I came across this problem recently and I didn’t actually manage to find a solution online for a change so I thought I had better post about it. All of a sudden the word count in my WordPress site was showing zero on every post. Continue reading Word Count Not Working in WordPress
If you have an SLR camera, whether it be digital or not, you have the option to choose different settings with which to take your photos. This gives you much more control over how your pictures turn out.
However, a lot of people buy a good camera and then just use it on the automatic setting so that the camera itself decides what speed and what aperture the lens will fire at. It may also choose the ISO setting for that shot. It is very easy just to keep using the camera on the automatic setting and you can get perfectly good shots by doing this, but if you want to be a bit more inventive with your photography then you need to take that step to learn how to use the manual settings.
So, if you want more control over how your pictures turn out, and you want your pictures to look more professional, then try experimenting with the different settings. The best idea is to actually read the instruction booklet that came with your camera but some of those are hundreds of pages long and realistically how many people do that?
So, there are some different settings on your camera – you may have the picture icons which will customise the kind of settings that you might use – for example if you choose the sport option you will get a faster shutter speed at the expense of depth of field and it may also automatically turn on the multi-frame option.
Otherwise you may have the following setttings:
Av – Aperture priority – where you choose the width of the aperture (this controls the depth of field)
Tv – Shutter priority – where you set the shutter speed and the camera chooses the aperture
M – Completely manual – you choose both settings which means that you need to make sure that you have the right combination that will let enough light in for the picture to be correctly exposed.
I will explain the first two options below.
Continue reading How To Use Manual Settings On A Digital Camera
So British Gas have a fantastic system called Hive which enables you to control your heating system from your phone (or the thermostat). Usually this costs £250 for the product including installation but if you are looking for a Hive discount code then we have one here.
If you thought last year’s deal was good then this year it has got even better. If you want to get the Hive heating and hot water system (including professional installation if required) – you can get the whole deal for £148.99 including installation or £108.99 without the installation included (i.e. you install it yourself or get someone to install it for you). Grab the discount price here.
This year sees the best price so far for getting the Hive system (including professional installation if required) – you can get the whole deal for £159.99 including installation or £119.99 without the installation included (i.e. you install it yourself or get someone to install it for you). Grab the discount price here.
So there is another great discount on the Hive heating control system for Black Friday 2016 and this time you can get the heating and hot water system for only £124.99 – I think this may be the lowest price so far – but obviously this price will not last long – get the discount price here.
Currently you can get the Hive version 2 system for heating and hot water with installation for the discount price of £185.78 – click the image on the left for more info.
Currently (February 2016) Amazon have a discount on the full Hive heating system including installation – reducing the price of £250 (which is the current price on the British Gas site) to £203.58.
We do not know how long this Hive discount price will last for but it seems that there are occasional discounts being given for the Hive system on Amazon so click through on the link below to show the currently available price.
OK so this Hive discount code only applies for Black Friday – 27 November 2015. If we come across any other codes then we will add them here. Currently you can get a £70 discount on the Hive heating control system from British Gas and believe it or not it is being sold on Amazon for Black Friday.
Here is the link to the reduced price Hive system. Even with the discount it shows the full price below but click through on 27th November and you will get the discounted price of £179. If you click on the link after the discount period is passed it may not work or it may just come up with the standard price:
With Hive you can use an app on your smartphone to change your heating while you are out. You can also have different settings during the day so that you are in total control of your heating system. It also has a setting for automatic frost protection so that you can leave your heating on the lowest possible setting without the danger of burst pipes while you are away.
This Hive discount code offers a significant saving on the installation of the system and it could pay for itself in energy savings in a couple of years.
If you are wondering how you can create a photo silhouette with some free software then you could try using Google’s Picasa shoto software to get quite a good effect.
If you use the Neon effect tool in Picasa then this might give you what you are after. Using the Picasa Neon effect is simple and depending on how you use it you can get a silhouette effect or else you can have a level of detail in your photo. Personally I wanted to create a kind of chalk outline sketch effect which blanked out the features and just left an outline of the body. The good thing with this though is that you also get some of the internal lines of the image rather than just having a plain black silhouette.
To create this effect firstly open the photo you want to edit in Picasa. Although Picasa does create a backup of your photo itself, you may want to create a copy so that you can play around with that and not worry about messing up the original.
The first thing that I do is to crop the image to how I want it to look. The crop tool is on the first edit page and you can choose what format you want to use to crop the image to: you could keep the image in the same ratio as the photo was taken or you can just crop it manually to a size that you want.
The Neon Effect icon is on the last page of the edit icons. I actually first used the black and white tool to change my photo to black and white before using the neon tool. In this way the colour I chose in the neon tool would not be clouded by any other colours in the picture.
With the neon effect you have two decisions to make:
There are many tools you can get in Picasa that you pay for in other software, it really is pretty versatile. Obviously it doesn’t come close to tools like PhotoShop that you may need if you are doing detailed changes to images but for the everyday photographer it has almost everything that you need.
I find the crop tool is one of the most useful and also the fill light tool for those photos that come out a bit dark due to lack of light. You can also use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button which sometimes can be a bit hit and miss but other times can give you a quick good result!
If you do use the fill light tool then it can also be good to add a bit more contrast. You are pretty much in charge of what you want to do and can cancel and undo any of the changes you have made if you do something wrong.
I think a lot of people live in a world where they know the chances of their computer crashing are significant and yet they still put off backing up their data. I think in most cases this is due to their lack of knowledge of how easy it can be to back up your data. I know people who occasionally add the files in their documents folder onto a CD or thumb drive but it is not very frequent and chances are if their laptop or PC were to fail they would lose data for sure.
I myself have had no less than 1 PC and 2 Laptops die on me completely, without a hope of recovery, in the last 3 years. The first laptop died due to someone else trying to fix something by removing the operating system and not being able to replace it. I stupidly had not backed up my data before allowing them to do this, my bad. The 2nd one, the PC, died a few months later, it was a few years old and I had started slowly copying the data over but had not finished backing up before it went. Lucky for me I had a friend who, with a lot of effort, managed to rescue the data from both machines. So if you are wondering how do I back up my computer then I’ll tell you the easy way that I do it (although there are other ways but for someone who doesn’t want to delve into lots of settings this one is simple),
And so it came that said friend decided that I needed an easy back up facility and bought me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive with I think 500 Gb of space. Now I am sure that there are other easy plug and go back up drives available but as I have used this one I wanted to share my experience with it. Basically it has software installed that you can just run and once you have that installed, every time you plug the drive in afterwards it will automatically detect and new or changed files and back them up to the drive.
That is as simple as it is – plug it in and it will back up for you. For someone like me, who never quite gets round to doing a manual backup, it is a godsend. And that was shown to be the case when my 3rd computer, a laptop that was only about 18 months old, also died. Lucky for me that just the day before I had plugged in the backup (I had actually plugged it in to look for a file from one of my old computers that was stored on it but of course as I did that it backed up too).
So really, for less than 100 dollars (on Amazon anyway) you can have a very easy back up system that is suitable for any technophobe to use and really is the simplest back up out there as far as I am concerned. Don’t leave it until it is too late – it is not always possible to recover data from dead computers or can be expensive so save yourself the worry and trouble by getting a back up now.
You can check out the GoFlex drive on Amazon US and the equivalent in the UK below:
