New Year!
Posted: January 1st, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Life | No Comments »Well its that time, 2008 has gone and 2009 has rolled in!
What a year, I’ve had: great GCSE results, moved to a new house and moved on to a Sixth Form which I absolutely love, along with a great holiday and lots of laughs along the way.
So now your probably asking whats my New Years Resoloution? Well…
I’ve been thinking (shocking I know), and i’m not really one for making or keeping these resolutions so lets start simple:
Resolution 1.
To improve my photography, I’ve joined the 52 weeks group on flickr and i’m going to try and take and upload a new photo every week! – and if you haven’t seen my portfolio please feel free to visit: http://www.sampbarsgallery.com or http:/flickr.com/sampbar
Resolution 2.
Well as you know i’m not a regular blog updater so how about… making a blog post a week and at least one useful tutorial/guide/hints per a month, whether they be photography, linux or financially related.
Resolution 3.
And finally, Cycling! I really enjoy it, but trying to cram it in with work and other hobbies is a bit of a struggle so this is my third and final resolution: Make more time for activities!
Thats it for this post, I’d like to take this time to Thank You for your support throughout this year and I do hope you continue to Read and Comment my blog throughout this New Year of 2009!
Kitting your new system out!
Posted: September 13th, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Technology | No Comments »
So you’ve got your brand new PC home (a new Medion Akoya Mini in my case), unpacked it and gone through the tedious setup process. Now what?
Oh Yeah! there’s that thing called software!
There is now so much good quality open source and free software on the web that there is absolutely no reason to buy commercial equivalents. So where do you find all this stuff?
Well there are three very good websites you can visit depending on what operating system you are using:
No.1 Microsoft Windows (Vista, XP, 2000, 98, 95)
Unfortunately this is probably going to be what most of you use -
http://www.opensourcewindows.org
No.2 Mac OS
This is going to be the second most likely operating system -
http://www.opensourcemac.org
No.3 Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva etc.)
http://www.opensourcelinux.org
I happen to use all three operating systems so I try to keep the same software on each for familiarity.
Two other pieces of open source software you may be interested in which aren’t mentioned on those sites are:
Songbird (Media Player)
It’s still in beta but is very stable on all systems.
http://www.getsongbird.com
IBM Lotus Symphony (Office Suite)
It’s a lot more polished than Open Office!
http://symphony.lotus.com
I hope this helps some people out, if anybody has any more suggestions for things I missed please feel free to email me at: samuelbarrett@sampbar.com