Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Blurb

Published on May 18, 2009 in Life and Photos. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

(Note: I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. Now, finally getting around to posting…!)

There is a huge difference between sticking photos into a photo album and the amazing service offered by Blurb.com

I originally found the site through Flickr.com – they have links to various printing companies and Blurb was one so I decided to check it out.

The process involved couldn’t have been simpler – the final product, couldn’t be better.

To start, download the “BookSmart” software, which is currently only available for Windows XP/Vista & Mac OS. I will forgive them for not offering a Linux version of the software.. But ideally this should be sorted sooner rather than later.

The BookSmart software is used to build a photobook from scratch, allowing you arrange photos and text in a number of pre-defined templates. It’s very customisable but I kept it simple for my first book.

booksmart_frontpage

I chose the best photos from my trip to Toronto and New York and compiled them into a 40 page book. The result is like I said before amazing, it’s a professional quality book. I got 4 printed and gave them to the guys we went on the trip with for their birthdays, the ultimate in personalised and unique gifts I’d say.

There are five different sizes of book you can create and an option is given for soft back or hard back and the inclusion of a dust jacket etc. Pricing of the books is done on how many pages the book will contain, starting from as little as £10.

You can view my final product or at least the first few pages of it at http://www.blurb.com/books/366876

The only real let down for me was the ink used is pretty dark, when I do my next book I’ll try to adjust the photos and make them a little bit lighter to compensate. Obviously the higher quality photos you use the better quality the final prints are and as such it takes absolutely ages to get the thing uploaded to their servers once you’ve finished the layout. Having said that, I used some photos taken on my old Nokia 6680 which is only 1.3MP and they came out alright – the images taking up the entire page though were 7.1MP from Kat’s Pentax Optio M30

It does say to get 1 book printed first on it’s own if you’re going to do a bulk order – so you can check how it looks. I opted not to and just went for it… then found when I received them through the post that I’d used one photo twice. Oops.. But luckily hardly anyone notices! It’d suck if you got 20 printed and they all had a typo on though. So make sure you double triple check it before you upload…

Happy book making!

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Do you know a “Google Surfer”?

Published on May 12, 2009 in Internet, Life and Rants. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .
Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Have you ever seen someone who, instead of putting a web address into their browser address bar as you’d expect, chooses to put the address into Google and do a search on it, then click the first link?? People who do this bizarre series of actions to view a website I now call “Google Surfers”.

A chap phoned me at work the other day to ask where all his websites had gone… I didn’t really get what he meant so I got his screen up and asked him to show me and he proceeded to type “www.” into the Google search box which, with Google Suggest being turned on immediately starting suggesting results such as www.facebook.com www.bbc.co.uk etc. and the chap said he’d never even been on Facebook before! It turned out what he was after was his auto-complete history because that’s how he browses the net.

And it’s wrong in so many ways. Why not press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which would accomplish the same as clicking Search then clicking the first result? Why not actually type a web address into the address bar in the first place!? Why not bookmark frequently visited pages so you don’t even have to type anything in at all?!? What if the first result on the URL searched for isn’t the site they’re after by some random occurrence on Google which could happen? The mind boggles.

What’s gone wrong in the way people are taught to use the Internet which makes them think that’s the way everyone does it?

Mobbler

Published on May 10, 2009 in Music and Nokia. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Mobbler is god’s gift to users of Last.fm and Symbian S60 devices.

Only a short while ago it was just an app which sat in the background and collected tracks played on the built-in Music Player of Symbian phones like my Nokia N95 8gb. It would queue up and scrobble the tracks to your Last.fm profile when you told it to. Even then, it was much better than other Last.fm scrobbling apps for Symbian becaMobbler V.3use they all worked off their own players but personally, I don’t find anything wrong with the default Nokia player. So I was chuffed to find an app which would scrobble tracks I listened to on my phone. Useful, pretty cool but not worth writing home about… Till now.

After being offline for a while last month I was pleased to see news there’d be a few updates to Mobbler, currently at version 0.4.5 – always preferring to be up to date (even when it lands me in the shit, but that’s another story!) I installed the new version to find it now does so much more.

You can see data from your account on the phone such as your shoutbox, friends, playlists etc, you can listen to any Last.fm radio station you want (but I wouldn’t listen unless it’s on a wifi connection..) and it’s got a sleep timer which switches itself to offline mode after a set amount of time. For example, I usually put the “sleep” tag radio station on for half an hour when I go to bed.

So if you’ve got a Symbian S60 device and a Last.fm account – definitely check this out, have a play with it and see what you think. Top marks from me though.