Like everyone else my first reaction to Flickr’s new storage plan was jaw-dropping happiness. Flickr was not only the first web service that I actually paid for, I also spent insane amount of time uploading, organizing my collection of images. Flickr used to be awesome until Yahoo stopped working on it. I recently looked at the Google+ image storage/backup service and I think it is much much better than flickr, at least for me. Here is why:

• Unless you have very good internet speed with top notch upload speed and take a lot of picture, you most likely will never use, or even come close to using even a fraction of Flickr’s offering. That’s Flickr’s fault, but they know the math, which is why they can offer such ridiculous space. If Flick offered more than just image uploading, then it would have been a different story. The flickr desktop uploader hasn’t been updated since 2009.
  
  
• Because of my horrible upload speed, and its not only me, it will take me months (if not years) of continuos uploading to store my tens of thousands of image in its original size. So to upload my images to Flickr I will have to resize all my images from its original size. If I am going to resize my images, why not use Google+ offering, which offers unlimited storage in standard size?
  
  
• Image hosting is more than just storage. Google+ with its recent update made image hosting smarter, better looking (I know subjective), more fine tuned options, and overall looks like something that is made for 2013. With features like Auto-backup, Auto-enhance, Auto-awesome, Highlight; its way ahead of almost everyone else I can think of. While the much needed new flickr update looks better than what it used to be (again subjective), underneath the simple design changes its still the old flickr with the same set of features and settings that has always been there. Visually its not as pleasing as Google+, it has a long way to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I am anything but a Google fanboy. But when it comes to polish and feature set and the reality of uploading large amount of photos online, I honestly think Google+ is way ahead of the pack, perhaps Facebook can be considered a second best option. Flickr, being the only other Image backup service I have used, comes in third for me. I hope Yahoo continues to refine flickr and doesn’t wait another 5 years for feature bump and I also hope that Yahoo, under Mayer’s leadership becomes a serious challenge to the present 3-4 tech behemoth. Yahoo may have shown some early glimpse of change in direction but this was not the defining “It” factor I was hoping for. As a matter of fact the biggest take away from Flickr update was not the storage bump, but that it actually did something new.

The post Why I don’t think Flickr’s 1TB storage offer is such a big deal appeared first on SlashGeek.

This is how your new photostream looks like:

To change is back to your own look just add ?details=1 at the end of your profile url. So for example, if this is your profile photostream url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/youraccountname/ just add ?details=1 at the end of it. Not it looks a lot like before.

This is obviously not a permanent solution, so you will have to bookmark that link every time you want to see your photostream the old way. Hopefully Yahoo people are listening to their users and give them an option to keep the old for people who prefers it to the new one.

The post Quick tip: How to get the old flickr look back appeared first on SlashGeek.

The only pre-requisite is that you get your linux-based server. It could be in the form of low-end box or a dedicated server or cloud service like AWS or more user friendly like DigitalOcean that lets you increase your HD space on the go. While there are packages and installation instructions for almost all mainstream linux distro out there, I am going to show you how to do it with Ubuntu server in less than 5 minutes.

Step 1:

Simple install owncloud with apt-get apt-get install owncloud. You will be prompted to make a mysql password.

Step 2:

Go to your-ip-address/owncloud to configure your owncloud server. You will be asked to create an account and put mysql credentials (just like WordPress).

Step 3:

Intall desktop client for your OS, Windows/Mac/Linux or mobile client for iOS/Android. You can also upload from the web interface.

That’s it, in less than 5 minutes you have your own dropbox-like file sync and storage service, make sure to check out the setting section to customize owncloud to your needs or add new users.

The post Host your own dropbox-like cloud backup service under 5 minutes appeared first on SlashGeek.

If the statements were made by anyone else from any other major corporations, say microsoft or oracle or Apple, most people probably wouldn’t even bat an eye. But this is Eric Schmidt we are talking about, former CEO and current Executive Chairmen of Google. A company that is often associate with (sometimes rightfully so) as the champion of open technology, superior products and generally geek friendly.

Sometimes you have to take double take on some of his statement and think, “really? This guy is in charge of Google, a company that is arguably sitting on the largest pile of data on anyone and everyone who used any of many google products.” Yes, yes he is. It really makes you wonder what Google thinks about its users behind closed doors as opposed to what we are used to thinking about them.

Let’s look at some of his more troubling statements:

1) “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”

(CNBC interview – video)

2) “Streetview the cars we drive only once, you can just move, right?”

(CNN interview in reply to privacy concerns about streetview cars – video)

3) “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

(Interview by the Atlantic – video)

4) “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

(WSJ interview)

5) “There is what I call the creepy line.The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

(on The Hill)

6) ““Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”

(Techonomy interview)

7) “‘Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood. We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply–you know–what is good and what is evil….The rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap…it must be a joke. I was sitting in a room in [the] first six months…talking about some advertising…and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It’s a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation especially in areas that are ambiguous.”

(New Yorker Interview)

8) “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time … I mean we really have to think about these things as a society.”

(WSJ interview)

9) “No anonymity. And the reason is that in a world of asymmetric threats, true anonymity is too dangerous. … I think it’s reasonable to say that you need a name service for humans. … The governments are going to require it in some form. They just are going to. It’s not going to be OK to have random terrorists doing random terrible things under the cover of absolute anonymity.”

(technonomy interview video)

10) “The idea was that we don’t quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don’t be evil, then employees can say, I think that’s evil,” … “Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something.”

(NPR interview – audio, In his defense he later said that the rule worked and served its purpose.)

I hope you are as excited about Google Glass and its privacy implications as I am. To top it off you can now take pictures with just a wink, without consent or anyone’s knowledge.

The post 10 crazy statements Eric Schmidt made appeared first on SlashGeek.

I have my reservation about Google Glass. Generally speaking Google is one of the better corporation when it comes to privacy and advocate of free and open technology. But they are also an advertising company which places them in position where Google Glass is a very intriguing product and also something to me worried.

But that’s just me, I tend to be on the right side of skepticism spectrum. I am interested to know what you guys think about Google Glass. So feel free to vote.

The post New Poll: How do you feel about “Google Glass”? appeared first on SlashGeek.

curl -I www.slashgeek.net
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: Sun, 12 May 2013 02:55:30 GMT
Pragma: public
Cache-Control: max-age=3600, public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
Etag: c39b09b955e4bb5b69b56bce7e36ce7e
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.9.2.9
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: R2D2
Date: Sun, 12 May 2013 02:06:43 GMT
X-Varnish: 1472756484 1472756321
Age: 673
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive

To use custom server header with nginx you will have to recompile nginx from source using headers-more-nginx-module module. It might not always be the ideal solution, specially if you enjoy the seamless update feature of package managers or your server configs are not located on default paths. There is another painless way to change your server header using varnish. Varnish is often used as reverse proxy in front of nginx, for a fast and responsive site during high traffic.

Unlike changing server header with nginx, it is very trivial to do this with varnish. Edit varnish config located (Ubuntu) at /etc/varnish/default.vcl and edit these two lines to look like below, make sure to use your own custom server name by changing “R2D2″.

unset beresp.http.Server;
set beresp.http.Server = "R2D2";

The post Quick Tip: How to change nginx server header using varnish appeared first on SlashGeek.

To get the latest stable nginx release on your Ubuntu 12.04 server you have to do this.

1) Add the official nginx repository:

Add deb http://nginx.org/packages/ubuntu/ precise nginx to your package source list /etc/apt/sources.list

2) Add public key for your package from ubuntu server:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys ABF5BD827BD9BF62

3) Remove current nginx install:

You have to remove nginx-full and nginx-common as they will conflict with the new version. Don’t worry your server configs won’t be removed. Do a sudo apt-get update for good measure.

4) Install nginx from new repository:

Simply install nginx with apt-get install nginx

One thing to note is that nginx package from Ubuntu use /etc/nginx/sites-available/ to store site configs but package from nginx stores configs files in /etc/nginx/conf.d/. Even though you get an option to keep your current nginx config or overwrite during installation, its always a good ides\a to backup your config files before installing/upgrading to a newer version of nginx.

Finally check to see if you are using the current nginx. As of this writing for me its:

nginx -v
nginx version: nginx/1.4.1

The post How to get the latest nginx on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS (Precise Pangolin) appeared first on SlashGeek.

There seems to be a lot of misplaced anger towards Google for deciding to cancel Reader. I say misplaced because if you really think about it there really isn’t any reason to be angry about it; here is why:

• Reader isn’t an irreplaceable service, there are many other RSS readers out there, I just learned about some of the new ones in the last week, that I never knew existed. Some of them are actually, IMHO, much better than Google Reader. As a matter of fact, besides Google Search, I can’t think of a single proprietary Google service I use that can’t be replaced, if Google decides to close them tomorrow.
• Google gave you plenty of time to move your data off of Reader to another service. It takes less than a minute to download or move your data to another RSS Reader.
• I am happy that indirectly Google is pushing me away from one of their service, I have been trying to be less dependent on Google for some time, and this is a perfect excuse (albeit forced) to move out of their ecosystem. By diversifying my online footprint and self-hosting some of the services, I am being less dependent on one company.
• No company can guarantee you forever support for any single product. We don’t know if 10 years from now there will be anything called “Google Search” or anything even remotely comparable to how Search works right now. Even paid and wildly popular services like Dropbox can close down tomorrow (however unlikely). Being a paid service doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will last longer.

The post I am not even mad that Google canceled Reader appeared first on SlashGeek.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal.

- Steve Jobs

Anyone who spent a reasonable amount of time with both OS X and Ubuntu with its recent iteration of design changes (aka Unity), can see without doubt the OS X design features and elements that has been heavily copied by (or helped to inspire) Ubuntu.

What often gets lost in discussions on how everyone else is ripping off apple design ideas is the fact that apple itself is not immune to this fault (if you would call it that). For instance, lets just talk about the OS X dock. I always reposition my OS X dock to be on the left-hand side of the screen, it works good for me that way and I have seen others who use it like that.

With Unity, Ubuntu introduced dock and positioned it on the left hand side. And its fixed, in default setup you can’t change the dock’s position. It works pretty much how you would expect a dock would work. What some people may not know is that there was Linux DE docks even before Unity docks, as a package, with all kinds of options to customize it.

There were similar looking docks in other OS even before it was first introduced in OS X in 2001. In one form or another, there was a dock on NEXTSTEP (which was later bought by Apple), OS/2 3.0, Windows 98, AmigaOS, MorphOS, BeOS. But the first OS that most likely introduced it was RISC OS in 1987 (was called Icon Bar), curiously enough Steve Jobs’ NEXTSTEP picked up the design element a year later without much fuss.

In Apple’s credit, they almost always repackaged an existing idea by making it look good. But their ideas itself are not always original as the fanboys would like you to believe.

The original Dock in RISC OS in 1987:

The post Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy appeared first on SlashGeek.

(Warning! This is not necessarily the most secure VPN setup guide, but one of the quickest and easiest way to do it.)

This is how easy to set up a VPN on your own.

Step 1:

Install PPTP package. On vanilla Ubuntu:
apt-get install pptpd

Step 2:

Simple configuration. Use remoteip that is outside the range of your DHCP server.

Edit /etc/pptpd.conf

Step 3:

Adding a user is as easy as.

Edit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

vpnuser pptpd password *

Step 4:

Connecting to your vpn server from your Windows machine:

And you are done.

The post HowTo Setup a VPN in Under 5 Minutes appeared first on SlashGeek.