back | Archive: April 2009
Archive for April, 2009
Free Open Source Web Mail Application
Most web hosts have a default webmail client that comes pre-installed with your web hosting package. The most popular of these happens to be Horde – which is a dinosaur of a web app. A couple of days ago I came across an interesting open source project called Round Cube. “RoundCube Webmail is a browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface. It provides full functionality you expect from an e-mail client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking. RoundCube Webmail is written in PHP and requires a MySQL or Postgres database. The user interface is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2.” – RoundCube.net.
Utilize What’s Around You as a Tripod
The other night Natalie and I were coming back from a friend’s house and decided to take a stroll by the water. It wasn’t the best night for taking panoramic shots of the lit-up city across the Hudson but I made the most of it. We wandered onto a surprisingly open pier and proceeded to the very edge to get the best vantage point. Not having a decent tripod on me I had to sort of hang my camera off the edge of the pier, and pry it against the gated fence in order to minimize the movement caused by wind.
Don’t Shy Away from Social Media, Embrace it
The age of hiding behind aliases for your various online accounts is behind us. With the exception of private information such as your bank account of course. Social Media is one of the best ways of performing PR for yourself and managing the content that’s found about you when you’re searched for online. Instead of letting others decide what’s posted about you, why not take it upon yourself to actually post relevant information about yourself under your own disgretion. Every social media platform has preferences that allow you to limit what’s available to the public and what’s picked up by search engine queries.
Additional Fun with HDR Photography
Previously I’ve discussed the steps in configuring your DSLR camera for taking a series of photographs of the same scene with different exposure in order to begin crating a HDR image. I went back to my photo library within Adobe Lightroom and decided to let the software recreate the various exposures needed for that first initial step. One among many advantages of shooting RAW is that you’re free to manipulate your original shot image without actually compressing and destroying pixels that compose your photograph. Each time you apply additional modifications to your jpeg images within Photoshop, and continue to resave your changes, you’re actually deteriorating the quality of your image. The act of saving your image as a jpeg actually compresses the pixels within the image.
