Restoring lost Picasa albums

Do you use Picasa? If you do, then chances are that you already love the Picasa client and if you haven't tried it yet, I seriously recommend it. It's a wonderful application which makes organizing photos very easy and fun. In addition to the various photo editing features that the Picasa client provides, it is also convenient to share photos online to various sources. Photos can be emailed, uploaded to Picasa's web application called picasaweb, and can be shared on facebook as well! Photo prints can also be ordered right from the Picasa client (and yes, it works pretty well in India).

Here is a video introducing Picasa for Mac:


If you have spent painful long hours to organize your photo collection, you would never want to lose it. But if you somehow delete albums from Picasa client while retaining the photos, here is how you can restore the albums.

It turns out that Picasa client keeps backup of album information. This article will help you find this backup. Once you have album information files and photos located in the same hierarchy and location, you can get the album information back by rebuilding the Picasa database. Here is another article explaining how to rebuild the Picasa database. You may want to take a back up of your photos and album information before going ahead.

Remember: Picasa client helps in organizing the photos present on local hard-disk. Unlike iTunes, it doesn't store photos in a central repository.

A Hero is born

At 5 AM in the morning, I suddenly started thinking of getting myself a new phone. I've been using HTC magic (a.k.a. G1), powered by android OS, for last 6 months. It's a pretty a good phone and I enjoyed using it, but now it's time to move on.

Thinking about possible choices, the obvious came to my mind, iPhone 3GS. I am a big time Apple fan and b/w Apple; I love the iPhone. iPhone has shaken the mobile industry, set a whole new standard, very similar to what Google first did with their search, then with GMail and now with Chrome. But the problem with getting an iPhone 3GS in India is it's hefty price tag, around Rs. 35000 for 8GB model. I seriously don't understand why Vodafone and Airtel can't follow AT&T's selling model and offer it for a lower price along with a contract and earn from data usage. Anyways let's leave it, this post is not about iPhone.

Since I am also an Android user and fan, I looked around for upcoming android devices. And then I came across HTC Hero. After watching some videos, I was stunned! I wasn't expecting such an awesome device based on Android OS. HTC has made Android so elegant, social and useful with all their customizations. They just nailed it! That's the power of Android and that's why mobile manufacturers are ditching Windows and Symbian and moving to Android. Now let me stop here and point you to this video which blew my mind.

There are so many goodies in this phone that instead of listing them here, I recommend watching all 4 videos on HTC Hero website and reading this in-depth review by TechCrunch.

HTC Hero is now available in India for Rs. 32000. So if you're planning to buy a mobile in that range, definitely consider buy HTC Hero.

Awesome birthday management using Google Calendar!

Do you use any calendar service for personal use? Most people don't. But if you ever wanted to get birthday reminders of your contacts without putting any effort, you should start using Google Calendar.

Instead of asking your contacts to manually enter their birthday into some awful birthday reminder service, you can have their birthdays automatically pulled from your social network into Google calendar. This is just a one-time setup and you don't have to do anything afterwards to keep it up-to-date as you expand your social network, it will always be in sync. This also means that you don't have to bother your friends with "I'm setting up a birthday calendar and need your help" mails, you automatically get birthdays of those contacts who have shared it on your social network.

While Orkut has this feature built-in, Facebook has a third-party app which can do this for you. I don't care know about other networks as I don't use them but if you know, please leave a comment. It's also possible to pull birthdays from Google Contacts (i.e. GMail contacts) and less famous Google profile by using this recently added feature in Google Calendar. And for those friends and family members who are not present online, you can manually create recurring entries in Calendar.  

Here is how to setup this:

• To add Orkut birthdays, look for the link highlighted in the image or follow this guide.

• To add Google contact birthdays, follow this link and click on 'More'.

• To add fbCal app on Facebook, follow this link.

Once you've done this, you'll see these calendars embeded in your Google Calendar.

Now here comes the best part. You can have this information always available on your mobile phone! You can enable Google Sync if your device supports it and get all these birthdays on your phone. And if you don't have a high end device, don't worry, you can still get SMS reminders from Google Calendar.

If you have an android device, embed this awesome calendar widget by Quick Calendar on the home screen.

I am already using this setup for the last few months and just loving it. Let me know if you find it useful too.

Coming up next, awesome contact management!

A quick review of official Facebook app for Android

Today Facebook launched their official app for Android. And contrary to TechCrunch's review, I liked it at first glance. Since I am not an iPhone user, I am not comparing it to the iPhone version. Instead I am comparing it to other facebook apps like Babbler Lite which are already available on Android Market.

It's sleek, has a nice UI and is really fast. It supports uploading photos. Also, I can now see my friend's profile as well.

But the main reason why I liked this app is the addition of two widgets that comes with this app. There is a widget to quickly update status from home screen. And then there is a Phone directory widget. I really liked this one. I can now have phone numbers of my facebook contacts on android's home screen. Also I don't need to update their number when they change it. Hopefully they'll update it on facebook and I'll get the updated number.

I've been using Babbler Lite for sometime and although it has most of the features that this app provides, I am not a big fan of it because it's slow and has a bad UI. The only advantage of Babbler Lite over Facebook app is its integration with twitter.

Hopefully facebook will soon add more features to their app.

Yaar bhai nahin hai..

Watching 'Oye lucky lucky oye' right now and missing Haryana! Brilliant movie.


PS: Just wanted to share a particular scene, you can skip rest of the video if you want.

Here is another clip from 'Khosla ka Ghosla':