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WEDNESDAY, 25 JANUARY 2006
Kingston Compact Flash Card Problems >>
Category [/photography]

 

I've now had two 1 gig Kingston CF cards break and stop working, the cards appear to short-circuit internally, heating up when placed in the card reader. All data is lost, since Kingston won't try to recover data if RMA'd I ended up taking them apart to see if there was any obvious problem I could fix.

Needless to say taking CF cards apart invalidates any kind of warrenty but for the £30 odd they cost it seemed worth a punt if there was any chance of getting the images back off the card. After taking both failed cards apart the problem didn't magically fix itself (suprise!) but I'll post some pictures showing which internal chip gets hot in hopes it helps someone else.

 

I'll post more on this later but looking on google I couldn't find anyone with similar issues and I find it hard to believe I'm the only one who has seen broken Kingston Compact Flash cards.

 

SUNDAY, 22 JANUARY 2006
Get Your Dorset Photography Website Noticed! >>
Category [/internet]

 

You've made a wedding supplier website, spent a lot of time writing about your chosen subject, designed graphics and tweaked the layout so it looks good in Internet Explorer and Firefox but it's just sat there on the hosting server, you keep checking the web stats but no one's visiting?

Getting visitors to a website can cost huge amounts of money, you can put adverts in the press, spend out on click based advertising or sponsor a boat in a transatlantic yachting race. Many of us simply don't have that kind of money; the website could be a few pages about your family and pets or a local wedding photography and portraiture site you're trying to get off the ground. This is the situation we'll deal with, it's possible to spend no money and get your website lots of visitors.

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SUNDAY, 10 JULY 2005
Exposing The Relationship Between Shutter, Aperture and Depth Of Field >>
Category [/photography]

 

Quick tutorial to hopefully explain in simple terms the bits of a camera that can be used to create better photos and give you a better understanding of what you camera does when you set it to full auto or use a 'scene mode'. :)

From the first cameras with glass slides and a pinhole for a lens to the present high-tech cameras with 'digital film', not much has changed. The camera captures an image because the light in a scene is focused onto a light sensitive recording medium, that's all there is to it! Read on anyway as there's some other stuff that might be useful.

Anyone who's read any photography books will have seen an explanation of the relationship between shutter speed / aperture and depth of field. That's all I'm trying to do here. To start with I'll remove some of the technical words and use an analogy which may or may not help, you'll be the judge!

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WEDNESDAY, 23 MARCH 2005
How To Remove Solid Peer >>
Category [/security]

 

What is Solid Peer?

Firstly, you might like to know what this is and how you got infected, the chances are you probably installed it without realising as it's bundled with adware supported software like Morpheus.

Essentially solid peer is software that displays targetted pop up adverts, it therefore 'knows' which websites are visited by your computer and works out how to target adverts based on that information. Not something you'd generally install by choice it has to be said!

As a side note, it appears that at least some anti-virus and anti-advert software identifies this software as 'xirc.darkwarez' so if you think you are infected with xirc.darkwarez see if you actually have sold peer installed.

 

Removing Solid Peer

OK, so how do we remove solid peer and uninstall it from the system so you won't get another popup? Luckily it seems that the software is quite well behaved, it should generally have created an entry in your 'Add/Remove Programs'. Simply select 'remove' and follow the prompts.

If you can't find solid peer in your 'Add/Remove Programs' or have other problems then read on.

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SUNDAY, 20 MARCH 2005
eSpyer UK Price Comparision >>
Category [/cool]

Quick plug for a little site that you might find useful if you buy much computer stuff online in the UK. Essentially eSpyer checks the price and stock of items from some of the more popular online computer stores in the UK, a graph is drawn for each item so you can track the prices as they move up and down.

An example of the graph is this one for "AMD (Newcastle) Athlon 64 3800+/2.4ghz L2-512kb 939pin Boxed With 3 Year Warranty" for Ebuyer:

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THURSDAY, 20 JANUARY 2005
Dorset and New Forest Wedding Photography >>
Category [/cool]

 

It's this time of year that couples in love are planning for their perfect wedding, one of the most important things the big day will provide are happy memories, those remembered and those captured on film.

It just so happens that some good friends of mine are wedding photographers in Dorest, I know they do excellent work so it's a pleasure to give them a quick plug on my site.

Check out their wedding portfolio Contemporary Wedding Photography by Murakami you can also check their New Forest Wedding Photography blog at New Forest Wedding Photography Blog

 

SATURDAY, 02 OCTOBER 2004
BitTorrent Tricks and Tips >>
Category [/cool]

A friend of mine has written a good BitTorrant tweaks and setup guide, worth a look if you are considering other p2p apps Bit Torrent tweaks and tips guide it mainly focuses on the Azureus BT client.

 

WEDNESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2004
Emule Tricks and Tips >>
Category [/ed2k]

Emule Icon

 

What Is Emule / Edonkey? Emule is a popular peer2peer / p2p file sharing client, it's an open source version of edonkey and uses the same ed2k / edonkey2000 p2p network. Most of the edonkey tips are therefore applicable. Emule is a little like napster, the differences from napster include: It has many servers in many countries which are unlikely to be shut down. It allows sharing of any file type (not just mp3's). It does multiple source download, i.e. it will retrieve the file from many places at once, it can give a very fast download (like 60 Kbytes/sec on 512/256 ADSL).

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FRIDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2003
Make Your Own Router - Secrets Revealed >>
Category [/security]

This page sets out to explain:

Why Do I Need A Router?

A router or router-firewall (I will use the terms interchangably, where I say 'router' I mean 'router-firewall') in the simplest sense is just something that sits between your ISP connection (be that a dial-up modem an ADSL modem or a cable modem) and allows data (e.g. the web page you are viewing) to be routed between the internet and your internal 'home network'.

Your 'home network' might be just one PC but a router allows you to block all types inbound or network related attacks, e.g. any kind of internet worm that works by connecting to RPC or DCOM ports and many other types of attacks that try to connect to you from the internet. In simple terms a firewall-router protects your PC(s) from the bad people on the internet very effectivly, you don't need to know anything about how it works or how to setup the 'firewall' side of things to be protected, most routers come configured to work well with no real setup needed.

The other main advantage to using a router is that you can leave it on 24/7 and connect any number of PCs into your network at home to all share the internet connection with minimum fuss. A router should be very stable and many people leave them on 24/7 to give them a more or less permanent connection to the internet.

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