Someone posted a great video on YouTube that is a promotional video created for Digital Equipment (DEC). One of the creators said that DEC “distributed thousands of copies of this video, using it to help spread the word about the business potential of the Web, which, at that time, many business people found difficult to imagine.” It’s amazing to see the old web pages and how there were almost no images. People were still using very slow modems back then. The Internet has changed a lot in the last 13 years.
If you are into tinkering or fixing things, and are looking for a copy of a repair manual, a great place to start is RepairManual.com:
Find repair manuals, owners manuals, parts books and a growing line of tools and shop supplies to help you repair your ATV, motorcycle, car, truck or tractor. RepairManual.com - the repair manual specialists.
I’m sure many of you have seen this before, but CareerBuilder has a page on their site with a funny little flash tool called Monk-e-mail. The tool lets you send a message to someone and have it spoken in a browser by a monkey (get it? … monkey email). You can customize the monkey, its clothes and accessory, and voice. You can also choose a pre-recorded message, use text to speech (you type in your own message), record yourself online, or call a telephone number to record your message. It’s definitely a fun time-waster!
Many of the software packages that come with digital camera’s as well as a lot of the photo editing software applications have features that let you stitch a series of images together to create a panoramic shot.
There are a few steps you want to take before hand though to be sure you have some successful shots to work with. One of the most important steps you can take is to make sure that you have turn off your auto white balance on your camera. This will ensure each image in the series has the same colour tone. We have a poor ability to remember similar colours but a very good ability to distinguish them side by side. Shooting your images with the same white balance will help to ensure this.
Similar to this, if you can set a manual exposure for the entire series of images, this too will help to ensure seamless images. Finally, try to keep the camera perpendicular to the ground. The will ensure that you will not have to needlessly crop your final image later. Of course this process can become more technical including finding the nodal point of your camera/lens combination and using special tripod heads but that is not for this blog.
Until next time, happy shooting.
I’ve mentioned Sysinternals a couple of times before. They make fantastic system utilities for Windows operating systems, and were recently acquired by Microsoft. On Monday, their blog posted that there is a new Active Directory utility, and 3 updates to other utilities. Most of the tools are particularly useful in an environment where there are many computers (since most of them will work on remote computers), but if you like to play around with your system and tweak settings or look more indepth at some settings, then you should definitely look into the Sysinternals utilities.
Michaels is a large arts & crafts store with hundreds of stores. One opened up in our city this Spring, and my wife was ecstatic. She was there a few days ago and picked up a flyer about their Family Craft Times newsletter. this is a monthly email newsletter where you get craft ideas to keep your kids busy as well as standard promotional information. If you are looking for things to do with your kids this summer, this would be a good place to start.
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