#prism British minister says report of UK access to US data is ‘baseless’
This again, Coz I feel like it :-) BANCO SABADELL – YouTube http://buff.ly/L4rjhw
http://buff.ly/L4rjhw
Making Hay, the old fashioned way.
I thought that this style of making or “Saving” hay as it was called was long gone and that I’d never see it again in my lifetime, so when my neighbour decided to do it this way because of the lack of a decent few days of fine weather to do it using modern methods, I said I’d tag along and take a few shots while giving him a hand to do it.
Not alone did we make old fashioned “Winds” but we went as far as making a traditional “Súgán” or rope from hay just for the sake of doing it (Only one mind you, it is a time consuming way of making a rope, There was a chunk of “red-setter” baling twine used for the rest). Of course at the very end you can see the way that hay was made across the road by someone who was a little luckier with the weather and his timing.
Spider V Spider
I spent an interesting twenty minutes watching two spiders have it out on a wall near my home,
Aologies for the quality, I couldn’t stop long enough to set up properly.
I got a surprise when I saw it unfold and saw who came out on top and who was lunch.
New poster campaign for Bruff RFC
We have just completed a new poster campaign for the launch of Ladies Rugby at Bruff RFC.
It involved a couple of Photoshoots, some Photoshop work and final agreement with the clients before printing and Getting the news out there with a launch video, facebook and twitter campaigns.
We are delighted to have been a part of the launch of what may well become a major development in the Munster Region.
HHAR 2012 Slideshow online
We Took the photos for the “Headless Horseman Adventure Race” event held in the Ballyhoura Region of South Limerick. Click on the HHAR logo on the side to get at the slideshow.
Google Sketchup Pro now Free for Schools in Ireland
Google announced that all Primary and Secondary Schools in Ireland will have free access to Google Sketchup Pro version as of last month. Sketchup is a fantastically easy tool to produce 2d and 3d drawings for export to Google Earth or many other design Programs and the Pro Version allows for export into a multitude of professional 3d Software Programs.
CLICK HERE for a link to the blog post on the sketchup Blog.
Block unwanted texts or phone calls on your mobile
Are you receiving unwanted phone calls or text messages to your mobile? Tired of those incessant calls about saving money on your phone bills? Do you need to deliberately block someone who has become a pest? Maybe you have a child who has come under the attention of a bully at school?
I was reading through a post on Damien Mulley’s Blog earlier and one of the links listed on the post in question was to this online service for O2 customers called Block it which allows you to block incoming texts from up to 100 numbers at any one time. It doesn’t however allow you to block calls.
For Vodafone customers you can use Mobile Manager. This runs on a few different models of phones and will also allow you to limit or “Net Nanny” your childs phone depending on you registering the age of the phone holder with Vodafone. This allows you to block phone calls and texts as well as facilitate some internet blocking on an age basis. These two systems can work on most traditional mobile handsets , you must have an internet connection to download the software in the case of the Vodafone offering.
For those of us who form the Smartphone Brigade there are a multitude of paid and free apps that can be downloaded and installed to help with dealing with problems like this.
In my case there are quite a few call blockers available for the Blackberry format (I am an avid Blackberry user for a few years now, I’m impressed with the quality of the phone, email and messaging systems on the Bold Series, I tried the unfortunate Storm but backed away from touch screen after that).
A Quick search on BLACKBERRY APPWORLD (click to go there) churns out over 100 results for the free ones alone, with a multitude of paid apps, far too many to list here.
Android users have a far better choice as well. The ANDROID MARKET (Click again) has over 650 free blockers, use the link to search for the free ones.
To use it on an iphone, it is my understanding that there are fewer options and most of those involve having a jailbroken phone which a lot of the iPhone brigade do not want to do.
The facebook and twitter apps etc. all facilitate the blocking of unwanted posters or spam posters and practically all email apps allow you to classify email senders as Junk or similar.
Microsoft Raw Camera Codecs, now freely available
Anyone that uses a digital SLR or one of a list of cameras that can save photos in Camera raw format should have a quick look at the latest set of camera raw codecs for windows from Microsoft. If you shoot in raw or are thinking about it, then these codecs to put it simply allow the raw format photos to be seen in windows explorer (Which is not the case with an out of the box installation of windows.). For an explanation of raw format and its advantages, there are a multitude of explanations and tutorials available on the net. A quick explanation is given below.
Put Simply, Camera Raw format is the unedited image information taken from the sensor on the camera and saved in a file without any processing by the software or hardware within the camera itself. Think of it a bit like a digital negative.
When a digital camera takes a shot and produces a jpg image out the other side, the photo has gone through a process of translating the pixels on the sensor inside the camera, through the processor chip using a set of default options in regard to sharpness, colour, contrast and a myriad of other options to churn out a jpg which is then saved on your card on the other side. During this translation the software within the camera makes a lot of assumptions about all of the options mentioned above before producing the final image.Some of these are settings that you can set in the camera itself, or even made by turning a switch to “Portrait”, Landscape” “Hi colour” “Black and White” or something like that. Saving as a jpg of course means that there is then a trade-off in quality to minimise the size of the photo that is saved on the memory card. “jpg” is a lossy format which compresses and discards some information in the photo as a trade-off to save file space.
For 80% of people using a digital camera this is exactly what they want, most people want a photo that they can print out themselves or bring to the nearest developers and get a 6×4 snap developed without messing about with finicky settings.
BUT, and this is a big but, the other 20% will spend some time after taking the image to crop, darken, lighten, increase colour saturation or otherwise tweak the photo in some form of software like Photoshop, Adobe Darkroom or something similar before they finally print out exactly the final image that they want. These 20% should shoot in camera raw format if it is available. now while it does add another step to the digital darkroom work-flow, the unedited camera raw image is the purest form of original photo (digital negative) and allows you the greatest latitude for post processing in photo software, it gives you the most original information that the camera can give you.
The fact that the file has not been saved in jpg format means that there is no loss of image quality at all. you are getting the image as the sensor sees it before the camera makes any decision about how the final image should look. There will be a significant cost in storage space (Up to 3 times the size or bigger), you will fit less images on teh memory card but they are of the highest quality. When you open these images up in your image editing software they do look duller than what you are probably used to, especially if you are new to camera raw format. The choice of how to process the final image is left 100% up to you, you now have to do the job of the camera chip before deciding on the final image and how it looks before you save it.
Another drawback to the camera raw format is that most software cannot read it by default, particularly windows in its various formats. Most better image editing software vendors have built up a series of plug-ins for their software to do the process of converting this information into a format usable within their program, but each one is different. Windows of course does not have this image viewing capability built in and camera manufacturers create new models every month with a possible change in raw format with each one. Image editing software manufacturers have to keep up with each new model and produce new plug-ins as it happens.
Microsoft have occasionally produced a set of codecs (coder-decoder software) to allow the various raw formats to be viewed in folders over the years but it has been sporadic at best (it was originally only available as a “Power-tool” download from the site). Earlier this year (July 2011) they churned out a specific freely available set for the list of cameras below.
This package is available in both 32-bit (MicrosoftCodecPack_x86.msi) and 64-bit (MicrosoftCodecPack_amd64.msi) versions.
- The Microsoft Camera Codec Pack provides support for the following device formats:
- Canon: EOS 1000D (EOS Kiss F in Japan and the EOS Rebel XS in North America), EOS 10D, EOS 1D Mk2, EOS 1D Mk3, EOS 1D Mk4, EOS 1D Mk2 N, EOS 1Ds Mk2, EOS 1Ds Mk3, EOS 20D, EOS 300D (the Kiss Digital in Japan and the Digital Rebel in North America) , EOS 30D, EOS 350D (the Canon EOS Kiss Digital N in Japan and EOS Digital Rebel XT in North America), EOS 400D (the Kiss Digital X in Japan and the Digital Rebel XTi in North America), EOS 40D, EOS 450D (EOS Kiss X2 in Japan and the EOS Rebel XSi in North America), EOS 500D (EOS Kiss X3 in Japan and the EOS Rebel T1i in North America), EOS 550D (EOS Kiss X4 in Japan, and as the EOS Rebel T2i in North America), EOS 50D, EOS 5D, EOS 5D Mk2, EOS 7D, EOS D30, EOS D60, G2, G3, G5, G6, G9, G10, G11, Pro1, S90
- Nikon: D100, D1H, D200, D2H, D2Hs, D2X, D2Xs, D3, D3s, D300, D3000, D300s, D3X, D40, D40x, D50, D5000, D60, D70, D700, D70s, D80, D90, P6000
- Sony: A100, A200, A230, A300, A330, A350, A380, A700, A850, A900, DSC-R1
- Olympus: C7070, C8080, E1, E10, E20, E3, E30, E300, E330, E400, E410, E420, E450, E500, E510, E520, E620, EP1
- Pentax (PEF formats only): K100D, K100D Super, K10D, K110D, K200D, K20D, K7, K-x, *ist D, *ist DL, *ist DS
- Leica: Digilux 3, D-LUX4, M8, M9
- Minolta: DiMage A1, DiMage A2, Maxxum 7D (Dynax 7D in Europe, α-7 Digital in Japan)
- Epson: RD1
- Panasonic: G1, GH1, GF1, LX3
Go here for the download: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26829
How we can deal with your social media accounts and promote you and your website.
The thing about modern social media is that there is just so much of it available. A question I am often asked is how and where do you begin with social media. Once you start down along the path of getting engaged with your public using social media, you rapidly start building accounts in all kinds of services.
You might start say with a standard facebook account, decide that you want to give twitter a try, add in a linked-in account to keep in touch with business contacts, put your photos up on tumblr or one of the myriad of other hosting sites, then of course google went and added iGoogle, google reader and then added google+ as its social networking site.
All of a sudden you are dabbling in a crazy number of different sites and places every day but the more that you do, the more that you feel that if you don’t then you are definitely missing out on market potential. When you get us to design a website for you, we can build in access to as many of these social media accounts as you wish, to make it as painless as possible to tell the world about your latest offer or item for sale, your new line in garments, The new account or project that you have won.
We can automatically link in newly created pages or even blog posts using your social media accounts without you having to lift a finger. We can lead you through the process of maintaining your social network presences or do it for you if you wish. The social media suppliers API interfaces (Automatic programming interfaces) allow things to be done quite easily nowadays (once you know what you are at, and become good at it).
A new website has upped the ante quite a bit in this regard. Called “if this then that” (www.ifttt.com), it can create what is known as “mash-ups” quite easily between a multitude of different services. You can for example, send an email to yourself when a particular weather service says it is due to rain, or automatically save a photo that you have been tagged on facebook in to your flickr account, log your favourite feeds and save them in an easily stored format, create an online diary of your facebook pages or tweets. The possibilities are endless and it is achieved by creating what they call “recipes” to do this automatically (if this happens then do that). Every time you log on to the site users have added more and more of these “Recipes” that you can download or if you want then we can very easily create one for you at our end to look after the dirty work. The possible uses of this are limitless, why not give us a call to discuss what you come up with and let us come up with the way to do it.