alias to simplify things. I’m going to assume you don’t have an alias for your text editor of choice yet, and I’m also going to assume you don’t care for command line / terminal editors like Vi, Vim, Nano, or Emacs, so we’ll do it the ugly way once, then we’ll go ahead and create a alias to the TextEdit as well to make this easier for you in the future.

In your terminal… you should still be at your Home (user)… run the following to backup your bash profile and open the profile (not the backup) in TextEdit:

Now, go to the bottom of the file and on a new line enter the following lines:

Now Save and Quit. You should now be back at the terminal. Now Quit Terminal and then Open it again. When it reopens you the new aliases should have loaded. To be sure type: alias and if it worked you will see all available aliases listed in the output. Now you can skip to Step 2.

Windows
I haven’t tested this on Windows, but there is an executable listed on the page so download it and put it in the root directory of your C: drive. If you want to set up an “alias” for it on Windows, you could try making an environment variable/path for it using the info found here. But for the rest of this guide, I’m just going to assume you put “jhead.exe” in “C:\” so for all of the commands below you will navigate to the directory where your photos are and then will run “C:\jhead.exe ” followed by the rest of the command, the path to the image will stay relative to your current directory.

Linux (other than Ubuntu)
I’ll update this later if I have time… but for now I’ll just have to assume you know how to install things on your own distribution or at least know how to look it up. Sorry.

Step 2: Remove/Modify EXIF Data From Pics

Locate the files you want to modify and then navigate there in your terminal or command prompt. (use Terminal in Linux or Mac, and use Command Prompt — cmd.exe — in Windows).

Once you have changed directory (cd in case you forgot how and you can use ls in Linux/Mac or DIR in Windows to list the files in that directory if you want) and then test the Jhead installation and alias by testing on a photo:

If it works you will see some output like this:

Now, obviously I changed the GPS data for this example… But it’s definitely there… for now!

Please note: All of the following commands are for BATCH processing (doing multiple files at once). You may need to change the extension from “.jpg” to “.JPG” depending on your operating system and the way your files are named. As far as I know Jhead only works with jpg/JPG/jpeg/JPEG files.
If you only want to process one image at a time, just substitute the file name of that image for the “*.jpg”

Here’s the code to remove the stuff we don’t want/need

To remove the EXIF/GPS data (but keep basic info like pic size and date/time) use this:

To remove do the same as above AND add your own comment use this:

If you want to remove EVERYTHING you can and leave just the bare-minimum to display the image, use the following:

If you are interested in other options to use with Jhead, see the full list here: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/usage.html

And that’s all folks!

If you have questions or run into problems, please feel free to comment below or contact me via one of the other methods listed on the Contact Page. Thanks!

Since Google has disabled my AdSense account and appealing their decision has no promise of being fruitful, I am left with a slight dilemma… What to do now?

I have space for ads, but no ads to place there. I have a few ideas, but really can’t decide.

Perhaps you can help… I am open to suggestions. You can leave a comment here, on facebook, or on twitter (or if you’re really shy you can send me an email using the “request/suggest an antidote” pages in the menu). I will give it a few days and take count of the votes/suggestions and proceed from there.

Here are the choices I’ve been considering, pick one (or two) or suggest an idea of your own:

1.) Seek out an alternative ad campaign similar to AdSense

2.) Write reviews about books and stuff on Amazon and hope people buy them (Amazon affiliate program)

3.) Seek out a pay-per-post type program (suggestions?)

4.) No Ads, no reviews, just hope people donate to $$$ freely (yeah, there’s a donate button on my page lol who knew?)

5.) Other (here’s where you make your suggestions)

Thanks in advance to all who are nice enough to offer feedback.

Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari

Remember when I said there was a problem with my template layout that caused it to display funny in every browser except Firefox? Well I finally got around to fixing it and thought I’d share the solution with you all. I figured it might be helpful to someone.

Why The Difference?

The different browsers display things slightly different sometimes because they use different “kits” (or rather — rendering engines)
to parse the HTML/CSS/JavaScript and convert all that code into the page you see (I’m trying to keep this in layman’s terms as much as possible).

Who Uses What?

Firefox uses Gecko
Chrome and Safari use Webkit
Internet Explorer uses Trident
Opera uses Presto

What To Do?

For code you only want used by Webkit (Safari & Chrome):
follow the guide here — http://css-tricks.com/how-to-create-an-ie-only-stylesheet/

For code you only want used by Trident (Internet Explorer):
follow the guide here — http://www.evotech.net/blog/2008/09/css-hack-for-google-chrome-and-safari-31/

SteerMouse 4.02 (via Apple Downloads)

I have been using a Mac Mini at work now for several months. I use a PC mouse and keyboard (for several reasons, namely i have big hands and fingers so using those tiny Apple keyboards is out of the question, and I like my multi-button mouse too much to give it up). If you are curious of the model, I use a Logitech Cordless Desktop LX710 Laser (keyboard/mouse combo).

As is expected, both the right and left mouse buttons work correctly “out of the box” on OS X, but the extra buttons and the horizontal scroll do not work! This has annoyed me for far too long and it was time I did something about it:

The Failed Attempt

First I tried searching Logitech’s website for drivers and/or software to fix the problem. I had done this before, but figured I’d give it another go. Nothing… So I tried Google… Oddly enough Google supplied me with a link to Logitech’s website — apparently they have a “Logitech Control Center” just for Mac’s.

I was excited that it could be so easy to fix, so I quickly downloaded the program, installed it, rebooted, and… LCC told me that no compatible mouse/keyboard found. I rebooted again… Same result… I did some more in-depth searching and discovered that this program is for the Mac versions of the Logitech devices only (which explains why when I registered my product the actual model I have was not to be found in the drop-down).

The Successful Attempt!

I decided I had enough and searched Apple’s download page under the “Drivers” section. I had read about a utility called “SteerMouse” when trying to troubleshoot the LCC (funny…in those searches it was SteerMouse people complained about as it apparently interfered with LCC — obviously not the case for me lol), so I thought I’d see if it still existed or if perhaps there were other options.

Sure enough, there was SteerMouse. I downloaded, installed, rebooted. Then I started up SteerMouse and was surprised to see that it did not detect a compatible mouse, however it knew enough to instruct me to remove the LCC as that was interfering! I uninstalled the LCC and rebooted.

I was pleasantly surprised to see SteerMouse now detected my mouse and allowed me to change settings for every feature. And the best part? Not only did it work flawlessly, but it already had my preferred settings set as default from the start!

You can download SteerMouse 4.0.2 here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/drivers/steermouse.html

You can download the Logitech Control Center here (wont work with PC models): http://www.logitech.com/en-us/494/3129

It never ceases to catch me by surprise how quickly time flys when you are preoccupied with living life…

So much for a post a day, huh?

To update you on what has been going on lately: my beautiful little girl was born a few weeks ago and has been keeping me quite busy (as is my son as usual). Work has been hectic at best, and I am really tired of ignorant (and I mean excessively ignorant) people…

Also, in place of school work and studying (I decided to take a break for a while in case you didn’t know), I have been taking on a few web projects and in the process o some big changes in life… But more on that another time…

I recently received an invite to google wave and also one to google voice… Both seem very promising…