For sure I am a travel addict. I am also lucky to have studied, worked and lived in various places around the world. My current stop is Singapore which is an excellent base for discovering South East Asia, a region full of hidden gems, diverse cultures and natural beauties. But I am no touristy-site hopper: when I travel, I try to look for small things, easily overlooked corners and places that are off the beaten paths. Small towns and cities are my favourite. It is in such places that you will find the most authentic food, untainted by the need to internationalize and commercialize, identify the unique aspects in the local way of life, and of course, meet the most friendly people who make your experience unforgettable. And I would rather spend more time in less places so as to give myself enough time to have a feel for whatever places I go to.

Interestingly, the more I travel overseas, the more I realize how little I knew about my country (I come from Vietnam), hence the need to go home and discover. Have you ever felt the same way? These days I try to make use of my limited holidays to explore what Vietnam has to offer. A highlight of this blog will thus be my travel experience in Vietnam and I hope it will be useful to travellers like yourself.

Enjoy!

P.S. Check out my tripadvisor reviews at http://www.tripadvisor.com/members-reviews/youngnfree

Recover Picasa albums from backup files

Saturday, January 29, 2011

I've been using Picasa for more than 2 years now. It's a pretty neat tool (especially considering that it's free!) to sort photos and quickly upload to Facebook. Recently though, the hard drive of my Macbook failed and I had to re-install the OS which led me to figure out how to recall files that have been backed up by various applications, including Picasa.

1. To recover a lost album, first locate its most recent backup file (with a .pal extension) or that of any other date you prefer. On my Mac, it's in User/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa3/Picasa3Albums/backup.

In the same directory, there should be another folder with a funny name (like ce5639026adb24fbfbfb4dded3c37e4f). This is the current database; it contains information about all the albums (or none) that should appear in Picasa if you are to start the application immediately. This is saved from your last Picasa session. In case no such folder exists, just open and close Picasa to generate one.

2. In the backup folder, there are many sub-folders each named after a certain date where some activities take place in Picasa. Each folder has some .pal files with very cryptic names such as 95a8b8e741e769511d518d04410be0c1.

To know which .pal file refers to the album you're looking for, open them one by one with a text edit application. You will see that listed are the paths that lead to all pictures in that album. For example, $Pictures/Planets/Jupiter.JPG/.

Also take note of the database ID (abbr: DBID) provided at the second line from the top of the document, e.g: 2e2bcb8311ab2ed72895a05958ac435f.

3. Make sure Picasa is not already on. Copy the appropriate .pal file(s) into the current database folder mentioned previously.

4. Launch Picasa and you should see your lost album re-appear!

What happened is that when Picasa is launched, it will look into the current database folder to find which .pal files have a different DBID from the current database, and update those into the new session. When the session is terminated, the foreign DBID is then converted to that of the current ID.

If your album is lost because you have moved the pictures that belong to it, you will need to edit the paths contained in the associated .pal file. For more details, refer here
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