Category Archives: Software

Improve Picasa face recognition performance

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the performance of Picasa face recognition. It is a great new feature, but in combination with my library it is very slow!

I tried to change the face recognition slider settings in the options menu, but to no avail. Yesterday I searched on the Internet and on a forum someone suggested to disable the ” enable suggestions” checkbox.

I disabled it and since then Picasa is much faster, more snappy. I let my computer run last night and the amount of scanned items went from 16% to 30%!

Furthermore, it still provides me with suggestions. I do not really understand what this checkbox is supposed to do. But I can conclude that it positively improves performance!

Picasa face recognition

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How long is Picasa 3.5 with face recognition available for download? A few weeks? I downloaded it the minute I read about it.

Now since then I have been running Picasa whenever my PC was on. I even let it run a few nights, just for the scanning for the face recognition.

It currently has only scanned 14% of my library… Ok, my library contains about 124.000 photographs but still. Is there some way to tweak this face recognition apart from the two sliders in the options menu?

Useful for web developers

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When you are working on web sites regularly you have probably done some testing using various different browsers. There are a number of scenarios for doing this:

  • install all the browsers on your machine
  • use virtual machines for various ous operating system / browser combinations
  • no cross browser testing ;-)
  • etc.

Sometimes these scenarios are not possible or even unwanted.

Recently I discovered the following site: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/.

From this page it is possible to install a browser plugin that enables you to start other browsers from the web page without having to install them.

The technology is based on virtualisation and streaming.

This is very interesting. Please let me know if this is useful

Mind mapping using Freemind

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I have been using Freemind a number of years for mind mapping.

It appears a bit rough and technical. It has much more features than xmind, but xmind has a more slick interface.

Sreen dump: