Good Grief! UK being PC...

Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun

Ex-soldier faces jail for handing in gun
Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 12:15

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty".

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

Seal teaches photographer!

I think this is amazing, have a watch!

Using Slideshare.net

Using Slideshare.net to view a presentation:

Beautiful Photos

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: incredible photos).

Google Flu Trends

Google Flu Trends

Among all the ridiculous uses or the Internet there are a few gems. Things that could be done as well and as cheaply no where else.

Google Flu Trends is a Google Trends page for searches related to the Flu tracked over time. As people get the Flu and search for information about it Google tracks those searches and can plot them against past years of the same search and by geographical region of the computer IP addresses doing the search. This makes a *real time* chart of Flu progress.

Have you gotten a Flu shot yet or are you gambling?

Splashup (beta) Image Editor

Splashup

Splashup is a pretty obvious adaptation of the popular open source program, GIMP, as a WebWare application. I'm am very impressed by how well it has been done too.

Let me add here that GIMP offers much more capability than Splashup does, Scriptfu addons and filters that make it an open source competitor of the commercial Photoshop program. (Though not fully, if you have the cash, Photoshop and Fireworks are still worth the cash.)

Still, this webware has some features that make it a great addition to your image editing abilities from any computer web browser with flash.

To begin with it will load files from your local hard disk or a number of online repositories, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook. In addition if you are needing to edit over several sessions of use you can save it to a splashup format which keeps all the layers, etc. that you have used during editing.

In short, give it a go. I think you'll be pleased.

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Seagull

Zoho Writer

An Online Office Word Processor Beautiful. Most of us have experienced using MS Word for writing documents and if you have been attentive lately you may have heard there are online office products now available.

Thinkfree.com has had the best system I'd seen up to now.

Writely.com has been around for some time and was bought by Google.

Zoho was too basic last time looked at it, but now it has a lot of new features which are going to make a viable option to compete even with MS Office. But most intriguing to me is it's components beyond word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Zoho has online chat, meeting, planner and more. This makes Zoho more like a real 'Office' with collaboration and sharing.

I recommend at least taking a look and making a free membership with it. Zoho.com.

PicniK.com

PicniK.com

Another example of the web getting *way* ahead of me.

While surfing photo sites and editing tools I came across this site and it's GREAT!

True Web 2.0 this is a website that will let you edit photos on your hard drive, from your Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook site or anything you see on the web. The site is Adobe flash (a free plugin if you don't have it installed already) and can expand to fullscreen so you don't have to work on a photo in just your browser sized window. It has the usual crop, color, etc. tools and also has special effects you can add.

If you have some photo editing to do and you are on a high speed Internet connection I really recommend trying this one.

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Google copies StumbleUpon

Your Search History Does the Magic

I just learned about this and have only started to use it. If you know about StumbleUpon.com
then you may find Google's foray into showing interesting websites something to try.

I think web surfing broadens the mind particularly the way StumbleUpon helps you. You wind up on sites you might never find any other way, interesting sites, sites suggested by other folks like you or unlike you as you choose.

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Tagmaps

TagMaps - World Explorer

Here is something new and fun from Yahoo.

Tagmaps combines the Yahoo map with Flikr photos so that as you look at the map you find tags for the ares on the map and by holding your mouse over those tags images from the area appear in a window to the right. Then you can look more closely at those pictures by clicking them and look at the photo collections of the photographers.

It's pretty neat!

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Tagmap View

Get out of Cell Phone contracts?

CellSwapper Solves A Very Annoying Problem

What an idea!

I *HATE* cell phone companies. The whole Reagan revolution meant the downfall of customer service and cell phones debut in the same period led the way in customer NO-service.

A major part of the NO-service was the inclusion of terrible contracts for long time periods with exorbitantly high cancellation fees. So along comes this site, CellSwapper, which tries to mate folks trying to leave a contract with others looking to get into one.

There are many reasons to change services, poor coverage, poor sound, etc. can mean you want to change but if you are stuck, this just may be the way to go.

Have a look. Here's hoping you don't find it necessary, but most likely... well, good luck.

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Yugma.com Beta

Yugma : Web conferencing, Online Meetings, Free Web Conferencing, Free Online Meetings, Web Conferencing on MAC, Online Meetings for MAC

I just came across this today and I am really thrilled!

I posted recently about Virtual Networking (VNC) and a one to one ability to operate a remote machine over the Internet with Crossloop.com but this is more for presentations or collaboration but would be great for support as well.

Installing it means downloading some Java and registering an e-mail address to identify you and that's pretty much it. It requires a relatively new Windows or Mac operating system, I have not had success running it on my Ubuntu Linux machine I believe because it doesn't use the most up to date Java but it could be something else.

Once running you get a chat window for communicating and a phone number listing if you want to conference call though it would be a long distance call for most folks.

The program seemed quite well made to me, it runs much as GoToMeeting.com does but without some of the bells and whistles they give for their $50/month service. Yugma.com is flat out *FREE* for up to 10 connections and just $10/month to go up to 20 users and added features of taking control of a remote computer and having hard disk storage online for folks. The free version does allow passing the presenter abilities around amount those connected.

All in all this is a GREAT find and I hope their business goes far.

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Google Reader Upgrade

Google Reader (100+)

Today Google updated their page format of Google Reader. It now can look much more like Bloglines or Pluck in addition to its old style of display.

Personnaly I think this is a great improvement once again making Google the big bully on the web, M$ is falling backward again.

Consider this a top recommendation from me, I think Google really made something useful here!

Be Frugal!

How to Buy Nothing - WikiHow

How could I say it better. We Americans have become so obsessed with consuming we don't care who or what else in the world it will hurt.

STOP IT!

The site linked above list ideas I use and will use to live for the good of GOD and that means for the good of the world.

Check out this article on 'Is Your Printer Spying on You?'

I thought you might find this article from Ask Bob Rankin interesting...

http://www.askbobrankin.com/is_your_printer_spying_on_you.html