I’m going to cut through some of the confusion, and show you how to get, keep, and consume free ebooks. It’s a fairly quick skate across the surface though, so you’ll need to do some more work yourself.

Just to clarify, ebooks, for the sake of this discussion, are books which are available electronically, rather than printed on dead trees, and which can be read on an electronic device of some sort. And completely free ebooks, just now, are those which are legitimately available for free. Other options exist. We all know that.

Getting Free Ebooks

The largest source of out of copyright ebooks is Project Gutenberg. If you want a book from before your parents were born, this is the place to start.

Books are available in a number of formats, categories and languages.

For a slightly different view of what’s available, you also might like to take a look at manybooks. They have a more modern approach to things. Some categories are not appropriate for everyone. Take care.

If you’re looking for some niche products, then you need to use the web to search things out. For instance, the nice people at Baen Books have a free ebook library for science fiction.

There are plenty of other options out there for broad or narrow fields of study. Google is your friend. Be cautious of the sites that require you to sign up, and watch what you download.

Managing Free Ebooks

Once you have some sources for ebooks, you need to give some thought to taking care of them. If you are ever going to have a decent stash of electronic tomes, then you need to think about how to go about it. I’m going to quickly show you how to make use of a product called Calibre, which has already been covered in some depth by Simon and Justin. Calibre is huge. We’re just going to nibble off a little corner.

Specifically, I want to show you how to organise your books, and then how to convert them. You’ll see why by the time we get to the end of this.

Organise

Let’s quickly grab a few books from a couple of sites first: War & Peace from Gutenberg, The Body Snatcher from ManyBooks, and the highly recommended Sheepfarmer’s Daughter via Baen.

Download and install Calibre.

Start Calibre, and from the main toolbar click on the Add Books”¦ button.

Browse to wherever you downloaded the books, and add them one by one.

Once the books are imported, you’ll be able to see them all listed in the main screen, and you can sort and filter in a number of different ways. The important thing here though is to add whatever metadata is appropriate, such as the name of the author, and the title. Calibre does its best to work out what to add, but you need to help.

Metadata

Right-click one of the titles, select the metadata edit option.

Fill in the data as best you can. Once your collection starts to grow, you will find you can select items such as authors from the combo box without typing them in full.

You can rate the books between zero and five stars, and attach each of the titles to series information if you wish.

There is also an option to download the metadata for the book from the Internet. I had mixed results, but it’s worth a shot.

Once you have finished with all the metadata, you’ll be able to filter, sort and search your books effectively. Not much use with three books, but you can use your imagination.

Reading Free Ebooks

One of the great things about Calibre is the way it can convert between file formats.

The format that you want will depend almost entirely on the device you want to use to read your books. You can choose, but I just need to use an example. First though, Calibre specifically states support for a large number of devices directly, and supports enough file formats to cover most anything else.

Calibre can also manage the device syncing in many cases, but we’re not going to do that today.

We’re going to convert each of the files we downloaded, and for the example we want to change them all to .PDB files, so that I can transfer them to my device. Find something that works for you, and stick with it as much as you can.

So, War and Peace from HTML to PDB: Right-click the book, choose Convert books, then Convert individually.

On the left are a big list of option categories. Leave all of those alone, and look over to the right and select the file type you want, set any other sub-options you need, and then click on OK. Give the system a minute to deal with your request, and then that’s it. Convert the rest.

Browse to the location of the library, and take a look. Additional files exist. Copy or synch them to your device, install the reader application, and you’re all set. You can also use the built-in Calibre reader on your PC for most formats.

So which parts of this are confusing? Any need for a deeper article on parts of it? Any questions? Let me know in the comments.

The post 3 Good Online Sources For Free Ebooks & A Free Ereader App appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Truecrypt is a practical implementation of paranoia for your PC, and Version 7 has an even bigger stash of goodies to ease your worries, along with better performance. We’ll use that app today to illustrate how to create an encrypted folder that others can’t explore.

Before we begin though, a couple of references. Mark has talked about Truecrypt a couple of versions back, and he also wrote a great article specifically about using Truecrypt on a USB stick. Saikat gave a broader outline on how to hide folders.

What Is It?

So is Truecrypt all about hiding folders? More or less. It’s definitely about making sure that your secrets stay secret, and hiding folders ““ or entire drives ““ is the most common way to deal with that.

Truecrypt is also cross-platform, as well as being open source freeware to encrypt folders. It’s secure. It’s also easy. Why wouldn’t you use it?

Why Do I Need It?

Unfortunately we live in a world where people don’t behave the way you might wish they did. Over the last few years, we are also living in a progressively more connected world, which means you are more exposed to those people your mother wouldn’t want you to marry. To add to the mess, we are also, especially right now, beginning to live in a thoroughly wireless, portable, mobile world, where not only can these undesirables get close to your stuff, but you help them out by taking your stuff to them!

Even if you never do anything you would like to keep private, if you have an online life of any sort, your identity and your information are valuable items, and you need to look after them. If you are doing anything that some people might not approve of, all the more reason.

How Do I Get It?

Visit the Truecrypt downloads page, and grab version 7. Download it to your PC just the way you might expect. Installation is a breeze.

What Can I Do With It?

The idea is to take a container of some sort, and encrypt the contents of that container. Imagine if we went into your living room, took a good look at the bookshelf, and then somehow removed the contents of all the books, shuffled all the words up in some nearly random way, and then put them all back again. You would have exactly the same information that was there earlier, but no way to make use of it.

If, on the other hand, we gave you a key to the shuffling, then with time and patience, you could put everything back the way it started, and get on with reading War and Peace.

This works just the same way. The container, conveniently enough, can be a drive, a folder, a USB stick”¦ For our example we will just use a folder on your drive. We will shuffle the contents, and then give you a (software) key to let your computer sort things out for you on the fly. Version 7 adds a couple of wrinkles like using hardware acceleration for decryption in some cases, and automatic decryption of USB keys on insertion if you want it to.

How To Create One

Fire up Truecrypt, and you will be presented with the main window.

Click the Create Volume button to build that container we were talking about.

There are a number of different types of containers, but for our first attempt we can just use the default file container.

Click Next.

Along with the various container types, there are advanced options for creating one container inside another. Think of a bookshelf inside a library. But for now, again take the default.

Click Next again.

Because we are using the standard file container, we need to tell it the name of the file to use. Just in case you’re thinking in terms of folders, this can be a little confusing. We are going to create a file, and then eventually it will look like another hard drive on your system, but only when it’s mounted.

So, browse to a folder, and supply a file name. No need for a suffix. When you’re ready, hit the Next button again.

Remember I said there were lots of options? You can choose from a number of encryption types and hash algorithms. Ordinary people like me take the advice of the developers, and go with the defaults.

Yeah. Click Next.

You can create a container of any size up to the available space on your real hard drive. It’s worth considering some limits if you ever want to backup the result to portable media, so perhaps you might want to stick with 4GB or so if you want the file to be backed up to DVD. You get the idea.

In our case, we’re just creating a small container for some tax files. Setting aside 100MB seems about right, but I have created 60GB containers in the past without any trouble.

Click Next, yet again.

Passwords are very important in Truecrypt. Tina talked earlier in the year about how to select a good one. I can’t expand on that. Make a good choice.

Next. Again.

This screen is a little unusual. You need to move the mouse around in a random fashion for a while. Go on, you know you want to. A little more. Great.

Just for a change of pace, click Format. Then take a break.

All being well, you’ll get a confirmation when the format is finished.

Go ahead and click OK. It’s not as though you have other options.

And that’s it. Done.

One new Truecrypt volume is quite enough for now, so click Exit, and we can move on to making use of it.

Using The New Volume

Run Truecrypt again.

Select an available drive letter from the list, and then browse to the file you just created. Just to be clear, in this case I’m going to mount the new MUO container as the O: drive.

Click Mount to complete the job. You will be prompted for that password you carefully made up earlier. Don’t forget it. There are no back doors here.

Click OK.

And that’s it. I now have a 100MB O: drive, ready for use.

Click Exit, and take a look in Windows Explorer.

Keeping Things Going

The drive will be dismounted automatically if you log off or shut your PC down, but it’s a good idea to close it yourself, from the same window, when you don’t need it any more. You might have trouble if your PC still thinks you have files from the volume open, so close any applications, files, or Windows Explorer views beforehand.

We could spend a lot more time on this subject, but I’m sure you’d rather make use of your new encrypted drive. Let me know if there are any details I can go into more depth with, any questions, or any good ideas for use.

The post How To Make Encrypted Folders Others Can’t View with Truecrypt 7 appeared first on MakeUseOf.

No, not supermodels. That’s a whole different subject. TitlShiftmaker makes this easy, and the results are great.

You can buy lenses for big cameras that do this stuff properly, but most of us will never find the money, justify the expense, or learn to operate the equipment. Get your tilt-shift fix here instead.

Where does this fit?

We’ve covered many image enhancement options before, from the simple to the ludicrously complex. This is a simple site with a simple aim, and it doesn’t claim to replace either real tilt-shift lenses or the customisable effects from packages like Photoshop. But enhancing images with it is easy, quick, fun, and the results look very cool.

So if you want to have some fun with your existing images and see what you can do, here it is.

Getting your images into TiltShiftMaker

The front page of the site provides everything you need. You can upload images from your local computer, or from the web. Local files work just the way you might expect.

Browse to the image you want to play with, and hit the upload button.

Take note of the maximums. No more than 6000 pixels on the long side, and no more than 8MB in size. And if you happen to be working with RAW files, remember to convert to JPG first.

Web uploads are just as easy. Browse to an image, click the button. Now let’s do something with it.

Making changes

We need an example, so let’s start with a default conversion from this:

TiltShiftMaker presents you with a set of options. By default, it’s going to come out like this, but let’s work through the settings:

A real tilt-shift lens is moved out of line with the normal path of the light through the camera, and as a result tends to end up with a very small depth of field (the part of the photo that is in focus). Adjusting the focus on the lens moves that band back and forth, and lets you choose the small part of the image that is sharply in focus.

On the website, moving the slider up and down has the same effect, and allows us to get the child in focus, while blurring the rest of the image. You can adjust the effect further with the Focus size slider, making the band as narrow as makes sense to you.

Hit the Preview button to get an idea of what you might be doing.

The last option in this section, Enhance colors, is an example of something that improves on the real world capability. You’d struggle to do this with an actual lens. Go for it. I won’t tell.

Now that you’re experienced”¦

There are some advanced settings you can use to make your image pop.

The first setting, Defocus strength, determines how much the blurry part of the image is blurred. For some images, it doesn’t take much.

Defocus gradient sets the rate with which you slide from in to out of focus.

The last option, Enhance bokeh, might just require some explanation. Bokeh is a Japanese term relating to the way in which the out of focus background is blurred. This all gets deep really fast, but the short version is that the shapes that the background is made up of depends on the construction of the adjustable aperture on the lens. See what I mean?

In any case, the slider performs some magic in the background to make the bokeh look better. Your mileage will decidedly depend.

And from here?

Once you have the image you want, you can click on the Get full size button to save a copy locally, and then you can upload it to your favourite web location.

There are some places you might like to take a look at, to see what people have been doing. People who are a whole lot better at this than me. Firstly, check the gallery at the site. Then move on over to flickr, and finally take a look in the group at Photobucket.

We’ve covered a number of other photo-enhancement options in the past. You might also like to take a look at these.

A similar capability is available at TiltShift Generator. You can rescue some of your images at FocusMagic, and remove red eye here. Varun talked about a stack of enhancement sites in this list, and if you have any interest in digital photography whatsoever, you really need to take a look at Bakari’s stunning new PDF guide. Something to download and read thoroughly.

That’s it. I’d love to know how you go, any other techniques you find useful, and perhaps some links to your results. Let me know in the comments.

Image credit: clarkmaxwell

The post Faking It With Style – Enhancing Your Images With TiltShiftMaker appeared first on MakeUseOf.

We’re giving away 15 copies of Pixo 2.5 for Windows. Find out how you can win a copy for yourself.

We’ve talked about some other image tools before. Varun gave us a set of ten sites that can manipulate pictures in funky ways. Aibek told us all about online image editing, and I dragged you kicking and screaming through a whole set of Picasa tutorials, starting here.

Getting started

You can obtain a trial copy of Pixo from Bendigo Design, and get started trying out the capabilities. Purchase a license from the same site to free things up and make full use of the package.

It’s a little difficult to use screenshots of the whole app for this, so use the image above as reference, and let’s get going.

There are two ways to open an image to apply effects. You can use Open item in the top left of the toolbar, or simply drag an image onto Pixo. Either way, you’re going to finish up with something you can enhance.

The pictures of the flowers on the right serve as the menu for the various effects. you can turn the visuals off in the settings menu if you wish, but there’s a good indication of what is available from the flowers.

Click the small black arrows above or below the pictures to scroll through the list. Hold the mouse over the pictures to see what the effect is called. Let’s scroll all the way down to Melt and click on the flower.

Down below the selection appear all the settings related to that particular effect. In this case, there’s just a brush size. If you slide it left or right, and most the mouse over the door, you’ll see the size of the circle. That’s the brush.

And this is where Pixo differs from other packages. All you need to do now is to drag the mouse over the area you want to change. In effect, you paint on the image to get what you want.

Underneath the image are some controls to zoom in and out, and to rotate the image. In this case, we can zoom in on the area around the leaf, and then melt the wrought iron.

Before you apply the effect, you need to click on the Apply button beside the zoom controls. Then just paint on the iron.

Easy, isn’t it?

Let’s save this, and then I can show you another one. Click the save button from the toolbar at the top, and follow your nose. You can save as .bmp, .png, .gif, .jpg, and .pdf.

A couple of things about saving. First, Pixo wants to keep saving with the same filename after you save for the first time, so remember to go and rename the original file before resaving.

The second thing is that by default, Pixo will resize your larger images before loading them. It doesn’t affect the original, but the resulting image will only be 800 pixels wide by default. All of this and more is available for configuration from the settings tool in the toolbar.

One more, and then we can move on to look at some other interesting things.

Scrolling back through the effect options, choose the Colourise flower. You’ll see that for this effect you have to choose a colour as well as a brush size. Set, apply, paint. How easy is that?

Frames

Along with the main special effects, Pixo provides some other useful tools for enhancing your images. First up, frames.

This is just as easy. Select two colours you would like to use for your frame, or select the colours from the image using the eyedroppers.

If you want to keep things simple, click on the Use Same Colour option.

Decide on an appropriate thickness for the frame, and hit the Apply button.

Vignette

It’s not going to be useful everywhere, but you more than likely have some images that would benefit from a vignette. It couldn’t be much easier. Choose a colour, click Apply. You can again select a colour from the image with the eyedropper.

Old-style

I think I like these ones best of all. Find an image that could do with the antique treatment, and load it in the normal fashion.

Select the Aged option from the toolbar. it’s the star shape. You might have to choose the Frame option first. That’s the rectangle. Scroll through the flowers to get the one you want, and click it. No need for Apply with these.

That last one I’m uploading to my Flickr account, and there’s some help from the toolbar for that as well.

Click the button and you’ll get the usual Flickr authorisation run-around, and then you’ll be able to connect to Flickr and upload the image. Easy. Again. And that’s it. The rest is just about experimentation. Enjoy, and let me know how it goes in the comments.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

This giveaway begins now and ends Saturday, 10th July at 2100hrs PST. The winners will be selected at random and announced via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Sean from Bendigo Design for her generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

[update] Here are the 15 lucky winners who will each receive a free copy of Pixo 2.5:

1. Zachary Strader
2. Matthew Trifiro
3. Stian Helnes
4. Vishal
5. Laurie Warren
6. Beng Hooi Phian
7. Andrew Lee
8. Sadjak Franz
9. Arlene Culpepper
10. Vi Nguyen
11. Jasmine Bond
12. Linda Belthius
13. Elizabeth Cogan
14. Arlene Gregory
15. Sally Asbell

Thank you for participating!

The post Add Special Effects To Your Photos With Pixo [MakeUseOf Giveaway] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Generally though, RSS feeds are pretty drab, with the emphasis on drab, rather than pretty.

Enter the visual RSS reader Feedlooks, and the world of what they themselves describe as “˜full visual glory‘.

Needless to say, this isn’t the first newsreader we’ve taken a look at. You might like to take another look at a couple of earlier MUO reviews. Dave talked about some different ways to use Google Reader a few months ago. Karl took a look at the most used readers, and Nancy helped us through using Good Noows instead of GReader.

Getting onboard

I’m a big Google Reader user, so I was pleased to see that that the Feedlooks visual RSS reader was entirely web-based, and that it was happy to import my feeds from Google. There’s an export/import step in the middle, but it’s not too much of a problem. Beware that in the pre-beta world of Feedlooks, you might face some limitations as to the quantity of feeds they will let you bring in-house.

So, do what you do best. Provide an email address, create a password, answer the confirmation email, log in, and you’re feeding with class.

We’ll look at adding a feed manually in a minute, but in the meantime you have some sample feeds to take a look at, and we’re going to do that GReader import thing:

Click on Account in the toolbar, change the colour scheme if you’re of a mind, and then click Import/Export feeds.

As we’re going to deal with Google Reader, take a look at the instructions, then click the link as indicated. Assuming you’re signed into the right account at Google (I wasn’t!) then you’ll be asked what you want to do with the google-reader-subscriptions.xml file. Save it somewhere locally, and then browse to it from the Feedlooks page. Click import, and you’ll get a confirmation that the file will be imported.

That’s going to take a little while, and the kind folks at Feedlooks will email you when it’s finished. More than that, in my email I was given a list of feeds that, quite legitimately, it didn’t want to add. Closed blogs and the like.

Add a feed

Meanwhile, back on the homepage, a small child waits”¦ no, hold on, that’s a Kiwi saying, you won’t understand. In fact a small plus (+) button waits. Click it, and we’ll go through the add process.

Go to a web page with a feed. Copy the URL for the feed, and head back to Feedlooks.

The subscription itself is a little bit of an anti-climax. The box glows briefly, and the address disappears, ready for the next one. Back to the Home page.

Up and running

The pre-beta status of feedlooks means that you need to be prepared to put up with a few rough edges, and one of them is scrolling through a huge list of alphabetically sorted feeds, but eventually you can get to the one we want.

A couple of tips. You can click the title of each feed to hide the individual items in its list, but don’t click the X to the left of the title unless you wish to delete the feed. That’s a whole different matter.

Click the title of a particular post to take a closer look. For instance, my PhotographyBB feed looks like this:

And that’s the general philosophy. The way to achieve the full visual glory is to take the reader to the actual webpage, embedded in the feedlooks page. And it looks great.

Unfortunately, pre-betas mean that your mileage may vary. Probably the largest part of my RSS feeds are from Flickr. And as yet, that doesn’t work well because Flickr doesn’t allow embedding of their pages in other sites. There seems to be something of an issue with Feedburner as well.

Flickr feeds are probably going to be particularly difficult, especially if the simple visibility of GReader cannot be replicated for these.

You can do a whole bunch of other things in here. Help yourself to the menu, and go wild. You can export all the feeds again, so even if you change your mind, all is not lost.

Conclusion

it’s exciting. I really like where this is going. But I think it’s got a way to go. Is it cool? You bet. Is it ready? Not yet. Watch this space!

Take a look at this visual RSS reader yourself, and let me know what you think in the comments. I’m particularly interested to know how it copes with the sorts of feeds you have lots of.

The post Enjoy Full-blown, Visual RSS Feeds with Feedlooks appeared first on MakeUseOf.

A couple of years back, Jackson wrote about the Mac version of the application, but I’m really pleased to have discovered a Windows version since then. It’s not the most frequently updated program, but it works just fine. Jump in any time and have a go.

Getting a copy

Easy. Visit the website, download in the usual fashion, choosing the platform you need. For Windows, unzip the download, and run the installer.

Click on Poladroid in your Start menu, and the rather weird application will drop a camera on your desktop.

First use

It doesn’t get much easier than this. Find a file, and drag it to the camera.

A rather dark-looking image will start to develop. Wait. Give it a shake. Wait some more.

Drag another one while you wait. It’s not a digital technology, guys.

Poladroid will eventually complete the processing of your image, and will drop the result in your default photo location (usually My Pictures), along with a little cross on the developing Polaroid image to show it’s finished. Enjoy.

The resulting Polaroid image comes out at 1392 x 1692 pixels, including the classic Polaroid-style frame, and if necessary, some borders are added to the original image. Don’t use too small an original, or you might think it’s time to visit your optometrist when you look at the result.

You should also expect some cropping on non-square images, like this, but actually I rather like the effect.

Having a little more fun

If you’re anything like me, you just might be interested in the partially-processed images that you’re watching on-screen. If you right-click an image, a sample of it at the current state can be saved.

Those images show up in the same place as the final copies, and at the same resolution. The just have less contrast, with the amount depending on your trigger finger.

Changing the way things work

As great as this is at its defaults, there are still a number of settings which can be tweaked.

Click on the small blue circle above the camera, and you’ll be presented with a menu. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but go ahead and click Settings”¦ There are three tabs which allow you to modify things to work better with your mind:

Not a whole lot here, but you can set the resulting Polaroid images to be put back in the folder the originals come from, or in some other specified folder.

Important settings here is: Auto-rotate. If your camera knows when you’re taking a portrait, then Poladroid can pick up on the information and get things the right way around in here.

I really like these sound effects.

If you have some time”¦ tinker. In here you can determine whether or not any blurring happens, whether to put stripes on the image or the frame, and how much vignetting (that’s darkening of the outlying areas of the image) should occur.

Go on. You know you want to.

More

I have uploaded the “˜Poladroided’ images to my Flickr collection just here if you want to take a closer look.

If you like the idea, but would like to try some other options, take a look at Pixisnap and Instantizer.

That’s about it. Have any problems? Got some samples to link to? Anything Mac folks might need to know that’s different to the Windows version? Let me know in the comments.

The post Have Fun Polarizing Your Images with Poladroid For Windows appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Karl recently showed you WhatFontIs which could help you but I’m going to show you another way to discover the font you want, and perhaps even get a copy of it, using WhatTheFont.

There’s a problem using unusual fonts ““ as fonts – on webpages. Simply put, if the webpage uses a font that you don’t have, then you won’t be able to see the page as it is intended. The simplest solution to this problem is the one that is used most. Don’t actually use the font.

Instead, use a graphic image that looks identical. As webpages get more and more complex, this solution is more and more important. MakeUseOf uses this method all the time. Many of our screenshots represent fonts that you almost certainly don’t have installed on your system.

But now and then you need something more. You really like the font you see on a page, and you would like to to make use of it yourself to create the perfect webpage, or to use offline somewhere. To do that, you need to find out what font was used.

WhatTheFont lets you upload or link to the image containing the font, asks you some questions, and presents you with some candidate fonts for comparison.

So how effective is this? Depends. I’d say it’s a great tool to find a similar font. To be sure you have an identical font requires a better eye than I have.

Example 1 ““ The MakeUseOf logo

Let’s see what we can do with our own dogfood. First, make sure you have access to the image you want to use. Either the URL, or a local copy in a web format, such as .jpg or .png.

Visit the site then provide the address of the image:

Click the Continue button.

WhatTheFont needs to do some work now. If you’ve ever used any OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software you’ll be familiar with the idea. The images is composed of a set of small pixels. Fonts are instead sets of geometric models. Translation between these is the part that requires some effort.

The next page that appears is where you can help. WhatTheFont has made some guesses as to what some of the characters are that make up the logo.

In some cases, the guesses are not correct. For instance, se is tagged as being the letter m. You can easily fix these by changing the values in the boxes.

Some guesses are a little more complex though. The website cannot correctly recognise that this is one letter e, rather than two unknown characters.

These are also easy to fix though. Drag one of these images over the other and drop it. The page will be redrawn, and you can correctly tag the character.

When you have completed as many of these characters as you can, click Continue again.

WhatTheFont uses all of the supplied information and presents you with a set of fonts that best fit.

In this case, Futura SB-Bold Con seems a very close match. If you click on the font name you are forwarded to a more central part of the MyFonts site, and presented with information and samples specifically about that one font.

From here, the choices are yours. Look up more details, buy the font. Find free options. you can spend a lot of time in here.

Example 2 ““ Signage

Let’s try something a little harder from the real world.

You know how it works now, so let’s just hit the high points. First off”¦ it didn’t work. That is, until I cropped it down to just the text.

After that, things went more normally.

Turns out that there are some good matches.

Anyway, that should give you enough to get started. Enjoy yourself. If you need any more help with fonts, first give the rest of MyFonts a try. if that doesn’t do it for you, Identifont can help you out when the automatic options don’t work. And if you want to learn to identify fonts yourself, find out some more at FontTrainer.

How did it go for you? Let me know in the comments.

The post Find That Particular Font You Love With WhatTheFont appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The site asks you to supply an email address, and follow up with confirmation, and perhaps a login and password. It’s hard to avoid the process or any of the steps, but the part that really annoys me is the need to supply my email address to yet another unknown party.

But what if you could instead supply a temporary email address that was forwarded to your own? And then define either a maximum number of emails to forward, or a maximum period of time for which that would happen? This would stop you from receiving spam email to your regular email account. That’s what the website below do. And do it very nicely.

tempalias

tempalias is simple. I’m fond of simplicity. It’s functional, and effective. And it’s going to solve this problem for you.

A word of caution though. Remember that the whole reason you would go through this is that you don’t want to supply your email address to someone you might not trust. You need to be happy that tempalias is a safe place to hand over that address. I’m relaxed about it, but you should always make your own decisions on security, and not just take my word. tempalias has more so say about the subject.

Remember also that if it turns out that you want to have an ongoing relationship with the website then you will need to return and sign up with your real email address. tempalias has commitment issues, and won’t phone you back the next day, or at least not the next month.

Setting up an alias is easy.

Go to the tempalias site, and supply your real email address.

Then add either:

• A number of days for which you want the alias to be valid
• A number of emails which you want to be successfully forwarded

In this case, I’ve said I don’t want more than three emails to be sent to me. After that, forget it.

Click the Generate Alias button.

Now you just use the temporary email address instead of your own, for the website you need to get access to. In this case “˜0bcpd@tempalias.com’, but of course yours will be different.

Try it out. Send some emails to the supplied temporary address, and they will show up at your real email address. After the limit (either days or emails) expires, further emails will be rejected, and the sender, which will generally be a website, will be advised that the email address is not valid.

There are a few other providers with similar products. The details vary, and I should restate my caution from earlier. You need to be able to trust these people.

mint email

mint email operates a little differently. There is no forwarding involved. Instead, you create the temporary address at the site, and the emails arrive there as well.

mint email‘s addresses only last for three hours, so you need to complete all of the interaction smartly, or start again.

This stop you from receiving spam email and saves cluttering up your mailbox, but it also means you don’t have any sort of longer-term record of what has happened.

MakeMeTheKing

MakeMeTheKing is a similar proposition, but without the three hour timeframe.

There’s another fundamental difference too, and it’s best to understand it up front.

You can be the king if you want, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from sharing the role. Basically, if you choose an address which already exists, it will still work just fine. You’ll see all the existing emails, all the spam, potentially all the personal details from the last person who used it.

So firstly, choose something obscure, and secondly don’t use this service if the response emails might contain sensitive information. It’s easy though, and you can even add an RSS feed for the specific email address (pretty handy feature fore newsletter subscriptions I suppose).

Do you use any of these? Any others? Thoughts? Questions? Have you ever managed to accidentally make some of your private information public? Without using Facebook? Let me know in the comments below.

The post How To Protect Your Email and Still Subscribe To Everything appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I use a Windows Mobile smartphone, and this article is all about getting from one to the other as easily as possible.

We have talked about things associated with goodreads before. Bakari did a great comparison with LibraryThing and Shelfari, Simon discussed some stand-alone book recommendation engines along with library management, and Stefan built a list of the best book review sites. Most recently I gave you a deeper look at how to track your book collection in goodreads.

What Is Goodreads Good For?

Two things, in my opinion. First off, I can use it to find out what people who read the books that I like are also reading, along with checking up on what books my friends are consuming.

Secondly, and more relevant today, I use goodreads to compile and maintain a list of the books that I haven’t read yet, but would like to. Then I can use that as a shopping or borrowing list. I love libraries, but wandering aimlessly for interesting books is something I can seldom find the time for.

The Take Away

This is really what we are here for. How can I take my goodreads information with me? In my case, I need to export a list of books I want to borrow from the library, add that list to my phone, and take it with me.

Couldn’t I just browse to the goodreads site on the phone? Probably. But cellphone reception isn’t great in the library, and the regular goodreads interface does NOT work well on a phone. If you’re an iPhone or Blackberry user you might have more fun with the special goodreads mobile site, but it didn’t help me out much.

So, back to exporting the data. The chances of you wanting to follow the exact same process as me is slim, but there’s enough general information here to modify things to suit your needs.

Export From goodreads

We need to get the information out of goodreads in a format which is more accessible to other tools. That turns out to be easy.

Click the my books link at the top of the page.

At the bottom of the book list is a list of tools, including an import/export option. Click on that.

On the right, an option to export to a csv file.

You’ll be presented with a confirmation dialog. That’s probably a little over the top, as no changes are being made.

Nonetheless, boldly click OK.

Depending on your setup, your operating system, your browser, and quite likely the phase of the moon, you’ll see some sort of question about what you want to do with the file. Save it somewhere you can find it again, and move on.

Finding The Good Stuff

The only real problem with this process is that you now have a file that has a whole lot of books in it that you have already read, or have no desire to read. We need to filter out the gold, and we’re going to use Excel for that, though you could use any other tool that deals intelligently with CSV files.

Open the file in Excel and take a look.

The data is all there in a tabular fashion, but it’s pretty awful to look at. The first thing is to pare it back to the columns we are actually interested in. In my case, that’s:

• Title
• Author l-f
• Exclusive Shelf

Depending on the level of sophistication you want, you can use lots of other information, but all I need is an alphabetical list. So, delete the other columns first, resize the ones you have left, and then take another look.

Nearly there.

I still have books in the list that I have already read. Sort by the Exclusive Shelf column, and delete those ones.

Now, given that the fiction shelves in most libraries are sorted by author name, let’s match that by resorting the list. That way we can walk through the shelves with a lot less bother.

There’s our newly added book on row 37. You can delete the Exclusive Shelf column if you’ve filtered out the books you’ve read, and then all you need to do is to save the file to a format your phone/PDA can use, and sync the device. I’m pretty sure you know how to do that.

I have some more sophisticated Excel formulas that I use to do things like extract the series information from the title field (not quite sure why it doesn’t have its own column in the export) and to exclude the books that I have tagged as probably-won’t-bother, but you can build those sort of things in to suit your own needs.

So, how was that? Did I leave out anything that might be helpful? Do you have similar processes? Any recommendations? Questions? I’d really like to hear all about it in the comments below.

The post Take Your Goodreads Booklist With You on Windows Mobile appeared first on MakeUseOf.

We’ve talked about Goodreads on MakeUseOf before. It’s one of a list of virtual libraries in a post from Bakari, and one of the four great ways to keep track of an expanding book collection according to TJ. I want to dig a little deeper, because in my next post I want to show you how to get information out of Goodreads for other purposes.

To start, there’s a thoroughly familiar and free sign-up process. Done? Good. Log in, and we can take a look around.

There are essentially two common tasks you’re going to want to undertake in here. Let’s just work through them.

Add Books You Own Or Have Read

Depending on your needs, and likely your personality type, you may or may not want to trawl through your bookshelves at home and add all the books you already have. Or you might just want to start from where you are now. I’m a mixture. I have added books around the home, but increasingly now I’m reading some books electronically, so there is no evidence in the shelves. I add them anyway.

I have something of an interest in vampires and werewolves. I’ve been around long enough to remember the genre before it became trendy, but that’s another story.

How about we go through and add a vampire book?  Richard Matheson’s I am Legend for example.

First, you need to search for the book, click the button, and find it in the list returned.

As you can see, GoodReads has a comprehensive set of books. Fortunately for us we want the first one in the list.

Click the add to my books button, ignoring the other options for now, and you’ll land on a page where you can take some more comprehensive action.

Firstly, you can assign a rating. I’d give this a three”¦

Then you can complete the review and date sections if you wish.

Before we go further though, I’d like to talk about the shelves.

When you first start using Goodreads, the only shelves to put your books on are read, currently-reading and to-read, and these shelves are exclusive. That is, each book can only be on one shelf at any one time. You’re read it, you are reading it, or you plan to read it.

You can add more shelves, and they are not exclusive. That is, this book can be listed under both vampires and horror, if that is appropriate.

For now, click on read. Click close, and save. Does this ongoing lack of upper-case letters drive you nuts? Oh, it’s just me? Oh.

Locate the my books link at the top of the page, click that, and we can take a look as some of the options.

Down the left side of the page is a list of your books. If you’ve just started then the only book listed will be the one you just added. The books are totalled on the basis of the shelves they are on, and you can click on the shelf title to filter to just those books.

As you can see, I’m not very good at classifying my books. I’ll get there.

At the top of the list is an edit option for the shelves. If you want to do some heavy shelf construction this is the spot.

The main part of the page lists all your books, or the filtered list if you’ve clicked on one of the shelf titles.

You can edit the details for each book at any time.

Add Books You Haven’t Read

This should be easy, right?

I use Goodreads as my main way to track the books I need to buy or borrow, because without some help I’m prone to picking up a book and getting fifty pages in before realising that I’ve read it before. That’s just me too, right?

Goodreads does a great job of finding books that you might like to waste some time with, but in this case a good friend has told me that I need to read a book called The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which may or may not be good advice. It’s a story about Dracula, so the chances are good.

First, do a search, and find the book.

We are in luck again. The book we want is the first on the list. Click the add to my books button again.

In my case, I want to tag it as a book to read, and also tick the library shelf I created, so I know to look for it next time I’m cruising the real shelves in town.

On that subject, my next post is about how to take this booklist out of Goodreads and take it to the library with you. More on that soon. In the meantime, don’t you need to work your way through the living room shelves?

So, any questions? Thoughts on how else this might be used? Anyone have some cross-over interests, uses Goodreads, and would like to compare lists? Put it all in the comments below.

The post Track the Books You Have (and Want To) Read with Goodreads appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Windows doesn’t make that terribly easy, though. While you can get a decent view of the clutter in a single folder, expanding the view to cover more ground isn’t easy.

It’s not a new problem though, and there are plenty of tools around that will help you to visualize disk usage so that you can get organized.

We’ve covered some of these before. Karl reviewed a very geeky tool called Space Sniffer for Windows, Beth ran a giveaway of DaisyDisk for the Mac, and David talked us through using TreeSize, again for Windows. Damien even had a set of six option for Linux. I want to tell you about another Windows tool. A simple little application that can visualize disk usage called Scanner.

For a long time my favourite tool for finding more room on a drive has been Scanner, by Steffen Gerlach. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but it works just fine. Just download the .zip file, and run the scanner.exe that you will find inside it. No install needed, so you can also run it from a memory stick or external drive. You can use the other files in the folder to integrate Scanner with your right-click menu if you are so inclined.

When you start Scanner, the first thing it wants to do is to scan your whole PC and get a picture of what is stored where. It’s quite happy to scan external, removable and mapped drives.

Thankfully, you can stop that sometimes lengthy process by clicking on a specific drive icon on the left if you feel the need. Whether it’s scanning the machine or a specific drive, you’ll be presented with a complex sort of pie chart indicating what you’ve got. I’m a photographer, so my concern is usually with space for photos, which are mostly on my I: drive, so let’s take a look there.

First things first. The interface is a little”¦ well, peculiar. I like it, but it takes some getting used to. We can walk through how it works.

The chart itself shows what is stored in the drive. Indications are that it’s about 90% full, worse luck.

As you move the mouse around, the boxes in the top left of the display show the size and number of files for that location. Mouse over the central grey area, and you’ll see a number matching the large label, but as you move out from the centre, you’re working your way down the folder hierarchy.

In the example above, it’s showing that I:\_modified\7D (and all its subfolders) contain a total of 111GB spread over 7,109 files. That’s staggering, given that I’ve only had my EOS 7D camera for a few weeks.

If you click on the section of the chart rather than just mousing over it, the screen is redrawn to drill down to that folder.

I store my photos on the basis of the date they were taken, so mousing over one of the large folders shows that I have 36GB of images for 19 March. Hot air balloons. It’s tough to resist.

There are a couple of buttons in the interface to reverse your journey. The left-pointing arrow takes you back where you were (in this case to the root of the drive), and the arrow with an elbow takes you back up one level at a time.

You can use some of the tools in the interface to delete files and clean things up if you wish, but I much prefer to just use this tool to visualize disk usage, and then go back to Windows Explorer to commit the necessary crimes.

If you do hop out and undertake any housekeeping elsewhere, Scanner won’t know what you’ve done until it gets a chance to rescan. There’s a button for that, as well.

You might well find when you start Scanner that its default size is a little small on a modern monitor. And you’d be reasonable in thinking that you could drag the corner of the window to adjust the size. You would also be wrong. You need to use the small (+) and (-) buttons to resize instead.

It’s not the most comprehensive tool out there, even amongst the free options, but I like it a lot. After all, to a photographer, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

So if you tried it out, how did you like Scanner? Do you have a disk space tool of choice? Let me know in the comments below.

The post How to Visualize Disk Usage in Windows with Scanner appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I’m a Windows guy, so some of your options will certainly differ if you’re one of those Apple types. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Remove Duplicates from iTunes – Before we start

We’ve talked about iTunes before. A lot! Relating to this particular subject, David Pierce explained how to use TidySongs to manage iTunes, and more broadly, Jackson produced a great eBook to help with all your iTunes needs.

How did this happen?

If only I knew. It’s a combination of recopying files to the machine after the rebuild, using the wonderful SharePod to rebuild the library, and some peculiar choices in the iTunes options.

Never mind. That’s ancient history, and there are many paths to this place. Doubtless, you took a different one.

Things to check

There are two things you want to make sure of before proceeding to remove duplicates from iTunes, and one general word of warning.

First, the warning. Please, please ensure you have backups in place in case any of this goes wrong. You are going to delete files, and you want to be sure you can get them back if nothing else.

If you are allowing iTunes to manage your files, you can just copy the entire iTunes folder (and all the subfolders) somewhere else. If you are managing the files yourself, take a look and be sure where you stand. Missing tracks is much worse than duplicate tracks.

There are two different ways that you can end up with duplicate tracks listed in iTunes. We ware here to remove actual duplicates. But first you need to check if you have duplicate items listed, but they are actually the same files. You can do this by sorting the tracks in name order (click on the Name column header), then right clicking one of the duplicates, and choosing Get Info.

Click on the Summary tab, and take a look at the file path after the Where: and then click on the Previous and Next buttons and compare the duplicates. Make sure the file names are at least a little bit different, or deleting one will delete both. In my case I have an Africa.mp3 and an Africa(1).mp3, for example.

The other thing to watch for is that the tracks are not near-duplicates. You know the stuff. You have the studio version, the live one, the unplugged one from the Nineties, the extended dance remix”¦ be sure you really want to get rid of those. Oh, lose the dance one. Go on.

Search and Eliminate

You probably already know you have some, and sorting your library by Title will certainly make it more apparent. If you have a small library, perhaps that’s all the help you need. It’s not going to work for me. I’ll still be working on it next year.

The first level of assistance is to ask iTunes to show you the duplicates. That’s easy. With your library still sorted by Title, click on File | Display Duplicates. This was when I started to get concerned. That’s a LOT of duplicate tracks.

If you want to reduce the work here a little, you can also ask iTunes to take a little more care with the selection. By default it’s only going to check the titles, but if you click on the Show All button to put things back to normal, and then go back through the process but this time hold the Shift key down while you click on File then you’ll get a Display Exact Duplicates option. For me, this made no difference at all but your mileage will vary depending on how you got the duplicates in the first place.

After that, the process consists of deleting the one (or more if necessary) duplicate files that you don’t want.

Getting help with the heavy lifting

I investigated making use of third-party products to take the back-breaking repetition out of the process. Dupe Eliminator isn’t a free product, but the trial version will let you make use of the comprehensive duplicate selection criteria. Unfortunately, it won’t then remove all the duplicates automatically. I can understand that though, because why else would you purchase the full version? I moved on.

You Apple folk also have a whole stack of Apple Script options, but I can’t get near those.

My next option was a free piece of software called Duplicate Music File Finder. This one works outside iTunes, so there’s a need to clean up the resulting dead links afterwards. Hold your breath, start the app, point it at your music files, and let it check them out.

Just before we go further, a reminder. I’m trying to help, but the risk is yours. You need to have backed up all your music before you start.

Click the Check All button if you are happy that the duplicates have been selected, and then click on Delete Checked Files to actually remove them. Click Yes to confirm.

The application behaved for me exactly as expected, and all the duplicate files were moved to the Recycle Bin.

The last step in the process is to tell iTunes to take a look at itself, and remove any items in the library which no longer exist. Unfortunately there is no simple way in the iTunes interface to do this, so we need to cheat, just a little.

Apple has provided a script to do just this particular trick, and to make use of it you just need to do these things in order:

1. Close iTunes if you have it open
2. Go to the web page, right-click on it, and save the page as a file, making sure you change the extension to .js. So for instance, in Firefox, right-click on the page, choose Save page As”¦ and change the file name from RemoveDeadTracks.txt to RemoveDeadTracks.js.
3. Open Windows Explorer and browse to the file you just saved
4. Double-click on the file.

The script will open iTunes, and then start running through and removing dead links. In my case it took around ten minutes and correctly removed nearly two thousand links.

Give yourself a pat on the back.

I’d love to know how you go, whether you have found any more comprehensive tools, or if you can fathom how I got in this mess. In the comments, please.

The post How to Easily Remove Duplicate Tracks on iTunes [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

As a follow-up to my introductory summary post on the product, and a more recent post on tables, this Microsoft Access tutorial is the ideal next step in your journey with Access. Get ready to ask questions.

Preparation

We created two tables in the previous post. You’ll need to either do that for yourself again, open the one you saved last time, or follow along with a similar example of your own.

In any case, you need a table that looks a little like this”¦

Close the table, and we can start with the queries.

A Microsoft Access Tutorial – Query Basics

Queries are the second structure in Access. Tables hold the information, queries contain stored questions. Let’s create one. It’s much easier that way.

Click the Create tab, and then the Query Design button at the right hand end.

If you ever need help in building a query, you can also use the Query Wizard. But for now, we’ll take the direct route.

Access asks you which tables you want to ask questions about. First off, let’s just take a look at the Book table. We can add the Author table later.

The real power in Access is the ability to easily deal with multiple tables at once, but one step at a time.

Click on Book, and click the Add button. The window stays open, so click the Close button.

Access presents you with the query design page.

You can make some adjustments to the way the layout looks by dragging the central divider up or down, and there are shortcuts at the bottom right, in the status bar, that let you change the type of view you are using. More about those later.

The upper portion of the screen contains all of the included tables, with a list of the fields. The lower portion is where the questions are asked.

First, you need to choose which of the fields in the table you want to either ask questions about, or wish to include in the answer. To choose, double-click the field, or drag it to the grid below.

For our example we want to choose Author, Title & Rating.

Once you have the fields in the grid, there are a lot of choices to make. They work line by line.

We have already chosen the fields, and the tables are added automatically. The next thing is the sort. To sort the books by rating for instance, click in the sort box for that column, and change the setting to Ascending or Descending.

You can sort by multiple columns. The priority is from left to right, so if you wanted to sort by Rating and then Title, you would need to rearrange the columns. You can just select by the grey bar at the top and drag them around.

The Criteria row is a little more complex, but it’s very easy to use once you get used to it. Criteria are specifications for which records (rows) from the table to show. And for the technical types reading, these are generally what is known as AND criteria. That is, all of the criteria need to be met. If instead you wish to use OR critera (that means that any of the criteria can bet met) then put the criteria on different rows. You can use as many rows as you wish from the one labelled Criteria downwards.

In our case, we want to only see books where the Title starts with “˜S’, and the rating is better than 2. The “˜S’ criteria also includes what is known as a wild card. That is, the title needs to start the letter S, but anything at all is permitted after that.

Numeric criteria are allowed to be defined as limits, rather than specific values, so in the case we can use the “˜>’ operator.

We could spend the whole day talking about criteria and wildcards, but let’s move on.

Now that the we have defined the question we wish to ask, we can pose it to Access, and view the answer. Click the View button in the ribbon or the datasheet view button in the status bar. You can flick back and forth between design and datasheet to make further changes to the query.

It’s important to note that as a general rule, the datasheet view from a query is live. That is, if you make changes to the query results then you make changes to the table data.

Finally, you can save the query for later. There is some confusion with this at times. Saving the query saves the question, not the answer. So that means that next time you run the query, if the data in the table has changed, then the answer might also change. There some other options to grab a snapshot of the data later on if necessary.

Click the Save button in the quick toolbar at the top left of the Access window. Remember that queries are saved along with the tables inside the one Access file on your hard drive.

You often need to connect tables together in queries. For instance in this case, we could add the Author table so that we can make use of the information in it for sorting or further criteria.

As it happens, the lookup that we set up for the Author table means that we already have access to the Author’s last name, but let’s just pretend we wanted to sort the output by the author’s first name instead. After all, these guys (or at least the few who are still alive) are friendly enough. Let’s call them Isaac and Robert, right? Oh, hold on. Those two are dead.

To make this work, add the Author table to the query.

While in Design View, click the Show Table button and add the Author table to the grid.

Because of the lookup that was set up, Access already knows how the tables are related, so you don’t need to worry about that. Drag the First Name field down into the criteria block, then drag it off to the left so you can sort it as a priority.

Click the Datasheet View button to see the difference.

A Microsoft Access Tutorial on Query types

The query we just built, the default type in Access, is called a Select query. It’s essentially a view of the answer to a question. The other types do a number of specific things that might be useful later. I won’t go into too much detail here, but some pointers might help.

Most of these other queries are what is known as Action queries. That is because they actually change data in tables. No changes are made until you click the Run button (the Datasheet view only previews the results) and you will be warned that changes are about to be made.

Update

An update query is used to make changes to the table data in one hit, rather than dealing with the records one by one. For instance, perhaps an author might change his name, or admit to having written a stack of books under a nom-de-plume. An update query would let you select the appropriate records and then change them all at once.

Make Table

A Make Table query works the same way as an Update, but puts the results in a new table. This might be useful where for some reason you need to maintain both sets of data separately.

Append

An Append query lets you select records from one table and add them to the end of another. The most common use for this is for archiving records from a main table to a secondary one.

Delete

A Delete query is extremely useful, but care needs to be taken with using it. This query lets you select some records from a table, and then delete them.

Other

The other types of query (Union, Cross-tab, Pass-through and Data Definition) are for advanced use, and I won’t cover these here.

That’s it for now, until I’m back with a post on Access Forms.

Let me know how it goes with queries, and whether there are any difficulties I can help with in the comments.

The post A Quick Tutorial On Queries In Microsoft Access 2007 appeared first on MakeUseOf.

It’s important to work these things through, and to find the combination of features and price that work for you. And I’ve got some great places to start.

Firstly though, a general rule. Don’t trust anyone who is trying to sell you something. I’ve had more than one example of the sales process getting in the way of the facts. And that’s where the web comes in. Although it’s difficult to trust any one source, you can cross-check easily and comprehensively. Don’t buy a lemon just because you didn’t do the homework.

Get The Low-Down

I’ll use my purchase as an example. I’m a Canon guy, but it’s not a religion. Replacing my 30D with a new model was a matter of weighing up what I did and didn’t want, and what I was and was not prepared to pay for it.

A great place to do this is Digital Photography Review (DPreview). I’ve talked about this before, but it’s always the first place I look. In this case, you can find the camera specifications, a full review, and numerous user forum entries talking about the camera. You can also often get comparisons with similar cameras.

DPreview also provides links to sites that will sell you the camera. They may or may not be useful to you. I like to buy cameras in New Zealand if I can, so I just use those links as helpful pointers for pricing.

Other great places for advice and reviews are Steve’s digicams, and the camera review section of CNet.

Tech Specs

Inevitably, unless your camera choice is rather retro, you’re going to need to check out some technical specifications. Dpreview will tell you exactly what is in the camera, but they won’t explain what it all means.

If you need explanations about some of the technology in your biggest purchase of the year, there is nowhere better than Wikipedia to go. It’s dangerous as well though, for two reasons.

First, everything is linked to everything else, and you can forget all about why you went there in the first place. Secondly, it’s not always the most authoritative place around, but most of the disagreements relate to things other than established technical standards, so you should be on safe ground.

For instance, in my case I was going to need to upgrade memory cards. My old and valued EOS 30D used the same broad range of Compact Flash (CF) cards, but my 4GB cards weren’t going to be much use with a camera that creates 30MB RAW images.

DPreview and a number of other sources mentioned about how the 7D supports UDMA, and Wikipedia was able to provide enough information to tell me that it didn’t really matter a whole lot unless I was planning on serious sports photography or HD video. I was born without a sports gene, so it’s less than likely, and I could cross that off my must-have list.

Turns out, by the way, that some 133X CF cards would do the trick, so I now have a Kingston 16GB one, along with a 32GB. Early days yet, but they seem to be great!

Real People

It turns out that, so long as the camera you are considering isn’t really new, some of the best advice comes from people who use them. So make use of the community.

You know how fond I am of Flickr, and they certainly have the weight of numbers, but they don’t tend to be the most technical of photographers. There are some exceptions though, and Flickr seems to have a group for everything.

In this case, there’s a group specifically for the EOS 7D. In fact there are over 50 groups specifically for this camera. The biggest one has over a thousand members at last count.

There’s a significantly higher geek quotient to be had at Photo.net, and they have forums for everything.

For instance, there’s a Canon EOS forum that deals with a whole range of Canon SLRs, and huge numbers of helpful people are actively involved in there.

All of these places are filled with people who have opinions. Some are researched, balanced and helpful. Others are seriously biased and illogical. It’s best to take it all with a degree of cynicism, and to check up on anything that sounds suspicious.

Bonus

I know I said three places, but I wanted to add a little friendly advice. Something to take on your journey.

Please don’t research and purchase a camera online without actually touching an example of the model you want to buy. You can confirm as many tech features as you like, but if it turns out that the viewfinder irritates your eye, or the screen flickers, or it’s just too damn heavy for your little hands, you’d be much better to find that out before the purchase is being drip-fed from your hard-earned income.

If you are purchasing something which you might need some help with later, it could be well worth it to buy the camera from an actual store. Somewhere that they know what they are doing, and can offer good advice. You know. The place where you touched the camera.

That’s it. Oh, the 7D? It’s amazing.

Have you purchased any camera gear lately? Have any horror stories or advice? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The post Three Places To Get Excellent Advice About A New Camera appeared first on MakeUseOf.

This is the place to get the cure. I’m going to provide a Microsoft Access tutorial on how to create and use tables. I’ll be following that up with posts on queries, forms, reports and automation.

We need to make some assumptions in order for this to be short enough to fit in a single post. First off, you already know how to use a spreadsheet. probably Excel, but it really doesn’t matter. Secondly, you can relax a little even if you have a different version of Access. You might need to hunt around for a few things, but mostly it’s all the same.

Just to get the ball rolling, take a look at this spreadsheet.

That’s a pretty typical list of items in Excel. Imagine for a moment that this list had a few thousand rows instead of just the ones you can view here, and you might see that this isn’t necessarily the most practical way to deal with this sort of data.

Hopefully you’ll have some data of your own that you can experiment with. A practical example is always easier.

In Access, this same information would be stored in tables, but before we can do that, we need to make sure that things are thoroughly consistent. That’s one of the things about databases. It’s much harder to deal with inconsistencies than it is in a spreadsheet.

There are a couple of examples of things in here that you would need to fix. For starters, you really ought to read some of these books, but that won’t help. Every column in Access needs to be consistent. You can’t start putting dates, like we have here in the Finished column, and then put the word “˜Never’ in one of the cells. Same problem with the “˜x’ in the Rating column. Fix it first. Note that in most cases having the cells blank is just fine.

Okay, let’s start Access, and start making decisions. Two specific things before you can get started with tables.

First, choose to create a blank database rather than using any of the pre-built templates. Come back and check those out later for more examples.

Secondly, you need to choose a name for your Access project at the beginning. You can’t go ahead and do things like you can with the other Office products.

So click on Blank Database, give the file a name, and click on Create.

Access tries to help out as much as possible by creating a default table, and setting it up ready to use. In our case though, we don’t want to do that. We want to design the table properly.

The best way to get there is to click on the X at the top right to close the table, click the Create tab in the ribbon, and then click on Table Design. If you get lost, close Access down without saving anything, and then try again.

Here’s the thing to remember. You need to know what you want to do first, design the table to do that, and then add the data. It’s cumbersome to change your mind afterwards.

Our main job here is to decide on the fields we want to store in the table, and what sorts of information we want to store in each one. If you’re using my example, fill things out so they look like this.

Before we can move on from here, there’s one thing that can be a little complex, but you need to understand. Access is a relational database. The relational part means that you can deal with multiple tables at once, and the relationships between them.

One of the aims of relational databases is to minimise both repetition and wasted space. I’m not going to go into the theory, but this is called normalisation. There are many other places to research the topic. I’m just going to be practical and show you an example.

Notice that each of the classic sci-fi authors is mentioned a number of times in the spreadsheet. To achieve the same thing in Access, we create another table especially for the authors, and then relate the new table. That way each author only exists once, and the opportunity for errors is greatly reduced.

For the moment, accept my request that you create the author field as a Number.

Save the table. The quickest way is to click on the Save button in the toolbar. That might not be the easiest thing to find.

You’ll be asked for a name for the table. Book might be a simple option. Another note. The table names are not file names. They are just components in the database called Classic Sci-fi. Think of multiple sheets in an Excel workbook.

But”¦ before Access will let you save the table, there’s another thing you need to do. Just take my word for this one. In almost every case, a table in Access needs to have a field somewhere in it that is guaranteed to have a different value on every row. I mean every row, so you couldn’t make use of the Pages field for instance, because eventually you’d be bound to end up with two books with the same number of pages. The easiest way to do this is to add another field just for the job. That’s normally referred to as the ID field.

So, click Yes on the crazy dialog box which is too wide to show effectively in the post”¦

“¦.and a new field is added to the table. The field type is Autonumber, which means that a new value is automatically added for each row that you add to the table. Don’t worry about it. It just happens.

Now go ahead and save the table again, and close it. When you’ve done that, run through the process again to create an Author table that looks like this. Same deal with the ID field. Just let it be created.

Before we can start using the tables, we need to relate them to each other.

Click on the Database Tools tab, and then click the Relationships button.

Add both of the tables using the Show Tables dialog.

Close the dialog when you’ve finished, and take a break for a moment. Let me explain.

Tables in Access generally relate in special ways. The most common of these is what is called a many to one relationship.

In our case, for each author there can be many books. To create this relationship, click on ID in the Author table, and drag it to the Author field in the Book table.

Access asks you for some details for the relationship. The only change you need to make is to tick the Enforce Referential Integrity box. Then click on Create.

Close the relationships window, and save the changes.

Another thing that helps make it easier to use the Book table. What actually gets saved in the Author field is the ID of the author from the Author table, but that’s a bit difficult to make use of, because you’d have to go and look up the other table to check on the correct value. So we’re going to set things up so that it looks up the author name all by itself.

Sensibly enough, this is called a lookup.

First, open the Author table and add some information.

Open the Book table again by double-clicking on its name. Click the Design button. Click on the Author field, and then on the Lookup tab down below the field list.

Fill out the fields as noted. You’re going to need a more in-depth tutorial to explore the reasons for the settings, but this will suffice for now.

Close the table, save it, and reopen it in the Datasheet view again.

Move to the Author field, and you’ll see a combo box appear. Click the arrow, and you’ll see a list of authors. Click the correct one, and move on. Go ahead and fill out the rest of the records.

And that’s it. You’ve successfully replicated the spreadsheet you had at the start, and now you can use it to build queries, forms and reports which are much more comprehensive than anything Excel can manage.

More on that in the next few posts.

So, how did it go? Let me know how much fun you had with this Microsoft Access tutorial. Oh, and have you read any of the books?  Let me know in the comments.

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