Billy Fire LLC

One of my children bought an Asus EEE 900A. Its a very attractive little machine. 9 inch screen that is surprisingly easy to view, a small but ergonomic keyboard, and, because this device uses solid state storage, it is silent and has excellent battery life.

The downside, the disk drive is only 4 Gb.

Before we bought it 4 Gb seemed small, but after all, it wasn’t that long ago that I paid about $500 for a 120Mb drive for my IBM desktop, and 4Gb still holds a lot of word processing documents. Or so we thought…

When the Asus arrived it included … Continue Reading

I often wondered why all the new flat screen LCD and plasma screens were 16:9 ratio. This is a nice ratio but only the equivalent of cinema widescreen (1.85 to 1 in the USA and 1.66 to 1 in Europe).

I love the Panavision or Cinemascope ratio (2.35 to 1) because this is how we see (i.e. your peripheral vision goes to the right and the left NOT up and down, or at least mine doesn’t!) Many multiplex theaters are designed with widescreen as their optimum presentation format, rather than scope. The reason for this has got to be that it … Continue Reading

I just set up an account with BudURL. Like some similar services it takes a long URL and shortens it.

The twist with BudURL is that is includes analytics behind each link that you create. So, for example, you could include a BudURL link in a Twitter Tweet and then see analytics on any clicks on that link.

I will post more when I have examples of the analytics.

BudURL includes free and paid services based on the number of links you create.

Its nearly Christmas and last night I created my Christmas card address labels, a task I do not overly like.

I am a big fan of OpenOffice, it does everything that I need, everything that MS Office does that is of any importance and sometimes more, for example you have a huge amount of flexibility in which file types it can open and edit. You can also create PDFs directly from OpenOffice.

One thing that I don’t think is overly easy is creating address labels – especially ones that do not include blank lines (if a field in a database is empty, … Continue Reading

I just created a video of a presentation I made recently. It covers podcasting 101, including how to subscribe to a podcast, and how to create you own podcast, including microphone selection and software.

The podcasting presentation can be found here.

Ikonoskop is an innovative manufacturer of movie cameras based in my favorite city, Stockholm, Sweden. A few years ago they created a super 16mm film camera called the A-cam SP-16. The camera was designed to be inexpensive and light. It was able to achieve this by using 100ft spools of 16 mm film (rather than 200 ft or 400ft used by other professional 16mm cameras such as Arriflex or Aaton). They also used a non-reflex view finder arrangement. This means that there will be some parallax error when using longer lenses, … Continue Reading

Most of my browsing is done using Firefox. Apart from the obvious advantage that it is not a Microsoft product, I very much like the ability to easily add plugins. I also like the tabs (although, of course, Explorer 7 has tabs.)

One thing I really like about Explorer 7 though, is the way you can zoom in and out of Web sites. Press CTRL – and the site gets smaller (all to scale), press CTRL + and you zoom in. Do the same thing with Firefox and the text starts changing size, something that eventually screws up even the most … Continue Reading

I just bought the full version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I can confirm that, just like trial version mentioned previously, it seems to be able to use the AVCHD files from my Canon HG10 camcorder.

I purchased it from Amazon, opting for the CDs and box version, rather than the download, and it was considerably cheaper than going though Sony.

I decided to go for the CDs because on many occasions I have had computer troubles and have lost software that I had downloaded from the Web. For example, I had an excellent little ico editor which was useful … Continue Reading

One of the strongest features of Wordpress is that care that has been taken to make upgrading to a new version as easy as possible. I have never had anything but the most minor problems, compared to some CMS software that I tried that failed miserably and I had to abandon.

This time I used subversion to upgrade. I has already setup my installations to enable subversion upgrades, by following clear and simple instructions on the Wordpress site. So when it was time to upgrade it was very easy. Firstly I performed a backup (using a backup … Continue Reading

A client of mine has started a series of podcasts. Thus far I have recorded the podcasts using the Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone discussed in a previous blog posting. We had always planned that my client would ultimately be able to create his own podcasts and he asked me to get him a suitable microphone. Having read a few reviews I decided that the Blue Snowball microphone would be the best option.

… Continue Reading