This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Relaxation. You can’t get much more relaxed than this market trader in Hue, Vietnam. The eagle-eyed may note that I’ve used this image for PhotoFriday before. What can I say? It amuses me!
Please vote for my entry in last weeks PhotoFriday challenge.
Last year I performed a photo-book group test, comparing the results from three different suppliers, Apple, MyPublisher and PhotoBox. The good news for consumers is that there are always new entrants to the market. This time a company called Printing-11 contacted me and asked for my opinion on their wares. That’s to say, while last years books were paid for out of my own pocket this one was not.
This test follows a similar pattern to last time. This post documents the software and the ordering process; the next will talk about the quality of the finished product. The initial order was placed on the evening of 17th April.
Sometime when bad things happen all you can do it show your support. That’s what I’m doing here. The first cause is “One Day Blog Silence”:
This is to honour the victims from Virginia Tech and all those other innocents throughout the world. Given that the “blogosphere” is where many students poured their grief and vented their anger it seems appropriate.
This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Blessing.” Here is my entry.
This was taken in Havana, Cuba. These slates can be found in a cemetery and are blessings for a woman thought to bring good luck and fertility. (If I remember correctly!)
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks “Growth” challenge.
In the fifth part of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker trilogy, Arthur Dent makes his living among a group of stone-age settlers by utilising the one skill he had that was relevant to that world: sandwich making.
I guess we all have a special skill. But my point in this article is that if you’re a software professional, your special skill (unless you’re stranded on a stone-age planet) should be making software tools.
If you came to look at ZX81.org.uk a couple of hours ago you may have noticed that it wasn’t here. I’m pleased to announce that we’re back, and better than ever.
The reason for this outage was an upgrade. I generally find it easier to stay with the current version of WordPress but with the big jump to 2.1 I chickened out. Until this evening.
And, honestly, it wasn’t too tricky. I did a test upgrade on my laptop using the webserver and MySQL database in MAMP. I found that the template I use needed a quick update (as detailed on GFXedit) but otherwise the upgrade script seems to have done the job without any trouble. Please let me know if you do find anything wrong.
The sky is falling! EMI have announced that they are to allow distribution of their content without DRM. From next month, you’ll be able to buy albums from iTunes without the digital rights management chains of Apple’s FairPlay and in higher quality (twice the bit-rate). This is clearly good news, and EMIs move can’t help but encourage the other major labels to follow.
Some would say that it can only mean that I have far too much time on my hands. I claim that I’m merely interested. As is often the case, the truth maybe somewhere between the two. But the fact is, I do like to keep an eye how many people are visting ZX81.org.uk and what they’re looking at.
There are also some oddities, I think anyway. My most popular picture is just of a tea leaf! (From when I was in the tea growing region of Sri Lanka.) It’s basically just a standard record shot, and even has a horizontal line across the middle where the lab scratched the negative. Not my greatest photograph. Some day I’ll invest the time to clean it up in Photoshop.
When I got my new phone, a HTC P4350, I quickly managed to make and receive phone calls and text messages. I even connected straight to the Internet over WiFi and (slowly) over GPRS. It never occured to me that sending a MMS, a picture message, would be so complicated.
With a “Pow!” and a “Zap!” I asked their technical support people and got the answer. It works in two parts, firstly the GPRS side, which you can find in the Connections tab of the Settings screen: