After washing a couple of pairs of tennis shoes recently, I discovered that getting them dry wasn’t as easy as just tossing them in the clothes dryer. Not only did they make a terrible racket as they bounced around inside the rotating drum, they also kept turning off the dryer by hitting the inside of the dryer door.
A little searching online revealed a very simple technique for drying shoes – without noise and without damaging the shoes or the dryer.
Tie the shoestrings of a pair of shoes together into a loose knot.
Close the dryer door with the shoes hanging on the inside and the knot on the outside.
Over the past few years, I’ve made the mistake of using Flickr as my primary source of photo storage. It just seemed easier to pull the memory card out of my camera, drag the photos into Flickr Uploadr, and organize them into sets and collections on the site, than to keep copies of all of my digital memories organized into separate folders on my computer – especially when I use three to four computers on a regular basis.
I realized the error of my ways last week when my partner gave me a digital photo frame for Christmas. I excitedly went onto Flickr and browsed through my collection of over 3,600 photos, selecting around 600 to use on the frame. That’s when the fun began.
While Flickr makes it incredibly easy to upload photos to their website, downloading them is another story. Unless you want to download them one at a time, you have to use third-party software. Bulkr would have been my program of choice, but it limits downloads to 200 photos at a time. After trying several others and finding most of them to be buggy or inadequate, I stumbled across Migratr – a simple utility that transfers pictures between photo-sharing websites. It even retains tags, sets, and collections.
Although the program is designed to move your photo collection between websites, it turned out to be a handy download tool. After authenticating my Flickr account, it asked for a location on my computer to save downloaded photos. Voila! I had a backup.
Since this method doesn’t keep tags or sets intact, I decided to download Picasa3 to keep my photos organized. If you haven’t checked out Picasa’s facial recognition technology, you are in for a real treat! It’s both amazing and a little scary.
