New Year, New Tools

This year I got a digital camera (finally) for Christmas. It was a gift from my wife, but I had a fair bit of input (about 100%). The Olympus Stylus Verve 5.0 megapixel camera is very compact, weatherproof and looks cool. It takes great photos and I’ve picked up an extra battery as reviews say that it eats them.

For my first transfer of photos to my computer I used Adobe Photo Album which had come with my Palm. I found it cumbersome, and when I wanted to do anything extra I found out that I needed to upgrade to a paid version. I therefore installed the Olympus master program that came with the camera. It took forever to download the updates from the web and when I started using it I discovered that it was a crippled version of the pro version which I could purchase from Olympus.

I therefore uninstalled both of these programs and downloaded The Gimp. It is a free and open source image editing suite that does much more than I need but there is no nag-wear and I know that it has everything that I’ll ever need in terms of functionality. I should have done this first, but the process reinforced how many good open source products are out there. If you install The Gimp for Windows, make sure that you install the GTK+2 Runtime environment first. I’m playing around with a Flickr account too, to start sharing some photos.

I’ve also tried some new tools for this website. In the External Links on the left you’ll see an OpenSource4Learning link which takes you to a Squidoo lens. Squidoo is an experiment in focused content, based on the premise that everyone is an expert on something. I’d appreciate any feedback. My intent is to see if one of the subjects of this blog requires its own special place. Is it any easier to find stuff this way?

I also built a swicki, which is a specialised search engine. I had it installed on the navigation bar but it slowed the loading of my pages so it’s off for now. You may see it re-appear as I test it some more.
Now it’s back to real work for the month of January ;-)