The Baby Bunnies on 5-13-2007

How to post iPhoto images to Blogger

Background

I spent a good deal of an evening trying to find a quick and easy way to post from iPhoto to Blogger. I found one pay option involving a utility that used Flickr as a middle man, but that costs about $26 USD to register.

I contemplated using Applescript and the Blogger API for the task. I was hunting up the relevant API and Applescript documentation when I had a thought. I'd already set up Blogger Mobile so it would post photos I sent from my cell phone and my gmail account. The cell phone posting I used all the time, but the gmail posting, almost never.

I'd stumbled across iPhoto2Gmail in my hunt. This utility allows you to e-mail photos through your gmail account directly from iPhoto. It even lets you resize them on the fly.

Within a few minutes, I was happily posting photos to Blogger from iPhoto without a care in the world.

Of course, iPhoto's ability to share messages via e-mail gives you even more flexibility by letting you bypass Gmail completely and use any Pop account you wish.

While Blogger has a Mail-to-Blogger feature, you HAVE to use Blogger Mobile to do post photos as "Mail-to-Blogger does not support images or other attachments."

The Method
It will take five to ten minutes to set this up.

1. You need to create a Blogger account.


2. You need to create a Blogger Mobile account. This is a simple matter of sending an e-mail or SMS message to go@blogger.com


3. You need to claim your Mobile Blogger Account. When you create the account, you'll receive an e-mail or SMS message from Blogger Mobile containing a token. Go to go.blogger.com and log in with the token sent by Blogger.


4. Next, you need to merge the Blogger Mobile Blog with your regular Blog. You'll receive directions on how to do this once you "claim" your Mobile Blog. After you claim the Blog, you'll see a list of "Mobile Devices" in your Blogger Dashboard


5. You're almost done. If the e-mail account you used to create the Mobile Blog is set up in the Mac Mail application, then you can start posting your photos to Blogger by simply highlighting them, clicking on the Share menu and selecting "Email". Follow the prompts and send the e-mail to go@blogger.com


6. If you want to use Gmail, download and install iPhoto2Gmail Once this is configured and installed, you will post to Blogger by highlighting the photos in iPhoto, and selecting the File menu, selecting Export and going to the iphoto2gmail tab. The tab name may be truncated.


7. The one down side to using iphoto2gmail is that it will append the following text to the bottom of each post:
   Email Sent using iPhoto2Gmail http://notoptimal.net

With either method (POP or Gmail) you'll still have sent messages containing the resized photos in Gmail or the Mac Mail application. The Mac Mail application can be configured to purge e-mail from the sent messages folder, which may be a valid option if you don't use Mac Mail for anything else.

That's the long and the short of it. A quick, free, easy way to get iPhoto top post directly to Blogger.

The Bunnies

Beanbag, Echo, Lookout, Holly and Cheyenne on 5-27-2007

Email Sent using iPhoto2Gmail http://notoptimal.net

The Kitchen Back Splash

Here are some photos of the new back splash tile in the kitchen. The
empty areas of wall board will be covered by cabinets, hopefully by
this weekend.

Email Sent using iPhoto2Gmail http://notoptimal.net

Breakfast

I've slacked off the last few days on updating my Food Blog. Part of this is the rather boring nature of what I've been eating. My diet has been mostly bagels and deli sandwiches, and not the more intersting foods my wife and I prefer to eat.

Part of this is the continued state of our kitchen. We have the back splash tile mostly up, now we just need to grout and then seal it. After that we install the counters and then install the sink. Hopefully I'll have more progress to report after the weekend.

Oh Noes! Im Meltin!

Mimi, a bunny abandoned in Plymouth, MA was caught by the House Rabbit Network. My wife and I, having been part of the team that caught her had the honor of fostering her until her spay. Now that she's been spayed and examined by a vet, she's up for adoption. UNless she's adopted soon, my wife and I will pick her up from the head foster home and foster her ourselves.

She's an affectionate, cuddly rabbit. This photo was taken during the hour drive from our place to the head Foster home, and she spent the entire drive cuddled in my lap, enjoying a good scritch.

Mimi enjoys a car ride

Links about scientology

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Lunch

Today;s lunch consisted of fried clam strips from Tony's.

Lunch

Today's absurdly belated lunch consisted of a roast beef wrap and some vegetable chips, made form taro and beet. The chips are far tastier than the inclusion of beet makes them sound.

Breakfast

Oatmeal and coffee, the breakfast of champions. (Well, it's better than the breakfast sandwiches I've BEEN getting.)

Lunch

Kashi Microwave Chicken Cashew lunch. Very tasty, relatively low sodium.

Breakfast

Yet another breakfast sandwich, this is getting boring!

Dinner

My wife and I had dinner at a friend's house. You can't see it here, but thee was a hot dog included with the steak and salad. The couscous was tasty and lightly seasoned.

Free, legal music downloads

Every now and then I poke at Yahoo Answers and post a few answers. Sometimes I just mess with kids cheating on their homework, but other times I try to post meaningful and useful answers.

I've noticed the same questions tend to crop up again and again. One of the common ones is "Where can I download free music?" These questions generally get a flood of twits recommending Limewire, and one in ten of those actually bother to mention that a lot of the music on Limewire isn't exactly legal.

Below is the response I've taken to posting. I got tired to retyping it again and again, so I'm presenting it here so I can just copy and paste it in the future. If people are going to ask the same question that's already been asked and answered over and over, they might as well get the same answer as everyone else who asked the question.

There are several options for free, safe, legal music and video downloads. A lot of people recommend Limewire, Bittorrent, Bearshare and the like, but most the content on such networks constitute a copyright violation or can be infested with viruses. Most of these programs are also known to have trouble with Firewalls and a few won't run under Windows Vista.

The first legal source is Podcasts. My favorite is Crap from the Past at crapfromthepast.com. The host Ron "Boogymoster" Gerber, describes it as a graduate level course in pop music, and he's not far off. You'll hear a lot of music that hasn't been on the air for a long time. The program is available as a podcast, with three half hour segments coming out a week.

Another great source of Public Domain and Creative Commons music is archive.org. For example, It's amazing how much old school Jazz has fallen into the Public Domain. A lot of techno and pop artists use a Creative Commons license that makes non-commercial distribution legal.

Jamendo.com is a record label that makes all their music available for download for free. The idea is to give away MP3s to encourage people to buy the actual CDs.

Archive.org has a page that lists other labels like Jamendo that offer free, legal downloads of their music.
http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels

You can also look into various music Podcasts. For example, there are some really good Celtic music podcasts, Celtic Music News being my favorite. celticmusicnews.com

The BBC and NPR have a variety of music programs, most of which are free downloads or can be listened to as streaming media.

If you use iTunes, the iTunes store has a selection of free music and videos, with new free music being released on Tuesdays. You can even sign up for a mailing list to be notified of new free content when it becomes available.

Finally, there's etree.org. A LOT of artists give permission to allow the recording and distribution of their live performances. etree.org only offers "lossless" recordings, so you'll need to convert them into another format to use them on your portable media player. The good news is since these are lossless files to start with, you won't have the data degradation and conversion artifacts typical of say, converting a WMA to an MP3. It's more like ripping an CD.

All told, there's a LOT out there free of charge. The Kuro5hin article I link to below has even more detail.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/5/05113/70314

http://www.celticmusicnews.com/
http://archive.org
http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels
http://crapfromthepast.com
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
http://www.etree.org/
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/5/05113/70314
http://www.ghacks.net/2005/12/03/free-music-list-december-2005

Dr Phil

Dr. Phil is a blowhard who shoots off his mouth without doing any research.

For example:

The day of the VATech shootings, he was on the air blaming Video Games for training the kid to kill.

Later in the day, the Washington Post's online article included a note that the shooter was a Counter Strike player. They later removed this claim from the article. The subsequent police investigation revealed that the shooter not only owned NO video games, but had never been seen playing any.

At the time Dr Phil went about blaming the media and video games, the inaccurate Washington Post article hadn't even been posted.

Dr Phil never apologized for jumping to conclusions that were later discredited.

He's a liar, a blowhard and he never admits when he's wrong.

He's only on TV because Oprah was taken in by his act, and his ability to pretend he knows what he's talking about.

Decker the rabbit

EDIT: 5-15-2007
My wife and I have been driving about an hour South (100 miles round trip) the last few days to capture domestic rabbits that were abandoned by various twerps.

The above rabbit is Decker, so named because we spent the better part of two hours trying to lure him out from underneath a deck. The deck was surrounded with a wooden latticework which restricted his movement options and kept us out. His mate is a lovely black rabbit, also around eight pounds who delivered a litter of two black bunnies and two white about a week after being caught.

Both rabbits were turned over to the Bristol County Rabbit Rescue, as a the moment they have more room than the House Rabbit Network. They're local to the site with the feral rabbits and are thus able to get down more often to catch the strays.

Lunch

A salami, cheese and romaine wrap with a bit of mayo and mustard.

Breakfast

By way of variety, I got a bagel and a muffin from Starbucks this morning instead of my usual sandwich. Aside from being lower fat, this is cheaper, has no protein aside from the cream cheese and is higher in processed carbohydrates. I really need to get back to granola, oatmeal or "Twigs and berries Cereal" for breakfast.

Dinner

Having skipped lunch, I swung by Wendy's for dinner, grabbing a Spicy Chicken value meal and a cheeseburger off the dollar value menu. Sprite as a drink, as I didn't want to take in any caffeine after noontime.

Breakfast

I seem to be spending a lot of mornings eating Starbucks for breakfast. While the sandwiches are good, it's too expensive to keep up for long. I need to be better about eating breakfast at home or bringing something to eat to the office.

Beanbag loves Echo

Lunch

Breakfast

My wife calls this "Twigs and Berries" cereal. High fiber, and moisturized with rice milk so I can avoid having to take Lactaid. I don't know WHY she dislikes the cereal so much, as it's quite flavorful.

Dinner

Lunch

Mmmmm. Hot dogs and mustard with a side of baked beans.

Breakfast

This was actually tastier than it looks. The much in the mixing bowl is some granola cereal in rice milk. It had crushed almonds, dried fruit and a host of other tasty things.

The coffee, consisting of more Folgers "Gourmet Chocolate Truffle" remained lackluster. I'm looking forward to using the crap up.

Dinner

Dinner consisted of leftovers, but they weren't MY leftovers. My wife came home with some leftover hummus and and Indian chicken dish that she'd had for dinner, and offered me the rest. Being a fan of Indian food (Assuming it contains no Cilantro) I was good to go.

Breakfast (Lunch not Pictured)

Yes, I went to Starbucks for breakfast again.

Lunch however was free. The company bought pizza for the office to entice folks to sit through a demo for a new video archive product that's in development.

Dinner

Dinner was, how shall I put this, unfortunate.

I was preparing a fish and rice dish when my pager went off. I called the customer who'd paged and ended up on the phone for most of the evening. I realized early on in the call that this was going to take a while, so I continued making dinner. I knew if I didn't get dinner underway I wouldn't be eating until midnight.

Unfortunately, I was a bit distracted by talking the customer through diagnosing a down server and I ended up grabbing and using a few spices I hadn't intended. The result was an odd flavor that was far too spiced for my wife.

Of course I now have a host of leftovers for which I need to find a use. If the stove were in working order I'd be tempted to try a savory rice pudding.

Lunch, Mostly Leftovers

Leftovers galore. The rather translucent noodles on the left ended up not being eaten, as they had grown a bit sour in the fridge. They weren't unsafe in any way, but the spices had mellowed in an odd way, resulting in an entirely inedible mash with a slimy texture.

The bread contained a few slices of Salami.

Breakfast

Breakfast was a big 'ole cup of Red Barn Peaberry Coffee, with a whiole grain waffle which my wife topped with a single dried date.

Dinner

Dinner was a salad and some pumpkin bread pudding. there was a slight miscalculation in the salad however. In my haste to assemble the salad, I grabbed a few large chunks of what I thought was tofu, only to earn when I popped the first one into my mouth it was inf fact Feta Cheese. Fortunately I like Feta cheese, so this was more of a minor inconvenience than anything else.

Unfortunately for my waist line however, I was at a friend's house and several people brought baked goods, including Macaroon Bars, frosted vanilla cookies and some chocolate chip cake. Atkins would be horrified, as would most respectable dietitians.

Lunch

Yes, it's Pizza, yes I took Lactaid, but hey, at least the soda was diet...

As you can probably guess by now, I forgot to grab lunch on my way out the door this morning.

Breakfast

Yeah, yeah, I know. A breakfast sandwich is hardly healthy, but I was in a rush this morning and forgot about the cereal and rice milk I have at home.

On the bright side, the prospect of posting the food to this Blog kept me from adding a donut to the mix.