Whether you’re planning to take your minuature ghosts and goblins out on the town or dress up yourself, chances are you’ll want to snag a few photos of the terrifying world around you this Halloween. And since a lot of Halloween festivities take place after dark, photography weblog Digital Photography School suggests adjusting your exposure for optimal night shots. For example: Increase your ISO – the larger your number the more sensitive your image sensor is to light and the darker conditions you can shoot in without having to slow down shutter speed. On the downside you’ll get more grainy/noisey shots.
The post also suggests slowing your shutter speed and increasing your aperture size—along with several other non-light-related Halloween picture taking tips. Photo by base10.
Halloween Photography Tips [Digital Photography School]Our friends Down Under followed up on how to do good with your computer with Save a life with your computer, part 2.
Windows only: Freeware application DriveImage XML creates and restores images of any drive or partition on your system. That means that next time you freshly install Windows on your computer (whether XP or Vista), you can back up that clean and sparkling system state with DriveImage XML. If things get messy down the road, you can just as easily restore that fresh system state with the program’s simple interface. We’ve given you the complete guide to system partition imaging and restoring from the open source perspective, but the freeware, Windows-only DriveImage XML offers a much more user-friendly alternative for the faint of heart.
DriveImage XML [via FreewareGenius]Online photo management application Snapmania’s Tourist Remover gets rid of unwanted gawkers and traffic from your photos by compositing two or more pictures of the same scene. All you have to do is make sure to take more than one of the same picture of a scene, assuming the people or cars you want to get rid of are moving. Once you’ve taken enough pictures so that every piece of the scenery is visible, just upload them to Snapmania and let the Tourist Remover do the work. Keep in mind that the more steady your hand when taking multiple shots, the better results you’ll see, so ideally you’ll be using an tripod or at least a wall to steady yourself. Alternatively, if you’ve got some GIMP or Photoshop chops, you can do the same thing yourself.
Tourist Remover [Snapmania via Photojojo]Keep your home spotless by following web site Real Simple’s Periodic Table of Cleaning. The table organises cleaning tasks by how often they should be performed, split up into weekly, monthly, three to six month, six to twelve month, or yearly periods. Of course the periodic guidelines aren’t hard and fast, and you should feel free to adjust the schedule to your liking, but the table provides an excellent checklist and reminder—both for those household cleaning duties you should perform regularly and especially for those that come along only once or twice a year. Grab the PDF of the Periodic Table of Cleaning from Real Simple. The Definitive Cleaning Schedule [Real Simple via Organized Home]
GNOME Linux users: Want to unclutter your desktop and get rid of the icons for your Windows boot and other partitions? Ubuntu blog Tombuntu offers up the easy yet hard-to-find fix:Run gconf-editor (by hitting Alt+F2 or from terminal). Browse to apps->nautilus->desktop in the left-hand folders window Uncheck the “volumes_visible” option
Note that this will also keep thumb drives and other portable devices from showing up on your desktop, so use carefully. Hit the link for tips on how to choose the drives that do show up on your desktop, and share your own desktop tweaking tips in the comments.
Hide Partition Icons from Your Ubuntu Desktop [Tombuntu]Jailbreaking the iPod touch/iPhone is now an utterly simple, one-click affair—which means if you’ve been waiting to jailbreak your iPod touch or iPhone (since the 1.1.1 firmware upgrade), the time is now. Just point your Safari browser to http://jailbreakme.com/ and click the Install AppSnapp link. It may sound scary, but the web site takes advantage of a mobile Safari exploit to install Installer.app (the gateway application for installing more applications) to your device. If you give it a try, here’s what you can expect.
Let’s face it: we’re all going to die someday. While it’s not healthy to dwell on this certainty, it’s a bad idea to pretend it’s not going to happen and never plan for it. You don’t want to splash out a tonne of money to prepare a will, but you don’t have to. Windows desktop software Quicken WillMaker walks you through the process of creating a will quickly and painlessly. After the jump, see a step by step tour of how I created a will from scratch in 30 minutes with Quicken Willmaker. more >>
Mac OS X only: If you don’t want to install a whole other piece of software to see today’s date in your menubar, you can add it manually in System Preferences. It’s not an obvious checkbox or dropdown, so bear with me. After the jump, the step by step.
