What are you taking about?

So have you ever looked over your kids shoulder and saw some thing like this? POS, BFN, BBS. Well with the increase use of text messaging and IM (instant messaging) services a new abbreviated language has evolved. Today I’m going to give you the Rosetta stone for deciphering these messages. Most of the time the answer is pretty simple, each letter represents a word, such as BBS is short for “be back soon”. Some are even easier such as L8R, or deciphered as “later”. So which ones are important for parents to recognize? Well theses are the one I think are important to know off the top of your head.

POS – Parent over the shoulder, meaning I can’t take openly right now because my parents are around.

PRW – Parent (people) are watching, same as above.

ASL or A/S/L – Age / Sex / Location, someone is asking for to much information about your kid.

PM – Private message, lets talk in a more secure chat room, with out other around.

F2T – Free to talk, can you talk openly, refer back to number one.

FYEO – For your eyes only, don’t let anyone see this is private stuff.

It’s a scary world out there and as parents we need to be able to know what are kids are talking about. Most of the time the stuff they talk about is harmless kid stuff, or stuff that they just don’t want mom and dad to know about not because it’s bad.

Here is a list with a lot more of these abbreviations http://www.aim.com/acronyms.adp.

I deleted the wrong picture!

Have you ever accidentally deleted a picture from your digital camera and thought, “Oh no that was like the best picture I took”. Well today I’m going to talk about a great little program that you can use to restore those accidentally deleted pictures. Unfortunately this program is only for Windows users, so sorry Mac and Linux users. It’s called PC INSPECTOR smart recovery 4.5 and can be downloaded for free from here.

First let me explain a bit about how digital media (film) in your camera works when your delete a picture. When you delete picture the camera basically is told to ignore the file on the storage card. The camera then is allowed to copy over that “space” when a new picture is taken. The original picture is still there until a new picture overwrites it, but the camera does use space in a liner sense but rather at random. Meaning that a picture that was deleted a few shots ago could still be restored.

Now even though I said that you could continue to take pictures and it would still be possible to restore them the likely hood of restoring the picture you want decreases with each new photo. The best thing to do is not to take any more using that digital media card, i.e. compact flash, SD, etc. if your camera only uses built in memory then you are out of luck depending on how important that deleted picture was. I keep a spare card in my camera bag for just such occasions.

All you have to do is plug your camera into your computer and run the program, it will then ask you to choose the media to be restored, this is your camera. A place to put the restored photos, I created a folder on my desktop and called it restored pictures, pretty simple. Hit the start button and you are off, the default setting uses a quick scan that will restore most of the pictures. You also have the option of doing a deep scan; the deep scan takes a very long time but can restore more pictures. So if the quick scan didn’t restore the picture you wanted, try this option when the quick scan is done and you might find that lost photo.

Keep in mind this program will restore all the pictures it can find on the cameras memory card, so if there is a chance of an embarrassing photo its probably best not to do this with a crowd standing around. When I used the program I was able to restore pictures from months earlier so be cautious.

So the next time you accidentally delete the wrong picture, don’t freak out, you might be able to get it back.

Anyways sorry this is only for Windows, I’ll keep my eyes open for a good one for Macs and Linux computers. If you know of one please email to let me know or better yet post a comment about it.

Cool Website

So the other day I was bouncing around the net looking for the usual geek related stuff, when I came across this website title Parents Hacks, so I decided to check it out. I thought it was going to be all techie or video games related, due to the Hack part. A lot of computer geeks call themselves Hackers, but I was wrong. In fact the site had very little to do with technology. Some of the ideas on the site where how to make socks non-slip, which I found pretty helpful. Use duck, cut it into strips and tape to the socks and viola, non-slip socks. Another post had some good ideas about home made holiday cards. One I have never heard of before used a baking sheet and paint to make some really cool looking cards, but who’ll have to check out the site to see how it’s done. So check out Parent Hacks whether you are looking for some good activities for the kids or want to know a quick meal idea.