TCP/IP Part 5

This is the final installment in my series of blog posts on TCP/IP which are based on what I learn doing an Infinite Skills training video. In this blog post I am mostly looking at wireless networking with a little on IPV4 & IPV6. There is a program called H Ping that is a good packet creator software. There is a type of network attack called a Fraggle attack and is similar to a smurf attack except the former uses UDP where as the latter uses TCP. Both types try to flood the server on a large network with loads of data from every client computer. Both types of attack are very rare nowadays because network hardware has advanced to a point where they are well prepared for it. 802.11 is the protocol for wireless networking which comes in versions, a, b, g, n & ad. Funnily enough b is the slowest and if you broadcast on 5 GHz and not 2.4 GHz you are less likely to find a signal clash with other devices. inSSiDer 2 is a windows program that lets you set up a wireless connection easily. Generally any wireless device will scan for available networks when you set it up and let you choose one. WPA is better than WEP for encrypting documents to send by wireless and there is a WPA 2 which is better still. If you send unencrypted messages anyone with a wireless receiver can read them. WPA & WPA 2 use a shared key for the messages to be read going both ways. A network should always be password and the users having their own passwords. IPV6 uses 8 groups of hexadecimal numbers and is far superior to it's parent IPV4. IPV4 is in danger of not supporting enough computers as each has to be individually numbered and it only reaches around 4 billion. IPV6 is highly unlikely to ever reach its limits which is a huge number. IPV4 uses multi-casting to send the same message to several recipients. IPV6 does it with in the program. It also lets you send much bigger amounts of data although this is limited by your broadband connection.

TCP/IP Part 4

This the latest installment in my series of blog posts on TCP/IP and based on what I learnt from a video course by Infinite Skills. SMTP which stands for simple mail transfer protocol & POP 3 which stands for post office protocol are the 2 main protocols used with e-mail. If you do a capture in wireshark you will often see SMB or sender message block. These transfer text and convey file information and are very common on most computers. Website addresses are normally conveyed in HTTP or DNS, both of which convert the URL into something the computer can understand. There is also something called TLS which the part of the website address that is something like .com or .net. Most countries have there own add on bits to the website address similar to .com. TCP/IP is a very old protocol developed for use on the Arpanet etc and probably because the military developed it, it's very resilient and still in use despite many changes. TCP/IP is very much the most used protocol on networks and individual computers. I remember if you had to install a modem on a NT4 operating system you had to install TCP/IP on the system before.

Public Relations

I am reviewing the book Brilliant P R which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. P R stands for public relations & I probably know quite a lot about this topic so didn't find that much new information. The book is only around 150 pages although the information is quite succinct. This book is part of the brilliant series which covers all the essential business skills. The book does advise that you develop relationships with journalists but don't expect them to publish a weak story about your product as a favor. At the end of the day there goal is to sell papers or magazines. Also unless you are a multinational giant of a company you will probably have to settle for coverage in local press and radio. You should obviously market your product on social media & there is an interesting example of P R at work. A couple in Britain fed up with the X Factor winner each year claiming the Christmas no 1 spot each year launched a campaign to get a single by Rage Against The Machine to the top spot instead. The campaign was mostly run on Facebook and did indeed get Rage Against The Machine to no 1. It's a good idea to have a blog separate from the business website that can have a link to the latter. Another trend is having several micro-sites which direct people to the main site. This can be combined with buying domain names similar to yours and if someone types one of these they are taken to your home page. Also focus on getting good quality links to your website and get satisfied customers to give you testimonials and bear in mind too many testimonials on a website actually puts people off ordering. Just display a few. A final item is if you are promoting a company you need to know that company inside out especially if you advertise on social media where you may have to deal with unhappy customers. I did quite enjoy reading this book. 

TCP/IP Part 3

This is another installment in my series of blog posts on TCP/IP based on the Infinite Skills course I have been studying. Last time I did look at ICMP and there is something called ICMP attacks. One method is to flood a server with large files coming from lots of remote hosts and of course you put some kind of virus on these hosts and hijack their connection. Another kind of attack called smurfing is to send a message to every host on a large network and getting them to flood the server with data. Most networks nowadays have hardware that can deal with these kinds of attacks so they are very rare but at one time they were quite common. In sending a message over a network there is something called a 3 way handshake. With this the sending host sends a synchronize request then the receiving host sends an acknowledge request then the sending host sends a get request followed by the data. There is an option particularly on wireless networks as to whether you want the file fragmented and you should select yes unless there is a very good reason not to because more often than not if the file exceeds a certain size it won't get sent and will be returned to the sender. There are thousands of ports on a computer and these are channels not actual ports and it is often a good idea to at least close certain ones of these and monitor which ones your computer is using as viruses can gain access to your computer or network via these. There is a UDP or user datagram protocol which is relatively high speed and is useful if the sequence something is sent in is unimportant. DNS is domain name server and refers to the internet address of a server on a network. HTTP or hypertext transfer protocol is also very similar. The session layer in the OSI model as well as other things replaces lost data if it's retrievable if it's lost in transit on a network. Encryption is also on this layer. Checksum checks a file for its size both before and after it's sent on a network and gives an error message if both aren't the same size. The RTS protocol is used to stream video and audio. If something is encrypted and sent on a network the sending host will normally send an SSL or secure socket layer and the receiving host will reply with a TLS or transport layer security signal.

TCP/IP Part 2

This is the next blog post in my series on TCP/IP based on the Infinite Skills course. First of all I'm looking at IP addresses. These are numbered in 4 groups from 0 to 255 and can be made up in 7 digits. Computers count in binary where 1 indicates a circuit in on and 0 off. Networks are numbered according to these numbers and the series

255.255.255.0 indicates a subnet which is where a network is subdivided. There is also regions of these numbers for things like broadcasts and multicasts and the further to the left the number is divided generally the bigger the network. There are also various protocols some of which I'm going to look at. ICMP is information control management protocol. It gives generally diagnostic information about a host. DHCP is dynamic host control protocol and is a non-static numbering system for hosts on a network as opposed to the static numbering of boot protocol. ARP is address resolution protocol and is when a sending host tries to find a recieving host and out several digits which are answering similarly. You do see ARP spoofing because there is no authenticode as such any host can send any ARP signal with the right software like Kane And Able which is a software program that will do the job. OSPF is open shortest path first and is a protocol that sends information about where a receiving host is and the shortest route that can be used with the least number of hops between routers. BGP is border gateway protocol and is the location of the receiving host sent to the sending host and also there are keep alive to show both hosts are still active during message transmission. I'll be doing another installment tomorrow.

Landing Page Optimization

The book I read to research this post was Landing Page Optimization For Dummies by Martin & Michael Harwood which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

A landing page is normally the home page on a website and is the page someone arrives on when they visit your site. Landing page optimization is the science of keeping someone on your site and if you have e-commerce getting them to place an order. When someone arrives on a website they will normally decide in just 4 seconds if your site is worth visiting. One thing you should also consider is 15% of users in America although that data is from a bit of a while back still use dial up networking so your site needs to load up fairly easily or they will move on. If someone is right handed they will normally look at the top left corner of a page then their eyes will move horizontally then vertically & it's the opposite corner if they are left handed. This area is known to web designers as the golden triangle and you probably want something that grabs their interest in this region. A banner advertising someone else is not a good idea. I must admit I try and avoid photos, flash movies etc on my sites to speed up the download time. If you do decide you want photos try www.istockphoto.com & www.bigstockphoto.com which both offer royaly free images for you to use. Of course you may have to mention where you got the photo on your site. There is also color co-ordination and the most common practice is to use primary and secondary colours and a color that is a combination of two colors but only certain colors will do. There is an online color tester tool at www.colorblender.com. There is also an online palette of suitable colors at www.kolor.com. You might also be interested to know there is a website at www.archive.org where you can enter a URL and a date and they will show you an earlier version of that site from that date. It's interesting to see how fashions for sites have changed. If you are selling stuff you need to state prominently your sales policies along with any guarantees. Don't forget most people use a screen resolution of 1024x768 or 1200x1600 which means important has to show within the viewable area often called a fold by web designers. You also need easily accessible order information and probably a paypal merchant account to process payments. Paypal is the most common although there are others. I really enjoyed reading this book which I'm sure you can see is loaded with information.

Web Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Web Marketing For Dummies 2nd edition which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

This book looks at the various ways you can promote your business and business website and seems more aimed at smaller companies. One thing you have to work out in business is first the demographics of your typical customers so you know how to tailor your advertising and then how much does the average customer spend both each time they buy and over their lifetime. This is important because one of the ways you can grow your company is through pay per click ads and these have different search terms auctioned off to the highest bidder usually. There is Google Adsense and Adwords but also other companies who might not provide as much business but are often cheaper.You should also look at your website and if you are starting out and getting a website built don't underestimate the cost and the variety of professionals you will probably have to hire to get it built. Consider this the average person spends 4 seconds before he decides whether or not he is staying on that site or not. You have to make sure your website catches his attention in just that 4 seconds. This is called landing page optimization. Another idea is looking at award winning websites to see what they do right and then copying them. Two websites that feature these kinds of sites are http://webbyawards.com & http://webawards.org. You can also promote your site often for free. Two sites that offer this and have free options are http://copromote.com & http://prfree.com. You might also try promoting on social media and one of the more minor sites mentioned is http://yub.com & also there is a social networks directory at http://linknrank.com. In promoting your business you need to be creative and minimize spending or at least don't spend what you can't afford. Request testimonials from customers and have Facebook and Twitter like buttons on your website. You should have a blog separate to your website and can usually get a free one which you can link to your website. Request satisfied customer's email addresses and send out a newsletter and don't forget by law there must be an opt out option on the email newsletter for people to unsubscribe. I am sure you can see this is a really good book and I have only covered a tiny fraction of what is in it. 

TCP/IP Part 1

This is a new series of blog posts on TCP/IP which is transmission control protocol internet protocol and is based on the Learning TCP/IP course by Infinite Skills which I am doing. I will be doing a post on a daily basis. TCP/IP is a suite of internet protocols which are basically rules for how computers and their networks communicate over the internet. There are other protocols as well as TCP/IP such as IPX & Appletalk but TCP/IP is the most widely used. The origins of the internet started with the ARPANET the basic backbone of which was constructed in 1967 and was a network for the Department Of Defense in America and was built in a decentralized way to survive a nuclear attack. There were other networks built soon after and around that time in particular networks for universities and scientists to communicate with one another. Initially there was TCP which was a protocol for networks and the IP part came later. This course looks quite a bit at wireshark which is a wireless packet capture and analysis program. It's free to download and contains a filter to look at certain packets of a particular type. The filter box goes red to show it's incomplete and turns green when you enter a complete search. You can right click on a packet and choose an option to search for packets of the same type. In the filter box you enter the equals sign twice to specify a search criteria because there is always the chance the equals sign might be part of the search criteria. You can search for a type of transmission like tcp or ip and ip would cover just about every transmission type so would be useless. There is something called the OSI model which consists of 7 modules which are Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation & Application. These modules are called layers and the lowest layer is Physical and the one data from the internet initially comes through & the highest layer is Application which works directly at a software level including your web browser. Data goes from one layer to the next all the way up and down this model. Different types of protocol work with different layers ie HTTP works with Application & TCP works with Transport. There are discrepancies about which protocols work with Session which isn't an exact layer. There is also a TCP model which works similar to the OSI model although the top and bottom module incorporate several layers from the TCP model. 

Surface 2

The book I read to research this post was My Surface 2 - 2nd edition which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

There haven't been many books written on the Microsoft Surface 2 the new tablet from Microsoft that uses Windows 8.1 and the hardware is a considerable upgrade from the original version. If you have the original Surface you can upgrade the version of windows on your tablet in the form of a free download. The Surface 2 still downloads updates on a regular basis and although occasionally you might need to restart to complete the download they are mostly done in the background and you are unaware of them. Unlike some tablets the Surface 2 isn't compatible with miracast a standard used by many HD televisions to project video from a tablet, without a 3rd party device. When you first turn it on it will normally want to connect to your wireless network and you can't connect from your computer to the tablet without special software for security reasons only the other way around. Windows 8.1 features start tiles which you normally press the screen to operate although you can also use the flat surface keyboard or proper keyboard which are available as extras. These tiles are called live tiles because they display information which is updated whenever you are connected to the internet. If you do what is known as pin a tile to the start menu it won't generally be a live tile so you won't see updates. If you go to

http://familysafety.microsoft.com  you can set up a service which will work with either a computer or surface 2 where you get a report of your childrens internet usage and can also ban them from using certain types of website and this integrates with Windows 8.1. You can download apps to work on your tablet many of which are free & on the side of the screen of your tablet are some commands that work with most apps called charms. You can download or stream video and music to your tablet. Note when you delete either music or video from your surface 2 you have to buy it again to put it back on. You can also download xbox games to your tablet. Microsoft also lets you integrate it with skydrive where you get I think it's 15 GB of free storage which you can use with your tablet or computer network and many people stream music from their account. You can buy a music pass with xbox live which gives you unlimited streamed music for $9.99 per month and you get 10 hours per month free anyway. Of course some pop stars remove their music from this streaming service so you have to watch that. 

Digital SLR Video And Film Making

The book I read to research this post was Digital SLR Video And Film Making For Dummies by John Carucci which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. SLR cameras have been around since the 40's when they revolutionized photography. Digital SLR's follow the same principles although they store photos digitally often on a media card which is printed out on a computer and printer. You can buy a digital SLR camera for a few hundred dollars and buying it with several lenses works out cheaply compared to the equivalent prosumer video camera. It doesn't cost the camera company much to add this capability to the camera and the results are so good even tv programmes like House are sometimes shot on a digital SLR. Most of these cameras shoot footage in full HD resolution although one drawback is the controls aren't very intuitive if you are a videographer. You also need a tripod & of course a program like Adobe Premiere Elements to do your video editing. Many people shoot video and put it on websites like vimeo & youtube. You can get free screenwriting software that includes templates at http://finaldraft.com & http://screenplay.com. I think this book is an enjoyable read & there is tutorials on Premiere Elements which is quite a capable program for most film makers. It's quite a long book and advises that you learn as much as possible about lighting and cinematography to become a really great film maker. Most tv programs like soap operas are often very similar shot and the great film makers knew how to use light to great effect which when you see their films they are very impressive. You should also watch the great movies and read books on the great movie makers to get ideas for your films. 

Freedom - Rebecca Ferguson

I am reviewing the album Freedom by Rebecca Ferguson which is a very good album. Rebecca was the runner up to Matt Cardle in the X Factor and has a great voice. She is very influenced by Arethra Franklin and this is her 2nd album. I haven't heard her 1st album and in the UK she is signed to Simon Cowell's Syco Records. She had previously auditioned for the X Factor but sites being nervous as the reason she got rejected. She is a qualified legal secretary although even in her childhood she wanted to be a pop star. She did audition in New York for a pop talent but got rejected from that. She was absolutely devastated because she spent lots of money going there. She was born in Liverpool in 1986 and was bullied as a child for being poor. She has had problems with her music management company and they are currently going to court to sort it out. This album has very much a soul and pop feel to it and I think is a little bit under rated. She has had a couple of songs featured in commercial adverts. I really enjoyed this album and think she is very talented. 

Computer Forensics D

This is the last in my series of blog posts on computer forensics based on what I have learnt from the Infinite Skills course. A big thing in computing is virtualization where you can run something like a potential virus or suspect driver in a sandbox where it can run but the damage it can do is limited. There is 2 types of virtualization, one where it runs on the operating system and one where the operating system runs on the virtualization software. This also lets you run multiple operating systems on the same computer. Examples of virtualization software are VMware & Hyper-V. There is a website at http://totalvirus.com where you can have a suspect file or URL analyzed for viruses and the service is free. Often if your computer becomes infected you will want to remove the virus but also know what damage the virus has done in order to mitigate any problems. 

There are a lot of utilities that will let you copy the contents of a smartphone to a computer and many are free. One issue is you must prove the contents came from the phone which is sometimes contested. On most smartphones the system memory is on a separate partition to the storage. You will also have to analyze the sim card separately. On an android phone most files are named descriptively but there is more room for misnaming files on an iphone. If you are interrogatting a symbian phone you will usually have to use the tools that came with the phone which can cause problems. Most software that interrogates an iphone only works on an Apple Mac. This kind of software will often reconstruct images on the computer which you may have to check. Often on smartphones the contacts list is on the sim card. Some software will also bypass the pin number or password if it's not available but you might not be able to access everything without it. To get this kind of software it's best to either do a search in a search engine like google or look on bulletin boards on the internet. 

Computer Forensics C

This is another blog post in my series on Computer Forensics based on the course I am doing with Infinite Skills. In this post I am going to look at network security and hacking. There are many types of hacking and in the types of hacking like denial of service attacks there are many different types of those. There are a lot of websites devoted to downloaders of denial of service attack tools. Many of these are out of date and haven't been updated so won't work on a newish network. There is a type of denial of service attack called ARP poisoning which doesn't necessarily knock the computer out of action but adds data to the computers workload and is when you listen in via a program to the traffic going to and from that computer. Wireshark is probably the industry standard program for tracking traffic on a wireless network but there is a program called network miner which is a bit simpler to use. There is another type of attack called a brute force attack which is when a computer is bombarded with random passwords often done sequentially until it accepts the right one. There are programs where you just set the program up and it will do this automatically. There is a thing called white hat cracking and penetration testing which is when a computer hires someone to test the soundness of their network. No network will stand up forever to an attack but you have to give the hacker such a difficult time he will think it isn't worth the bother. If a network is under attack you shouldn't reboot it or interogate the server. Rebooting will make you lose any trace of the virus in a lot of cases. Running diagnostic software on the server is liable to tip off the hacker who can then take appropriate action. You should run the diagnostic software on one of the workstations and access the network from there. In a very serious attack sometimes the network administrator will literally pull out the broadband or network cable  and it doesn't cause as much damage as you might think although they have probably as a result lost the ability to trace where the virus came from.

Computer Forensics

This is the latest in my series of posts on Computer Forensics based on the course I am doing with Infinite Skills.  I will first look at the computer forensics software Encase which is probably the market leader and it's primary purpose is to find and analyze files. It can analyze a sector on a hard drive and tell the type of file and even partially recover a deleted file. If you select a file within the Encase program various information about its properties will be shown when you press report. Another very similar program is FTK although that works in Linux. Encase works with Windows. There are also various in built programs like Windows Process Manager that can be used in connection with computer forensics. Many computer forensics use AFF or advanced forensic files as the file structure within the software. Encase has its own proprietary file system. In general computers should have NTFS as their file system as you can attach conditions as to who can do what within a program. FAT 32 good as it is doesn't have this permissions feature. CD's tend to use either ISO1660 or Joliet as their file structure. 

Influence

The book I read to research this post was Brilliant Influence by Mike Clayton which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

Mike is a businessman who lives in Manchester, UK & is also a motivational speaker who knows quite a lot about this subject. Many people think they are poor negotiators but when you were very young you were an excellent negotiator and it is only as you got older and over analyzed it you may have partially lost it. Just look at the fuss a young child makes when they want a parent to buy them something and often succeed. Gandhi once said you must be the changes you wish to see in the world although that may be paraphrased slightly and you need to be ethical and only ask for things you really want. If you give in on a point in a negotiation ask for something in return preferably that is high value to you and low value to the other party. The British Army has a saying Prior planning and preparation prevents poor performance, and normally when something goes wrong it's because you didn't plan for it. Of course prior to going into an important negotiation do your research and be prepared for what the other person might suggest and put yourself in the other person's place and think about what you would suggest in their situation which can be quite revealing. I did enjoy this book and it's only around 200 pages so is a fairly quick read. It's part of the Brilliant series which are mostly books on business topics and are pretty good overall.

Computer Forensics A

I have started a video training tutorial in Computer Forensics by Infinite Skills and will be writing some of what I learn in a series of daily blog posts. Computer forensics conjures ideas of some one analyzing what is on a computer and then giving a testimony in a court but these skills are also useful to other professionals like a malware analyst working for an anti virus software developer or a security or network administrator. To become a computer forensic expert who need to understand a lot of different disciplines like the various operating systems and how to use the specialist software and file types to name a few. You particularly need to understand the Unix & Windows operating systems. You will copy what is on a computer and normally work on the copy and will use write blocking hardware or software to copy the hard drive. You can't change anything on the suspect computer otherwise the evidence becomes inadmissable. You also must be ethical and many certifications like CISSP & Ethical Hacker have detailed codes of ethics for their members. You must never take a case which involves a subject you aren't knowledgeable about as the case is likely to be thrown out and also you must never swap sides or be paid according to the outcome whether guilty or not guilty. One job you must do is check the properties of programs and files on a suspect computer and to do this you right click and choose properties. In particular you are looking for any changes or modifications to the program and when it was installed. File types and saved work are also important. If you are working in Windows there is a program called Compare It which compares 2 files and tells you in the form of a hash tag if they are identical or not. On Linux there is MD5Sum which does a similar job. I will be continuing this tomorrow.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 F

This blog post concludes my series about using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 which is based on the video tutorial I have been doing. Normally you won't composite your pictures with in Lightroom although there are tools that will do it with in the program. Usually you will use either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Doing this helps ensure the photo is optimized correctly. Another thing you will perhaps use Photoshop in conjunction for is HDR photography where several pictures taken at different settings are combined to make one photo that is perhaps lighter in parts and darker in parts than the collection of photos but makes one really good photo. Different people have different theories about the exact settings for any combination of photos used in this process so it's a good idea to see what works for you. You will also find you need to convert photos to either TIFF or JPEG files for internet use and will want to print stuff out. The print properties dialogue box will depend on the printer you have connected to your computer. Usually you will a lot of the default. Some of the things you may change are having more than one photo on an A4 sheet of paper which can be done by adjusting the number of columns and rows. Rows go across a page and columns go lengthways. Also you have to watch if you adjust these settings it may reduce the size of the photo to fit although it's simple enough changing it back. Normally the setting for the print density measured in dots per inch is set on the default. Also you need to specify if you are using matte or glossy which require different print processes. I have really enjoyed doing this series and will be starting on another tutorial and writing about what I learn soon.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 E

This is a continuation in my series of blog posts on using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 E and we are nearing the end of the series. When you connect a digital camera to your computer and upload photos Lightroom has a way of handling those pictures. The default standard for handling photos and the most recent one when this software came out is Adobe Standard but there are other preset ways to handle the pictures which vary according to the type of camera connected. Generally Adobe standard is the best and as you select a different there is a preview pane where you can see the results prior to accepting them. If you are adjusting the various levels in a picture you can shift click and rather than adjust a slider you can move a mouse up the height of the picture and adjust it that way. You can also tilt this dragging the mouse for interesting effects. There is an adjustment brush which is the equivalent of the brush, dodge and burn tool. With dodge and burn you can alter how much you want something lightened or darkened in a photo and apply it like a paintbrush and you can also adjust the virtual brush size. There is also a red eye removal tool which turns red when the mouse hovers over it. You click on it then select the eye you wish to remove the red eye from. You can enlarge or shrink the pupil and also can choose what shade you want it to be. There is also a clone tool where you specify where you want pixels copied from and to and is ideal if there is dust contaminating a picture. Right next to it is a duplicate tool which copies the pixels automatically with you just selecting where you want them copied to. It uses complex algorithms to judge a suitable part to copy from. I've only got 1 more post to do in this series so I will complete that today.

Photography Cloud Computing Applications

The book I read to research this post was Photography Applications For Cloud Computing by Matthew Bamberg which is an excellent book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a decent and has 26 fairly short and succinct chapters mostly on different cloud platforms. The original photography cloud sites was Photobucket around 2003. Since then this market has mushroomed and there is a wide variety of different types of photographic cloud computing services. Many people have heard of Carbonite who promote themselves heavily on television etc and they do a free month trial and run a back up service and if you consider the current huge capacities of hard drives a month isn't all that much time in terms of backing up your hard drive contents. Dropbox & Photoshop Express offer 2 GB of free data back up. Photoshop Express is a cut down version of the Photoshop software and lately Adobe have been offering their software suites as a cloud product for around £30 per month. Google has a whole suite of products mostly offered free including Google Drive which I think offers 12 GB of free storage and also they have quite a reasonable photo editing product in the form of Picasa. Another photo editing cloud product is Pxlr which is one of the best cloud photo editing products on the market. Flickr is a popular online photographic storage medium and gives you the chance to show your work to a wider audience. Many people have Flickr accounts and they let you upload 300 MB of photos per month to your account for free. There is a platform called Adobe Revel formerly Carousel that primarily works with iphones and ipods but that allows you to upload and edit your photos. I really enjoyed reading this book and a lot of the sites mentioned can be found by searching for them in Google Search. Something I'm struck by is what good value many of these cloud computing services with the many freebies offered and I think if you do it right you can just use free storage across several free accounts. One not mentioned in this book but worth checking out is Microsoft's Skydrive which offers 15 GB of storage and don't forget especially if you are a business entity Amazon do a complete range of competitively priced cloud services called Amazon Web Services.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 D

This is yet another post in my series on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. First of all on the left side of the screen in either the library or develop tabs is the presets. There are many of these preset s can settings for photos and often you can search for more on the internet which can be easily imported. You can also create your own and once you are finished with the settings title it and click create. On the right side of the screen are the light levels. You can select HSL which stands for Hue, Saturation & Luminosity  and these are some of the settings under this. Saturation is the intensity of colour and luminosity is the brightness and counteracts the colour intensity when at a high setting. There is a line graph to help with adjusting the light levels and a simple left click on the graph adds a control point to help adjust it. A right click brings up a menu to remove the control point but click on the control point. A right click on the area surrounding the graph brings up a menu to reset the graph. There is also the histogram a series of bar charts showing light levels. You can also adjust things like white balance along with the various colours  There is an eyedropper tool which you can click on a colour or one of the preset colours to reset neutral. You can also go from one picture to another and click on previous to apply settings applied to a previous picture to another picture. Bear in mind once these settings are updated again they change. You can also use synch to synchronize the settings on one picture with another. You can also use auto synch where you select several pictures which are continually updated as one picture is changed. As well as a HSL tab there is a color & black and white tabs on the right portion of the screen. To see what one slider does you can slide to to the end and it will show you a preview on screen. Many of the sliders do a very similar job to each other. You can reset the slider by either double clicking or control + clicking it. That's all for now.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 C

This is another blog post in my series about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 based on a video training program I try and do each day. First of all there is a series of menus at the top of the screen but generally you won't use them as you will either use the keyboard shortcuts or the tools on the main screen which are more efficient. There are some options which say fit, fill etc, fit makes the whole photo fit the screen and fill makes a portion of the photo fill the screen. There are also options 1:1 which enlarges the photo to the number of pixels and an enlarge option where you choose how much you want it enlarged. When you have a photo enlarged you can categorize it either with 5 colours or on a rating of 1-5. In practice you will rate photos 4 or 5 or probably not categorize them. You can also flag, unflag or reject pictures. There is a keyboard shortcut of selecting a picture and choosing 1-5 to categorize by number and 6-9 to categorize by colour. Note purple doesn't have a shortcut. You can also use shift + click to select photos in a series or control + click to select photos not adjacent to each other. You can also make collections where the photos don't have to each other on the hard drive and simply, select your pics, go to the + buttons by collections and name it. Similarly you can create collection sets and smart collections. Collections sets are where you select sets of collections to make a set and smart collections require you to select criteria you work from left to right in column choosing criteria then choosing equal to, greater than etc then entering a figure. You can also do it based on colour codes or flags etc. You can also stack photos which helps with organizing them and you select the photos the choose stack which is in the + menu by collections. There is also categories and metadata in the right part of the screen with the various elements being in a list. There is a select button next to metadata where you can choose simply by clicking and/or filling in fields. Of course clicking decides whether it is displayed or not. You can select more than one and have it applied in multiples. You can create different levels of keywords by using the right arrow key prior to entering a keyword to put it up one level. 

Sawdust - The Killers

I am reviewing the album Sawdust by The Killers. They were initially formed in Las Vegas around 2001 and by 2002 had their finished line up. Their music was good but needed a bit of smoothing around the edges. A promo person took an interest in them but couldn't get any American labels and eventually an English indie label signed them called Lizard Records. Later on they signed to Island Records. They have had most of their success in Britain where they are regarded as an Indie inspired band. This album was a collection of b-sides and rarities and their are quite a few cover versions including Romeo & Juliet originally by Dire Straits & Don't Take Your Love To Town by Johnny Cash. I think it's a very good album. Apparently one of their earlier studio albums was the 26th biggest selling album of the decade in Britain. This album did sell over a million units worldwide.  There lead singer Brandon Flowers did release a solo album that was very successful. I did look at the Wikipedia article on this group which is worth visiting. 

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 B

This is another installment in my blog series about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. First of all there is your settings under edit/ preferences which set the program to work the way you want it to. Generally these can be left alone one exception being if you are importing pictures into an even earlier version of photoshop or similar for editing. Some of the graphics options like whether you export it as a 8 bit or 16 bit image might have to be adjusted as the software might not support that type of image. Generally when you are on the main page of photoshop lightroom 3 there are 3 columns and the one on left handles importing and the one on the right handles exporting. You might it necessary to convert files as this program can import lots of different types but can't always edit them. Adobe's own DNG format is a good one to convert to. Across the top of the program are the commands Copy To DNG, Copy, Move & Add. Add doesn't physically import the file and merely links to it. Move imports to a different location and then deletes the original. Copy leaves the original alone and imports a copy. When you import something often a second file is created called a sidecar which contains information about the file. This tends to be necessary when file sizes are being kept small. There is also an option where you can tag a photo with information like keywords, copyright info & artist name. There is also an automatic uploader for sites such as facebook and flickr. The photo is optimized and uploaded almost automatically.

Google Sketch Up 8

The book I read to research this post was Sam's Teach Yourself Google Sketch Up 8 In 10 Minutes by Steven Holzner which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is part of a series where the books are fairly short and you can read each chapter in around 10 minutes hence the name. Sketch Up 8 comes in 2 versions a free version which is ideal for most jobs and is the version this book is about and a paid version which is $495 at least it was when this book was published and that is a proper high end 3 Modelling software that will do a lot of things like read AutoCAD files. Files that are used by Sketch Up usually use the skp filename extension. It is a while ago this book was published so it might be a bit tricky finding either version of Sketch Up. Google as far as I know haven't released any more updated versions. The free version does have a lot of 3d modelling tools and a while back I did see a software video tutorial on sale on Amazon. This program is quite and especially if you have experience of other drawing packages is quite intuitive and easy to use. I think the free version especially is a bit of a bargain. I am quite a big fan of this series of books as they don't just stick to mainstream subjects like facebook and twitter. This book is on quite an unusual subject matter. I think more publishers should take a chance and commision computing books on unusual subjects. When you think of if someone writes a book about facebook they are competing with literally hundred's of other titles about the same subject.

Android Forensics

The book I read to research this post was Android Forensics by Andrew Hoog which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a how to guide to doing digital forensics on an android smartphone. Most of the software used in the tutorials is open source although in some cases it's free to people who are employed in digital forensics labs but the rest of us have to pay for it. Much of the process of interrogating  a smartphone is very complicated. There is a very interesting section on the history of android which was developed by Android Inc before Google bought them out.  It's based on the Linux 2.6 Kernel. There is also an operating system called Minix which is a sort of Linux or Unix software that runs on Apple Macs, 

When interrogating a phone ideally the sim card should be removed and the wireless carrier contract should be suspended to make sure the data doesn't change in anyway way. Also put it in a faraday bag to prevent unwanted transmissions. Sometimes the SD card has to be removed but the smartphone has to be turned off to do this and there is a chance if you have something like a virus some of them disappear once you do this making it impossible to trace. There is a couple of file systems mentioned but I think the book is showing its age and they may be obsolete on the latest phones. One is FAT 32 which of course had widespread use with windows pc's. The other is YAFFS2 or Yet Another Flash File System and you might find one of these on older machines. I enjoyed reading this book although I would advice a complete beginner to read something else. 

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 A

I am doing a video tutorial on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 by Peachpit and am doing this series of blog posts on what I learn. Photoshop Lightroom is aimed at photographers who can upload their photos in a batch and has a five part toolbar which is Library, Develop, Slideshow, Publish & Web. The first one handles importing your photos, the second doing on your photos and the last 3 refer to how you output your photos. You can import photos directly into the develop part of the program which is a new feature. In slideshow you can add music to your presentations and can even import music from itunes and it can automatically edit the music to the length of your slideshow. You can export a photo as a pdf with in the library. When you import photos it shows you thumbnails of each one and you can find a photo by selecting things like the camera speed used and model of camera with in the library search feature. If you have a photo that is slightly blurred this program does an excellent job of sharpening it, just look under the develop at the relevant option. You can also blur a photo using the same dialogue box. This program is primarily for people who touch up their photos and alter the light levels. It doesn't have the more heavy duty features of Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements. For most photographers this is all they need. You can output a photo onto a web page and upload a batch of photos in one go and do a photo gallery. Just tick the appropriate box. You can also with in the publish page print photos on paper and colour the surrounding area. You may find that a bit ink intensive and expensive. Photoshop Lightroom 3 isn't the latest version of this program but runs quite happily under Windows Vista and you will if you install it you need to download a large update file from the internet. 

Gimp 5

This is the final installment in my series on the open source software Gimp. You can download Gimp at http://gimp.org  & there is a separate help file which you must download to the same folder you install gimp on. There is a zoom tool that the best way to use it to click on the zoom button followed by a percentage greater than 100 % to enlarge or less to zoom out. There is a shear tool that lets you warp and distort a picture. There is a dodge/burn tool with the dodge option lightening the paintwork and the burn option darkening it. In traditional photography dodge would be a tiny sponge soaked in a chemical that would dissolve some of the ink on a negative. To create a sepia photo which is a kind of brown and white tinted old fashioned photo you need to use the old photo filter. It has a mottle option that ages the picture. Also distort and border options that also help with the aging process. There is a bump map filter with various options for raising features on a photo and creating noise in it etc. You can duplicate an image by choosing edit/ duplicate or edit/ copy. You can create a new layer by choosing layer/ new layer. There is also a heal tool where you control + mouse click a perfect or near perfect portion of a picture to a part that has an imperfection by mouse clicking that part. It copies one part of a picture to another so care is needed in choosing the right part. There is a preferences dialogue box with lots of settings to make gimp work the way you want it to. In one option it saves your changes to tools on exiting gimp and there is another option that saves them straight away. I will be starting a new series of blog posts tutorials on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 tomorrow.

Email

The book I read to research this post was Brilliant Email by Dr Monica Seeley which is an excellent book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is mostly about handling emails in an efficient way, it recommends not checking your emails more than 5 times a day and ideally 1 or 2 times. It also suggests having a chat with your boss and getting him to prioritize your work and also if something is urgent get people to phone you, it is a more efficient use of your time. Believe it or not there is an actual illness called email addiction and many employees check their business email account while on holiday, with some it gets to be a problem and they even hide from families to access email. This book suggests deleting unwanted or unimportant emails. You do find men tend to be better at doing this than women who tend to be hoarders. Many email accounts have a overall space limit for emails  and so it makes a lot of sense to delete any unwanted stuff. There are email archiving services and software such as mimecast worth considering. A couple of books recommended and which I will try to read are The Tyranny Of Email & The Myth Of The Paperless Office which both look interesting. How many emails do you print out? It's a fallacy the idea of the paperless office and of course look at the wastefulness of all the storage of emails and the power wasted running email devices often unnecessarily. This book looks at the legal aspects of email from a British point of view. Bear in mind email can be used as evidence in court and many people construct an email much more hastily than they would a letter. One bit of advice in the book is if it is on a sensitive subject construct a letter on paper and then copy it out as an email. Of course generally if someone sends you an email with the carbon copy or Cc option they will want you to read it but won't normally need you to reply. If you do need to reply send your message to the sender. I really enjoyed this book and I think you can see it's on a really interesting subject. The Brilliant series tends to be on business and psychological subjects and they are good books and present information in an easy to understand way.

Gimp 4

This is another blog post in my series of tutorials using Gimp the open source photo editor and graphics software. In this lesson I am going to look at using filters and saving files. Most filters are under the filter tab. The unsharp filter both sharpens and unsharpens a photo depending on what settings are selected. You should always make sure preview is selected as when you are making adjustments it shows you the results. The sharpen filter sharpens the photo by a set amount although to a lesser extent there are some settings on it. You can also use it multiple times. The despeckled filter is used when dust or similar gets on the lens during photographing and has to be removed. There is also a despeckled mask to protect part of the photo whilst this filter is applied. Don't be afraid to experiment with these filters as there is always a load default option to restore the settings to there defaults. Another interesting filter is the cartoon filter ideal if you are doing an avatar and don't want to display a photo in case of identity theft. This as the name implies converts a photo into a cartoon. There are also various predefined logos you can use which are similar to filters. Usually there is a text box on your dialogue for you to enter the text and this is automatically transferred into the logo. As with the filters don't be afraid to experiment as there is a load defaults option to restore your settings. With saving your work if it's a photo you will usually save to jpeg, especially if it's going on the web. Gimp handles a huge amount of file types but maybe strangely not raw and many of these file types you probably will never use. Normally you will specify the file type in the file name you are saving to and it will be done automatically. If saving to png it will need to be exported to a 3 rd party program. Tomorrow I am doing the final part in this series. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it and doing the tutorial it's based on.

Customer Service

The book I read to research this post was Brilliant Customer Service by Debra Stevens which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

The Brilliant series of books covers many aspects of business and psychological subjects and I think they did used to cover software, mainly adobe and microsoft products. This book is very interesting and looks for examples for good customer service from companies like Amazon & Stena. Stena empowers its customer service personnel that they can spend up to 1,000 euros solving customer problems at their discretion. One example of Amazon customer service is when you buy a book on their websites they offer 3 books on a similar subject with out any hard sell but a lot of customers do find that quite helpful including me. Often when a customer has a problem they don't just want someone to solve it they also want someone to listen to them. Many customer service representatives are almost on auto pilot and listen to so much of the problem and then think they have the solution. Each case should be treated as unique and you can get it wrong with that approach. Also many companies think if they don't get many complaints that means customers are happy but the vast majority of unhappy customers don't complain and simply don't come back not to mention tell all their friends about the bad experience. It's important to do customer feedback and also monitor what is being said about your company online and where appropriate answer them. Of course all the big companies try and do this. I really enjoyed reading this book which does a good job of explaining things and is a reasonable length at around 180 pages. 

Robotics

The book I read to research this post was Robotics A Very Short Introduction by Alan Winfield which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. The term robot was coined by a Czech author in a science fiction novel. Probably the science fiction author most associated with robots is Isaac Asimov who wrote I Robot among other books. The idea in that robots will be like people's helpers is likely to start to become a reality by about 2020. By 2025 most families will have at least 1 robot do something like housework or gardening. As there was a revolution with computers a similar thing will happen with robots. Industry has already embraced the idea of robots. Everyone knows that robots help build cars but what about repairing work where natural gas is being drilled. Often it would be impossible for a human to get to it and what about milking cattle, it's a form of robot that does this. There is development in building predator robots that can digest house flies or slugs which can incorporate energy cells. These robots could use a very low current and be slow moving or release a fragrance to attract pests to a compartment where they can be digested. In the case of slugs they are notoriously difficult to detect but do reflect red light. For example they are cold blooded and could easily be confused with leaves and dirt. There is also an idea of having several robots of simple design that group together to do a task and if several malfunction the ones working can take over for them. There is even the idea of varying the specifications and even having living robots much like genetically enhanced farm animals and crops we have today. You can see this book covers a whole plethora of different types of robots. This book isn't all that long but is a good read. 

Gimp 2

This is the 2nd installment in my series of posts on Gimp. To open a photo in Gimp choose file, open & then select the file that's the photo by double clicking. If you have a dull photo you can click image then select one of the filters which mostly change it a certain amount without any settings and can be applied multiple times if necessary. The selective gaussian blur and the gaussian blur filters have settings but are quite similar to each other. They blur either the whole or part of a photo. The gaussian blur filter will blur either vertically, horizontally or both and you can adjust how much. A gaussian blur is good for things like if you are photographing a stationary car and want to suggest movement so blur the background. It can also be used if there is something like a barbed wire fence in a photo and you want to blur it slightly to make it invisible.

There is also levels dialogue box for adjusting the colour levels in a photo. You click colour and then levels to find this. You are presented with a line graph and a histograph. You will usually use the linear histograph although there is also a logarithmic one. You can select to only adjust the levels in one colour. With the default being RGB, that's normally red, green and blue. There is also other colour models like CMYK & HSL but usually you work within RGB. CMYK is often used if you are getting a printing shop to print the work. Normal printers work fine with RGB and are optimized to work with that. In RGB there are sliders in the different colours and also you can adjust the Hue, Saturation & Lighting which is HSL. You sometimes have to right click the main colour display to make it active and can then adjust the sliders. A lot of doing the light levels in a photo is practice and bear in mind you can always cancel changes. Of course when you finish either save or cancel depending on whether you want to keep it and both are found under file. If you select the greyscale colour model you can convert the photo to black and white and also if you separate a colour channel it will appear to be black and white but that is just so you can adjust the photo.

Gimp 3

This is another installment in my series of blog posts on how to use Gimp. In this lesson I am going to look at layers. These are produced choosing layer / new layer and unless it is a background you will usually choose the transparency option. To select an object you will usually select the area around it and then choose invert. You can use layers in photo editing where you will select different components of various photos and put them into one photo on separate layers. To drop an object into a photo or picture use the copy and paste commands. These can simply be control + c & control + v. There is also scissor & path features both of these remove portions of a picture to help with editing and will often be used with the quick mask. The quick mask as its name suggests changes the colour temporarily of a portion of an image so you can edit the rest of it. Amazing effects can be achieved in this way. The scissor feature allows you to remove part of a layer quite simply. The path feature is more complex and applies control points which are applied as you click different parts usually close together. Paths are for more complex shapes and the control points can be moved or stretched sometimes to create amazing effects. You will normally use the zoom feature with either paths or scissors. You will sometimes you the paintbrush with a quick mask and again can create quite striking images in this way. Normally you will save your work but if it all goes wrong just close the image without saving it and reload it. If you cut a piece out of an image with one of these tools the clear feature usually removes it. When you copy something like an object from one photo to another use the feather feature so the edges are blurred. In extreme cases apply a slight gaussian blur to feather the edges. Don't forget of cause that Gimp is open source and free so you have no excuse not to try it. You can search for the site in google if you enter gimp in the search box.

HTC One

The book I read to research this book is My HTC One by Craig James-Johnston which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a how to guide to the HTC One smartphone which uses Android Jelleybean & Sense 5.0 with the latter being a proprietary add on exclusive to this phone. Of course in this day and age with only a sketchy manual that only shows you the basics being included with most smartphones this kind of book is essential to any owner. This book contains lots of pictures and diagrams showing you what to do and is fairly short. The HTC One according to Stuff magazine which specializes in gadgets is the 2nd best smartphone on the market with the best being the LG G2 although because that phone is still quite new not much has been written about it. The HTC One has a feature called divide where your business and personal information is kept separate and if a business wipes their data the personal data is kept. This of course is partly a web service and you need a special provider. Also there is Google music which integrates with Android and the optional download Music Manager which lets you store 20,000 songs on the internet for free. Of course if you stream these to your phone you will incur data charges and you are better off streaming them to a pc then wirelessly to your phone. Most people pay a flat rate for their computer's broadband access. HTC & Google has tried to integrate this smartphone into a way of life on the internet. Android is the most commonly used smartphone operating system with more apps than even the iphone. I enjoyed reading this book and it also has things like the initial set up procedure on your phone which can be reset at any time. Especially if you have one of these phones I would recommend this book.