Posts Tagged ‘software’

Paint.Net Free Photoshop type program

If you need a good solid paint program that has a fairly straight forward learning curve but does have a good feature set then this could well do the job. Download

It is RGB only so, if you need CMYK seperation then this is not the program for you. If you don’t know what CMYK is then this will do the job. Great for screen graphics and for non commercial print work.
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Free Nikon script now does timelapse

Here is a post from a long time ago about an excellent free alternative to Nikon’s rip off software (the stuff they expect you to pay for even if you spend $,000s on their kit). Good news, the developer, Raymond, has updated the script to enable Timelapse photography.

Free Tethered Shooting Script for Nikon

This one is really useful, it enables a Nikon camera connected to a PC to do something impressive.

Even if you are shooting jpg just having to view them on such a tiny screen really makes it hard to tell if they are sharp or perhaps shaded as you are hoping. Sucking them right into your PC seems just so logical.

Simply put, it enables the user to set up and take a picture with the camera and then that picture to appear on the computer in Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Bridge within seconds and ready for editing. This means that corrections and, if required, retakes can be done on the fly, a much better workflow than take a bunch of photos, find out that something uncorrectable was wrong, rearrange the shoot.

Nikon have software which does this and a lot more to be fair but it is hardly a steal at $160. The fact that Nikon make us pay for software after spending $1000s on their equipment is galling but that is the subject for another post.

If you are a Canon shooter then no issue – the software comes with the camera (so I’m told).

Here for software download page. The author keeps his site very much up to date and is excellent when it comes to addressing any issues. He also seems like a really nice patient guy.

Scribe Firefox blogging extension

Scribe Fire

Other features of ScribeFire allow you to categorize and tag your blog
posts, upload images, set the timestamp of your posts, save
works-in-progress as notes, post an entry as a draft, share your posts
on social websites, and upload files via FTP. For help with these
features, see the complete listing of ScribeFire Help topics.

Have just installed this Firefox extension to enable blogging without returning to the admin section of this blog.(sort of like the Blogger thing but more) The Reviews seem to be good and it looks to have all the bells and whistles so here goes.

If this appears then the experiment has worked and I guess that if it doesn’t this is all moot.

Update: It looks pretty good, have to come back to the site to add the meta type stuff and do the trackback stuff and the headline does a strange formatting thing with large spaces between the words. But there is nothing that is essential to the post and that can’t be ajusted after the initial posting.

Good extension, like it a lot.

2nd Update:I was hasty, the pinging can be done from Firefox and catagories and tags can also be added. The social networking stuff (which I have sort of avoided up until now but may have to bite the bullet soon and get involved with) is also comprehensively covered.

Firefox is taking notes and phoning home

Not sure about this

Yesterday there was some concern raised over at Reddit because someone had noticed that both of Mozilla’s flagship products, Firefox and Thunderbird, call home every 24-hours. This happens regardless of whether you go into the Firefox preferences and disable all of the different types of updates.

Now I am a huge fan of Firefox, from a both a web developing (the web developer, measure-it and color picker extensions literally save me hours a week) and a user point of view it is simply the best browser out there but any software that sends data without my opting in is not a good thing.

The reason, apparently, is to stop people using extensions with security flaws, of which there are 5 at present. This doesn’t explain this:

I think the thing that caused the biggest stir is the fact that with each request Firefox also sends information including what version of the browser you’re using, what operating system you’re running, and other info that they can use to figure out how many active users they have.

Me? I will still use Firefox, version 3 is superb – version 2 on steroids, but this is a bit worrying and certainly warrants watching. i will be altering the about.config file though

In all fairness It is possible to disable this ‘feature’ :

This feature can be disabled by going through the about:config and searching for the extensions.blocklist.enabled option. If you set that value to false Firefox will stop phoning home, but you should probably think twice before doing this. A few years ago Mozilla created the block list as a way for them to centrally disable extensions if they are found to be malicious or cause instability in the browser.