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!

Here is a screenshot of my about:config page.

Firefox Multitouch Gestures

Adding/modifying these values is very simple - here is a quick tutorial:

1. Open firefox and enter about:config in the URL bar
2. Filter the list of gestures by entering: gesture into the filter (optional by recommended)
3. Modifying a value:
   • Double click on an existing preference name (eg: browser.gesture.twistleft)
   • Enter a value (eg. Browser:PrevTab)
4. Adding a value:
   • Right click somewhere in the window (probably best on empty space)
   • Select New->String
   • Enter a preference name (eg: browser.gesture.swipe.down.alt)
   • Enter a value (eg. History:UndoCloseTab)
   • Note: You will have to refresh the filter for your new custom value to appear.
5. Close the 'about:config' tab - and you're done!

You might want to play around with it to find out what you feel is most useful for your browsing habits, but these are the ones that I like the best/use the most:

The zooms are also quite cool but they are there by default so it should work without you having to do anything. Hint: hold down shift and zoom in/out and it'll reset the magnification to the default.

Once you get used to your gestures you'll wonder how you lived without them! Be interested to hear what other gestures you guys have set up

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.

2. Use the timer
This may seem like a weird tip, but the timer on your camera is truly your friend. One problem I find with my camera is it is very easy to accidently take blurred photos, if there isn't enough lighting any slight movement will cause the photo to be blurred. This is where the timer comes to your rescue!

If possible find somewhere to place your camera: desk, chair, bench, ledge, ground, anything...just don't drop your camera! Put the timer on, press the shutter-release button (the button to take the photo), wait to see the countdown start and move your hands away from the camera. This way, you are not touching the camera at all when it takes the photo. The reason for timer+moving hands away is you know for sure when the camera takes the photo there is no motion at all, not even the slightest of nudges from you pressing the button.

If you can't put the camera on a stable surface, this trick can still semi-work. Same drill, except after you press the shutter-release button, wait till the countdown gets to about 1 second or so left and hold your breath while the camera takes the photo. I find holding your breath helps a tiny bit in not moving - don't ask me why...

The Museum of Contemporary Art

3. Night photos
Probably one of the hardest times to take a nice photo with a normal point-and-shoot camera is at night, especially outdoors since you can't just flick the light on. I've found to take decent photos at night you really need to just place your camera on a stable surface, use the timer (see Tip 2) and have a longer exposure.

How do you change the exposure I hear you ask. Well, most modern point-and-shoot cameras have preset Scenes or Modes (eg. portrait, night, fireworks etc). Anything that is for night/dark conditions will generally have slower shutter speeds, which means longer exposure time,  which means your camera will "soak up" more surrounding light and give you a sharper/clearer photo. Since your camera will sit there for a couple of seconds "soaking up" the surrounding light you need to make sure that your camera does not move at all - thus the timer trick. You may have to play around with the different night modes on your camera to get something nice. The photo of the Sydney Opera House (above) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (right) were both taken using my point-and-shoot camera set on "Fireworks" mode with the slowest shutter speed possible (The normal night mode just didn't let in enough light resulting the photos being quite dark).

4. Focus and trick your camera
Every now and then you might want to trick your camera into letting in more or less light than what it would automatically do. For all digital camera's I've seen/used, when you half press the shutter-release button the camera will focus on the frame you have chosen - generally there will be some sort of feedback that it has found the focus (maybe something displayed on the screen or a beep).

Once the camera has found the focus, it will calculate all the required settings for that particular frame. Relying on this, if you want your camera to soak up more light, first focus (half press the button) on something darker than your subject (preferably similar distance away), then move your camera back to what you really want to take, then take the shot.

This works because when you initially focus on something darker, your camera will think it will need bit more light to take a clear shot, so when you go back to your intended subject (which is brighter than the initially focused subject) your camera will let in more light than usual since it still has the "let in more light for dark object" setting from your initial focus.

5. Lower your megapixel
This may sound like an odd tip, but lowering the number of megapixels you use to take the photo may help in giving you clearer photos. The technical details behind this is quite confusing, but generally a point-and-shoot camera won't have a great sensor (one of the important components in the camera needed to take clear photos), so the higher the megapixels, the more noise you'll get. You probably don't need anything more than 5MP as that will be more than enough to print out the standard 4"x6" photos (in fact you only need 3MP to do that).

Edit: Came across this post by David Pogue about Photography Tips and Tricks - I'm keen to give Tip #2 a go!

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.

There is no particular style that is "right" but the main concept is to keep your slides simple. Don't overload your audience with information. Don't put a billion bullet points/lines of text into your slide. If you have everything you want to say written on your slides, then the audience doesn't need you to be there - they can just read your slides.

...bullets tend to make our presentations formal and stiff, serve to "dumb down" our points, and lead to audiences being confused...and bored.

Avoiding boring your audience to death with your PowerPoint presentations isn't easy. In my opinion, how you design your slides is very important (and also what you are presenting and how you say it). The approach I've taken is predominately to have pictures/photos and minimal words on the slides. For example, my most recent presentation was pretty much all pictures only. Those slides probably don't mean much at all by themselves, as they were only there to help get my point across. (If you're wondering, they were the slides I used for my Thesis A presentation about Email Addiction in the Workplace)

One of the very first questions people ask is..."Where do I get the pictures from?" Well, there are heaps of different places on the Internet that will give you all the pictures you need - for free! The two that I use most are flickr and stock.xchng. Sometimes I give Google Images a try, however most of the time the images found aren't good in quality. There are many other sites (though some require you to pay), in fact Presentation Zen has a whole list of them!

If I still haven't convinced you to give it a go, have a look at presentations from TED - they are awesome! Or read a few more of the many excellent posts from Presentation Zen.

edit: Found this after writing up the above post - a great video by Garr Reynolds (author of Presentation Zen)  presenting at Google about effective presentations.

http://pbwiki.com
In my opinion, this is probably one of the most useful sites for group work - a wiki. I'm quite certain nearly everyone has heard of wikis (think Wikipedia). As to if you've used one extensively (editing, participating etc) is another question, and I strongly suggest you give it a go. The nice thing about pbwiki is how easy it is to setup and use. The wiki markup syntax for pbwiki is probably one of the most user friendly I've come across, but it doesn't really matter since they also have a GUI editor (basically a WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get editor).

So what makes pbwiki so good for group work?
Short answer: It's a wiki
Longer answer: It allows everyone in your group to contribute to the discussion and throw in ideas. Everything is in one place, everyone can see the most updated information, and everyone can access everything. If someone accidentally deletes something, or you decide that an idea form a week ago was actually good but was deleted - don't fear - just have a look into the wiki history

http://assembla.com
This is a MUST if you are doing any coding assignment - Assembla provides you with Subeversion (SVN). It also provides a wiki, Trac and a whole host of other features, but the one I've found most useful is SVN. I won't go into the details, but the SVN repository will pretty much let everyone in the group work on the code at the same time and keep a running history of all the versions of your code (so if you accidentally do something horrible, you can revert back to the most recent working version). If you want to read more about the wonders of SVN have a look at Subversion's web page. Assembla also comes with a wiki, but I find pbwiki more user friendly.

http://drop.io
This is one of my more recent finds and haven't used it much but I do believe it will be very useful for file sharing. It basically lets you create a 'drop' - a place where you can store files online (up to 100mb). The distinguishing feature for drop.io compared to other file sharing sites is that it allows you to password protect your files. With the password, you provide users with different levels of access (View/View and Add/View, Add and Delete). In addition there is also an admin password which lets you change settings of your 'drop'. Another bonus is that to create a 'drop' you don't need to use your email address - just the name of the drop and a password if you want. The only drawback is 'drops' are only valid for at most 1 year, but it's not so much of a worry as you can always renew it.

So those are the three sites I If I haven't convinced you to at least try out one of the sites, I'll just mention now that they are all free If you have any good sites for group work that you know of, please share - I'd love to see what else is out there.

"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!

1. Use EndNote
   If you're going to have more than 10 or so sources, then I strongly suggest you use EndNote. It might take some time to learn and set up properly for the referencing style you need, but it's definitely well worth it! You should be able to find a free download link in your uni website.
2. Use Google Scholar
   It is quick, easy and will save you heaps of time compared to using to your uni's online e-library catalogue. Google Scholar will pretty much search all scholarly databases at once. While chances are you will need to search multiple times using the uni catalogue because each service will only search within a select set of databases.
3. Tweak Google Scholar
   A bit of tweaking will make Google Scholar even more user friendly.
   1. Go to 'Scholar Preferences'
   2. In the Library Links section, search for your uni
   3. Hopefully your uni will be listed, if so tick the check box (If not, maybe ask a librarian and see if the uni can get listed)
   4. In the Bibliography Manager section, select EndNote
   5. Click on 'Save Preferences'
   Now when you search, for the papers you usually need to login to download you'll see a link similar to "Find it@UNSW" next to it. When you click on the link, it'll take you to your uni's login page and once you login you'll be taken directly to the article. Nice isn't it? Also, with EndNote, all articles should now have an "Import to EndNote" link, click on it to import into your EndNote library - no need manually enter the details (though be careful there are times when Google doesn't reference properly, but it's rare, and usually an easy fix)
4. Work at uni
   Do your research at uni. The Internet will likely be faster, you won't need to login to download the articles, and hopefully they'll be less distractions...
5. Google the Author
   Sometimes you'll find that your uni doesn't subscribe to a particular journal, or for whatever reason you just can't find the article. There is still one more option! Chances are the author of the article is from an university. I've found that if you Google them, and if you can find their staff page, 99% of the time they'll have their publication list...all free to download
6. Take notes while you're reading
   I still need to work on this, but I suggest while you are reading take notes! Don't just highlight important bits, summarise what you've read - otherwise after reading so many articles you'll surely forget where you've read what. Haven't tried this, but Google Notebooks have recently added "labels" function - so putting your summaries/highlights in there and tagging them will probably become useful later on, since you can easily search for what you need/want.
7. Organise your PDFs
   My suggestion is to name you PDFs in this fashion "LastnameF_year.pdf" (eg. SmithA_2007.pdf). If you've named your PDF, it makes it heaps easier to find! (a bit of time spent early on, saves heaps of time later). Though I've heard that EndNote links the PDFs nicely as well - will need to give this a try.
8. Reference List/Cited By
   This is something I was told and is very very useful! Any decent paper you have will have a reference list (if it doesn't maybe it's not all that credible). Guess what? A lot of those references will also be useful to you. Also, Google has a "Cited By" link - other papers that have used the paper you're reading; again, a lot of those references will be useful. Start with one or two papers and you'll end up with too many to read!
9. Pick a topic you like
   Probably not always possible, but if you can try to pick a topic you are interested in. It's very likely you'll have to read a whole pile of articles, and if you're not interested in the topic, it will be a very boring and painful process.
10. Start early!
    Sleep deprivation and stress is no fun

The last two are probably the most obvious, but also the hardest ones - though they will make a huge difference! If you have your own tips for researching please share them

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.

There are probably millions of ways to save water, some may cost a fair bit (eg. installing a water tank) but others are simple and free! They might even save you money as you'll be using less water and thus pay less for your water rates.

Here are some simple tips that anyone can do:

• Turn off the tap when you aren't using the water. There are times when you're in the shower or brushing your teeth and you don't need running water, so just turn it off.
• You don't need the water on full blast. Believe it or not, when you're brushing your teeth/washing hands/washing face etc, you don't need to turn the tap on full blast - a small/medium flow is plenty.
• To get hot water quicker (for showers etc) just turn on the hot water and wait. To be honest, I haven't exactly tested or verified this, but it seems to work for me. Letting the hot water flow first, then turning on the cold seems to be faster than turning on hot and cold and waiting for it to become warm. Just be careful don't burn yourself.
• Wash your plates together, not individually. If you live with other people (family, flatmates etc) don't wash your dishes individually, collect them and wash it in one go. It'll save you time and water!

If you're reading this and thinking "I already do this", then great! Though seriously, I've seen some people turn the water on full blast to brush their teeth, and not turn it off until they've finished brushing their teeth. Sometimes I feel the urge to just turn off their tap for them!

Another tip which might not apply to everyone, and takes a bit more time is to capture water to water the plants/flush toilets. Again, there are many ways you can capture water, here are a few:

• Put a bucket (or similar) in the shower and collect the water that is 'wasted' when you wait for it to heat up. Move the bucket away afterwards, otherwise you might get soap in it.
• Collect the water you use from washing the vegetables - don't just let it go down the drain.
• Collect the water from your washing machine. The first discharge may bit a bit soapy, but the second is usually quite clean. 3L milk/juice bottles work very well for this.

Depending on how clean the collected water is, you can use it to water the plants or flush the toilet. You maybe thinking "Yuck, flush the toilet?!", well I can tell you that pouring 3L of water into the toilet bowl efficiently flushes the toilet (this definitely works for Number 1, you can try for Number 2, though you might want to use the inbuilt flush).

PS Apologies for the long gap between this post and the previous one - been snowed under with assignment work, and procrastination doesn't help!

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!

Single key shortcuts

• v - changes to 'move' mode. So if you have a layer selected, you can now drag it with your mouse or nudge it.
• m - changes to 'marquee' mode.
• a - changes to 'direct selection' mode. If you have an active vector path, you can now go 'right click -> make selection' and then you can fill the selection with colours etc.
• x - switches the foreground/background colours
• d - resets the palette to the default of foreground/background colours to black/white respectively
• [ & ] - decreases & increases (respectively) your brush size

Double key shortcuts

• alt+backspace - fills the layer with foreground colour
• ctrl+backspace - fills the layer with background colour
• ctrl+d - deselects your selection. Handy if you are horrible at selecting stuff like me.
• ctrl+e - merges your current layer with the layer below it
• ctrl+g - groups the layer(s) you have currently selected into a folder

Triple key shortcuts

• ctrl+alt+z - goes back through the history undo-ing the previous actions (find ctrl+z useless as it just undoes the last step)

Quadruple key shortcuts!

• ctrl+alt+shift+s - opens the 'save for web' dialogue where you can choose to save as jpg, gif, png etc.
• ctrl+alt+shift+e - creates a new layer and puts in that single layer whatever you see on the screen right now

Mouse+keyboard combination
(not exactly a shortcut, but just as useful!)

• shift - when creating a selection, holding down 'shift' while dragging the selection keeps the proportion. Nice when you need a perfect circle/square, or if you're dragging in a logo/image
• space - when creating a selection, holding down 'space' will let you move the location of your selection. Always found it hard to know where to create the selection so it is exactly where I need it to be.
• ctrl - if you ctrl+click on a layer, it will select the outline of the image on that layer.