John Willis
IT Guru and Amateur Photographer
Visit the Seal Sanctuary
Nov 11th
After my recent visit to the sanctuary (over half term) for the second time I would highly recommend it as a good day out for all the family.
To get an idea of what the National Seal Sanctuary does take a look at this video:
New Nikkor 50mm F1.8 Lens
Sep 27th
I have just been out taking some photos with my new lens. And what can I say.
In my opinion it is sharper than the 50 1.4 that is 5 times the price. And yes, it does feel slightly more plastic that the 1.4 but it is only £110 inc vat in the UK and that my friends is a good enough reason to buy it…
I now have a lens that if my mood fancies can take fantastic portrait shoots as well as amazing detail. All for under £150!
All in all I am very impressed, it’s light, has full time manual focus over-ride and the focus ring is tight and precise. This lens works brilliantly on my Nikon D80…
JDownloader – Ultimate File host Downloader
Sep 9th
JDownloader is the ultimate free/premium file host downloader.
http://jdownloader.org/download/index
Mac OS Snow Leopard
Sep 2nd
Well it’s here finally, I ordered mine from Amazon for a cool price of £22.99 delivered and for that you get a tiny little box that looks exactly how any apple user would expect.. Beautiful.
Once opened (bloody shrinkwrap) you can upgrade within Leopard or do as I did reboot, hold down “C” and install from scratch and repartition the laptops drive… I choose this so it was a clean OS install and my work, music and apps we’re saved on my time capsule anyway…
Well once the install went through I got the first run wizard like any other time, this was crunch time would Snow recognise my Leopard time machine backups? Yes it did indeed… 30 minutes later after a full restore of my documents, etc I was happily typing this with all my applications, preferences, documents, etc working perfectly.
The new redesign of Snow seems to have made a big difference with my MacBook and has made the following big impressions within minutes of using it:
- The dock is now much smoother, and more snappy when clicking using the tackpad
- I am able to open apps such as iTunes, iPhoto, Pages and Keynote at the same time with very little lag, the whole experience seems more snappy.
- Quicktime now looks better, no more silver borders round the windows…
- The footprint of memory for the OS has been reduced by about 5Gb of my machine… so clearly they’ve had a spring clean!
All in all this is well worth the £23 so far… It’s a small price to pay to prepare your Mac for the latest software, etc.
I will post updates if I find anything else of interest…
For now, drool over the screen-casts on YouTube…
Record Online Streaming Music
Sep 1st
Back in May, John blogged about Spotify; a desktop application for streaming music via the Internet.
(Spotify – Streaming Music On Your Desktop: http://john-willis.com/2009/05/spotify-streaming-music-on-your-desktop/)
Spotify have struck a deal with the major record labels in a way that it can offer it’s service free of charge. This free service is ad supported, with various banners shown whilst the Spotify browser is open and an audio commercial every 15-30 minutes or so. There is a monthly subscription service to remove the ads, but because of this platform, it didn’t make my recession beating Windows Apps article back in July: (Windows Apps – Beat The Recession: http://john-willis.com/2009/07/windows-apps-beat-the-recession/).
But Spotify is definitely worth a mention. There are artists that have refused to sign up to Spotify, but there is still a wide variety of choice of music in its library. But you can’t download the music, and the cached versions of the files are un-openable. Quite annoying really – since the music has clearly been paid for via the ad service?