Thursday, December 31, 2009

Free Images

I have written about the seriousness of using images that belong to someone else without their permission. We all like free stuff, but just because it is on your end of a Google search does not make it free for anything except for viewing. The copyright can come back to bite you BIG. Click to read the previous post.

I was looking for a free animated image to use to wish everyone a Happy New Year and I found a nice site in the UK that has a number of royalty free images. They give permission on the site for you to use them as you wish. Here is what their site reads "If anyone wants to use the free animated gifs on this site for your web site, powerpoint presentation or as animated avatars do feel free to use them and download them to your hard drive."

Give them a try. They are located at http://www.sevenoaksart.co.uk

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Which Browser Do You Use?

For a long time I was stuck on Internet Explorer. I guess I assumed if Microsoft made it then it must be the best to use for Windows. Wrong!

Well IE starting freezing up on me in different ways on more than one of my machines. I was getting tired of forcing IE to close and reopening it or even having to restart the machine to get it back working.

So I tried Firefox and was greatly impressed. It did everything IE did and seemed to do it better. At least it did not hang up on me. There were even some add-ons that IE did not have that are pretty cool.

Along comes Google Chrome, so I tried it as well. And I like it the best out of these three. Smooth to use, seems faster than either IE or FF, and it takes much less real estate at the top of the screen. I like the fact that the address bar is also my Google search engine. And when I type something like ric.edu and hit enter, it knows to put in the http:// and open the site.

I have downloaded Opera and it looks fine, but I have been so pleased with GC that I have not spent much time with it.

One downside with GC is that there are some sites that will not work with it. For some of my emailings I have been using Constant Contact. It is a great service and reasonably priced. Much of it works with GC, but when I get to updating there are issues. I switch to FF and all the problems go away. Oh, IE will not work on that site either--editing issues.

Which one is your favorite and why?

Reducing File Sizes

You take a picture with your digital camera and then try to email it to a friend. It is so large that you can only attach one at a time. Even if you just want to upload it to Facebook, it takes a long time. Want to fix that problem? Read on.

Not too many years ago we were careful about the size of our files. We had to be or they would not fit on a 1.44mb diskette. Now our digital cameras create pictures over 1mb each. But with computer hard drives reaching into the terabytes, it is easy not to pay attention to the size of the files we save.

However, bloated files take longer to open and when located on a network drive they tie up bandwidth on the network as well as being slow to open. In our anxiousness, we often double-click two or more times on the same seemingly non-responsive icon only to wait and have multiple windows open, one for each of our frustrated clicks.

Why should we be concerned? The more bloat on the hard drive, the slower it runs and the more frustrated we become. We can control the size of our files and here are some examples of what we can do.

Click to read the complete white paper as a PDF