I have recently gotten in to digital photography. Since recently digital cameras have been rather cheap for decent quality, I felt that I should really start taking photos.

One generally does not realize how much actually goes in to taking a photo. How the elements all work together, continuity, symmetry, balance all play a big role in the overall quality of a photo.

One key point is having access to sites that are all relevant to what you need. I was googling around looking for a good photographer blog.  While there are many out there, it pays to have access to a concise relevant blog with lots of information, as there are heaps of small things that i picked up from there, that I can now use even on a Saturday night at a nightclub or while taking landscape photos on a weekend away.

I do encourage you to start if you have access to a digital camera as it is so easy to share your photos. Don’t forget that if your mobile phone has a camera you can use that too. My n95 outperforms my first digital camera. It’s fast and easy to use, and far more convenient when you need to take a photo then and there.

I have been using Facebook almost since they first allowed international members. It’s a fantastic site for social networking, I’ve found friends on there that I would have had no form of contact with any other way, and I highly recommend it. However as your friends list starts creeping into the hundreds, you notice that all of a sudden you get more and more application requests. It gets ridiculous. Like 50 on an average day, over a hundred on a really busy day. And my name starting with an A doesn’t help either.

But alas my dream cure has arrived. Since Facebook has obviously received countless requests to block application requests, (the closest you can get as far as I know, is to delete all your applications and block applications all together, or the next best is to go through and block each one, one by one.), as shown by the countless groups with thread after thread on Facebook support wont write back to me on the issue.

Well the cure is here: Read more

Now the other day something incredibly strange happened, I was checking my usage and had found out that I was gigabytes over my usage. I was in disbelief, I had to find out what had happened, but low and behold, there was no apparent way of figuring it out. I checked on my control panel, I tried about ten different ftp browsers, online ftp browsers, even went and tried to find Windows Explorer addons that might able to do it, but I could not find anything. Even the webhost’s help site had nothing, but then as  I was browsing through the forums on one of the FTP software’s site, I found a solution a PHP script that does it for you. Read more

Now I realise many of my readers have more than one place that they check their emails. I personally have two that I use frequently, and one that I use not as frequently, but still does occur. Now as most people would realise, you download it in one place, you don’t get it on the other. That is due to the nature of POP mail. There is one alternative that many people are unaware of. This is called IMAP.

IMAP works off a different system, one that gmail can utilise because of it’s large server space, (4.3 gig the last time I checked, and still growing), because it works off keeping a copy of your mail on the server. The IMAP service allows the user to download only the message headers and decide if they want to actually download the rest of the message and the attachments. IMAP was designed to overcome some of the issues that POP had. It allows a user to download the message headers and allows the user to decide whether or not to download the rest of the message, so therefore messages are kept on a server, and are only downloaded when a user requests them, and this is great for people who are constantly mobile.

Some advantages of IMAP over POP are: Read more

I’ve recently started using an RSS Reader to stay up to date with all the technology news. Now one thing that I noticed was that I needed to migrate all my live bookmarks to my reader, which could have been one of two ways, manually, or export to an OPML file and then import into your reader. Sounds easy enough, but believe it or not, OPML isn’t inbuilt into Firefox, BUT there is an extension. You can get it from Chris Finke’s website, just read the instructions and install, go to bookmark manager, and export to OPML, ready to be imported into your reader.

Saved me a lot of time. Hopefully it can help you too!