what have you shared on facebook?

Ever wonder what you've really shared on facebook?  Facebook now has an option for users to download their account information:

from the facebook site:

"This is a copy of all of the personal information you've shared on Facebook. In order to protect your information, we will ask for authentication to verify your identity. Learn More about downloading a copy of your information.

WARNING: This file contains sensitive information. Because this download contains your profile information, you should keep it secure and take precautions when storing, sending or uploading it to any other services."

basically, you can download a file that will have all the wall posts (with comments if there are any), messages (sent to you and from you), events,  pictures you've uploaded, all the info in your profile, and a list of all your friends.  I don't have any videos shared, but I would guess those would download too.

If you have made comments on other people's posts -- those don't show up in your activity download, and you don't get any information on pictures that other people have tagged you in.  I also don't see anything related to games or applications that you may have.  So you aren't getting *everything* you've shared, but it's still pretty cool. 

To download your info -- click on Account -> account settings -> download your account.  You will be asked to verify your password, and then Facebook will send you an email once your download file is ready.  Obviously the more you have posted to facebook, the bigger the file will be!

Once you get the file (it's a zip file), just extract it somewhere onto your desktop, the open the index.html file.  This will give you a clickable page where you can see everything.

more adventures with android....

I still have some issues with my contacts... everyone seems to be where they should be, except for my Dad. He shows up in my google contacts online, but never on the phone. I tried creating a new contact on the phone (twice!) which did update to my google contacts, but still didn't show up in the phone.

I've tried changing the name to Dad1, dad2.... still nothing. I finally created a new entry (father -- so formal!) which seems to be syncing over now. So maybe I will try renaming that contact to Dad and see what happens :)   -- update to that -- change to dad and it goes missing again!  I changed the name to My Dad -- which then merged this contact with my other Mom & Dad contact.  Not sure why Dad is an issue and Mom is not, or why there is an issue anyway!!!  Obviously something is messed up in my contacts, but I have no idea how to fix it!  It also makes it where I can't change it back to Father now *sigh*

There are 2 other contacts that aren't syncing, but I am not going through one by one to figure out which ones of the 200 aren't there!

someday I will get this working!

I may have figured out why my battery life was so bad -- seems that I had left the map application running (I don't really know how to close an app other than the back button or home button)  So I found another app that will work kinda like Windows Task Manager and let me kill things that are running.  Maybe this will help!

working with contacts....

more smartphone struggles :)

so far, I have copied the contacts from my old phone to my new phone about 3 times now.  Somehow, contacts keep disappearing and I am not totally sure what does it.  I think it has to do with the syncing to the Google account. 

I have tried turning that off, but it still seems to randomly change the number of contacts that I have.  For a while, I would see 3 (or more) different entries on my phone contact from my gmail account, 1 for un-synced phone and another for yahoo, but that seems to have cleared up on it's own (for now).  But the total numbers still seems a bit off.  Unless all the different entries per contact was counting as a different entry??

I have watched my google contacts (with the website) change when I manually tell the phone to sync.  It looks like it brings everything from the phone back into my google account, but doesn't seem to be able to reconcile the duplicates when it does this.  They all come in as 'Other Contacts' even if the same person/number is already in gmail as a co-worker/friend/whatever.  Sometimes the merge gets rid of most of the new ones, but not all. 

My problems could be because I also have a yahoo account in there doing something too -- but I shouldn't be losing things (other than my mind!). I think I have got the contacts sync turned off for yahoo, and maybe for gmail too.  So maybe I will try fixing the contacts on the gmail site, then syncing them again and see what happens.  But right now sync is broken (again!), so I will have to work on this later.

The other thing I seem to have lost (from the phone) is the ability to assign a ringtone to a group of contacts -- I can't even find where in the phone to assign someone to a group!  So I have had to re-assign all the ringtones from all the groups one-by-one.  (That is after I figured out how to add custom ring tones - but that is an entry for another time!)

More of the problem may be that I am unfamiliar with android and smartphones in general, but I do know computers fairly well -- I have had to search for more basic functionality for this phone than I have ever had to do for any other new technology (new laptops, new OSes, new browsers)

my new toy - day 1

I finally decided to join the technology age this weekend and get a smartphone.  The one I got was the Samsung Transform running android 2.1.  the sprint network doesn't support iPhone (not sure I would have gotten one anyway) and Blackberry doesn't have as cool of an app store.

For convenience I decided that I needed a phone with a real keypad.  I have no idea how people type quickly on the on-screen ones.  I try, and probably 1 out of 3 characters is wrong -- so even something as easy as 'hello' takes WAY to much time.  Now maybe I am using the keyboard wrong (I habitually try to use my fingernails which doesn't work), but still -- my fingers are much bigger than that keyboard.

What I have found so far is that a smart phone, not so much designed to be a phone.  There is no numeric speed dial which is driving me crazy.  You can go and add contacts to favorites, but that still means clicking on connections, click on favorites, click and hold on the person, click on call the person, then if you have multiple numbers for that contact - select which number.  Seriously??  calling from favorites takes 4 clicks at least??? 

I did find an app (Speed Dial Classic) that will let me use speed dial for numbers 0-9, so now all I need to do is click on the phone icon, then the number, then on the dial icon.... so now I am down to 3 clicks.  I tried with the keyboard, on there you have to shift to change into number mode, enter then number, then click on the search for 'dial number '. So not a huge improvement, but depending on how many people are my favorites vs. the numbers I call most often, it might be worth it.

I am still struggling a bit with the touch screen -- I keep calling people by accident, and then not being able to answer calls because of needing to use the slidy answer phone thing.  And I have noticed that cold hands do not work too well.

I do like having the email and RSS feeds to keep me entertained while I wait around for appointments... and the GPS came in really handy driving around with friends on Saturday night.

more updates later -- right now I am trying to figure out why my number of contacts keeps changing :(

New face of facebook....

After a month or so of bombarding me with notices telling me just how many of my friends are cooler than me and already switched to the new profile on facebook, I have a notice telling me I will be switched over now.  I get that they have a new interface, they want people to use the new one, transition time, blah, blah -- but did they really need to annoy me with those other notices when they were going to make the new profile mandatory anyway??  I would rather they tell me in the beginning 'we have a new look, you will be changed over by date XX, if you want to change earlier, you can'  and leave it at that.  I don't need daily/hourly updates letting me know that I am not on the cutting edge of FB.

And who really looks at profile pages?  Most of the time I go to FB, I look at the main status/updates, and messages -- that's it!  Maybe I am just an anomaly in the FB world :)  (I also don't play Farmville, so obviously somethings off!)

And while I am ranting on FB -- what's with my changes to privacy settings not working when I use Firefox?  As far as I know, I have all the necessary scrips allowed, but every time I make a change to one of the settings (say from friends only to friends of friends), the option just switches itself back.  Finally got my changes to fix using IE, but it was annoying!

Microsoft January Updates...

What a nice start to the New Year -- only 2 updates from MS this month.

The first patch is only for users who are running MS Vistas.  It fixes a vulnerability in the way Vista handles backup files (like those created by System Restore Points).  A specially crafted backup file and DLL are needed to make an exploit happen.  So far, there have been some proof of concept exploits for this, but nothing that shows attackers are using this yet.  But still

The other affects XP, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008/2008 R2 -- so pretty much everyone out there.  This one fixes a vulnerability in MS Data Access Components (basically this is how programs access data in a database)  So to get hit by this one, a user just has to visit a malicious website -- an the attacker gets access to the system with the same privileges as whoever visited the site.  Same as before -- some exploits exist, but nothing widespread has been seen.

The latest exploits for IE or the Graphic engine are not being fixed with these patches.  There are exploits being seen for these two... stay tuned for the fix on these.  MS has not said it will release an out-of-schedule patch for either.

Time to update your Mac!

For all you Mac OS X people out there... Max OS X version 10.6.6 has been released.

The update patches a vulnerability that affects both Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server ... the vulnerability could allow an attacker to run any code they want on the Mac machine.

here's the link to the update.

In addition to fixing the vulnerability, the update also includes the Mac App Store (it will now be in your Dock) for both server and desktop versions of OS X.

For servers, there are some additional fixes in there for some DNS resolution issues, and some other security improvements.  Not sure what's in those changes for security -- the sites just tells us that the update "Improves Mac OS X Server security"

On the desktop side, there is a fix for erratic mouse movements on specific graphics cards, and also a fix for some cropping issues when printing in landscape.

happy patching