Firefox Multitouch Gestures
For those of you who are unaware, I have converted to the "dark side" and now own and use a MacBook Pro laptop at home. One of the awesome things about the laptop is the multitouch trackpad. Used as part of the OS it is great - swipe 4 fingers down triggers expose swipe them up show desktop and a couple of others.
Having said that I spend a good chunk of my time on Firefox while using my Mac and there are some very useful multitouch gestures you can add! There are a couple of other tutorials out there already, but for some reason the ones I've found only talk about the twist left/right to move to the previous/next tab. Being curious me, I went exploring and found out how to get some more equally helpful gestures working!
Point-and-shoot cameras: 5 useful tips
Sydney Opera House
For those that are unaware, I have an interest in photography and love to just take random shots when I see something that appears interesting. But unlike many avid photographers, I don't have a fancy digital SLR Camera, instead I have a normal point-and-shoot camera (Fuji Finepix J110w).
As with most point-and-shoot cameras you are quite limited to the number of settings you can play around with even if it is in manual mode. Unfortunately this means many "How to take an awesome photo" tutorials out there are quite useless since you can't follow their suggestions of increasing or decreasing the ISO, aperture, shutter speed, exposure etc.
However, all is not lost as you can definitely still take awesome photos with your humble camera. Here are five tips that I find work quite well for me, if you have your own technique/tips I would be very interested to hear them 
1. No Flash!
This might be a personal preference, but I find when you use flash when taking the photo in a dark/dim place, the light from the flash is usually too strong which makes the whole photo look artificial. The simplest solution is to try and brighten up the place - turn on a light, open the curtains etc. Lighting is quite important in taking a good photo, so the more flexible you can be with your lighting the better.
Another alternative is to cover your camera's flash with a piece of paper/tissue. This somewhat subdues the flash while still providing a source of light. I've only tried this a couple of times and overall it worked quite well. Of course, you can always take two photos, one with the flash and one without - that way you will have both alternatives and you can pick the best one.
Having said all that, there are always exceptions when using flash and as weird as it may sound, using flash outdoors (where it is nice and bright) can often give you better photos - it lights up your subject just enough to make them clear, but since the surrounding is bright as well the flash doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.
effective powerpoint presentations
Recently my friend and I, have for some reason, talked to a lot of people about presentations - and we've been trying to convert them all to use "bullet-point-less" presentations. For those who we've talked to, you've probably already heard this, for those who haven't...welcome to a whole new perspective on presentations!
Late last year, through random blog reading we found a wonderful blog all about presentations: Presentation Zen. There was one post in particular that compared the different presentation styles of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates which I feel is a great introduction and gets straight to the point.
three useful sites for group work
Now that University has started, it is getting busier, and assignments are already being handed out - despite having only finished Week 1! When we got the details of the group assignment for the semester, it gave me the idea for this post - useful sites for group work. For pretty much all my group assignments from uni (and group work outside uni) I've used some/all of the below sites and they have definitely helped with working together.
10 useful tips to help with research
"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
Wilson Mizner
Research is probably something that uni students can't escape from - especially if they're doing honours and have to write up a thesis. Well, recently for one of our subjects which is a bit like preparation for thesis, we needed to write a research proposal. While searching through the Internet for credible sources, I discovered (or got told) a few tips and felt it would be a good idea to share them. So here are my 10 tips to hopefully make research a less stressful task!
how to save water
Few months ago, I signed up to Blog Action Day...
On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment
If you haven't guessed from the title, and from that short intro, this post will be about the environment - namely how to save water.
The reason for this topic is simply because Australia is facing severe drought conditions. A quick Google gives us an article from Wikipedia with the different water restriction levels currently in place:
- Brisbane: Stage 5
- Adelaide: Stage 3
- Canberra: Stage 3
- Melbourne: Stage 3
- Sydney: Stage 3
- Hobart: Stage 1
- Darwin: none
- Perth: permanent restrictions
As you can see pretty much all the major cities have some form of restriction in place. I'm not quite sure what 'permanent restrictions' for Perth really means, but either way it doesn't sound good.
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6 simple tips to help you snack less
If you know me, you'll know that I'm not a picky eater and I can eat a lot - especially when it comes to snacks. And if you're like me once I start eating/snacking I just can't seem to stop! Initially, I tried the approach of no snacks at all with the reasoning that if there are no snacks then there's nothing to snack on.
However, since I hadn't snacked in ages, and knew I didn't have any snacks in my room it failed horribly whenever sweets and junk food were in my reach - I just pigged out on them. Considering this "free food" is semi-regular (team meetings, birthdays etc) it doesn't help with reducing the amount of snacking.
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Forgot your password?
Not so long ago, I was reading Coding Horror and came across two rather interesting posts: Passwords vs Pass Phrases and Passphrase Evangelism. If you don't want to read those posts (though I highly recommend you read them) the golden rule is "stop thinking of passwords as single words, and start thinking of them as pass phrases".
A few people I know (including myself) have problems coming up with strong passwords and remembering them - and I think this is the solution! From psychology we learnt that on average people remember 7 things - be that 7 letters or 7 words. So that means, a password is usually 7 characters, but if you remember a pass phrase that will be 7 words - which is approximately 28 characters if you average 4 letters per word!
Continue reading "Forgot your password?"
photoshop shortcuts
Recently I've been photoshop-ing a fair bit as I'm making posters/website for an upcoming event for a student society. By accident, I found a shortcut that did exactly what I wanted! The elusive shortcut ctrl+alt+shift+e creates a new layer of whatever you see on the screen right now (or 'stamp visible' in photoshop terminology).
So after the amazing discovery, decided to put up a few photoshop shortcuts that I feel are essential. I'm no photoshop guru, but these are the shortcuts that I probably can't live without. I'm using Photoshop CS2, but most these shortcuts should probably work with most versions of photoshop. Seems like Adobe likes multi-keyed shortcuts, so organised them into the number of keys on the keyboard you need to press - wonder if there are any more than 4!