It seems that Apple has gone absolutely mad with new product releases. New iMac… check out how slick and silver it is! New Mac Minis for the media centre. I am quite impressed with the new keyboards though they do not have a full width wireless option at this stage. If I am at my desk I prefer the number pad to be there!

Finally, iLife 08 and iWork08 have been released. I have iWork 07 and it is an excellent suite so I iwll certainly be upgrading soon. With the introduction of an Apple spreadsheet app and Microsoft Office compatibility, it’s a bit of a no brainer!

If there is one thing that I have discovered during my recent attempts to become organised is that the best way to success is to simplify things. As such I am going to slim down all of the things in life that take up a lot of time but don’t actually help me achieve anything. Being involved in a lot of projects and activities, I often feel that there is not enough time in the day to achieve all that I would like. I have to make some big cuts and I think that the decisions I will need to make are going to be hard! I want to do a lot, and I do actually “do” a lot, however, not everything can be done now.

There must be about 50 different things I would like to do that are based on the Internet. I have website ideas, article ideas, blogging ideas… but there is not enough time to complete everything. One good example is theGetFit application that I was making with Gringod . It is a really good idea, deserves some regular time to be spent on it and would certainly be useful for a lot of people. As he is not available regularly anymore for this type of thing, perhaps the project should be shelved along with the 50 other ideas we have so that we can focus on 1 thing like, for example, encaptured.com my photography site that we both contribute to. This would in theory generate better content that covers more and could give us more satisfaction in the long run.

The biggest step I have completed recently on my way to achieve a simplified life was simple yet surprisingly hard to do … I have reduced the number of feeds in my reader by about half. The hardest thing I did was decide to remove the most active feed in each of my categories then just figure out which other ones I just skimmed over. I can now tell you that this provided a real “breath of fresh air”. I now have time to read each entry rather than scroll down like a hamster on speed. I am getting more out by bringing less in! This initial success has me inspired enough to think about my next simplification task… which is a bit bigger and is taking some time to work through!

Having been playing with a new Macro lens that I received for my birthday, I felt it was time I updated the homepage photo. The tulip photo was taken with it during my testing and I am very impressed with the image quality! The magnification ratio is superb, though this particular image is taken from a distance away!

Here is a link to the gallery

Thanks to a chat with Gringod and my news feed, I have been deed’ed my own 128 bit number from Freedom to Tinker

70 7A 4F EE 1A A2 97 DB CD 1C 58 CB 83 FB 88 E5

This is all mine now so if I Google it and find someone using it… I will be after you faster than the DMCA can back me up and say ‘Yeaaah’ like a high school bully!

Alternatively if this whole post means nothing to you… feel free to appreciate my number but dont use it…anywhere!!

I have a number of network based drives that I access quite a lot on my home network. One of the problems I have experienced with “OS X Tiger” is when browsing these shares. It seems that the auto refresh does not always detect changes and/or new files. One great solution I have discovered is ‘Refresh Finder 1.1′ by S�derhavet

Very cool and tidy todo app from http://www.carpeaqua.com/software/checkoff/

I have updated my homepage photo with an image of the moon during the eclipse. This was taken a little before the full eclipse because the visibility deteriorated badly over a 20 minute period. By the time we left, the moon was no longer visible through the haze. Nonetheless, it was a good sight while it lasted and luckily for us, not too cold!

The evening was also full of adventure as Dave’s Range Rover got stuck in the middle of a big puddle… a small lake nearly. As Aidy had the benefit of a good view and a camera to hand… there may well be a picture online soon!

This may be obvious to every other Mac user out there, but as a new switcher, I need all the help I can get to try and memorise all the new things I learn about the platform.

My task for today was moving all of my 250GB of files from my old Windows backup onto a new HDD so that I could reformat the old drive for the MAC. Sounds easy but each time I tried to do the 16 hour Firewire->USB2 transfer, it would stop with an error. I have now manually copied across the files and folders but to ensure nothing was lost I needed to find a way of comparing the two directories.

Filemerge - Small app… big help

I was very lucky to be hunting around the computer and come across this great application that I think was installed with the Apple Xcode tools. It very easily allows you to compare two text documents and luckily…even two directories. What a gem! You get two lists that are colour coded showing the differences.

Icing on the cake

I found another great addition use for this tool, it can actually merge the two directories or files together. This very simple tool has a lot of power which is why I have made a note here for myself in he future!

After reading part 1 of the “Taking Your Photography To The Next Level” articles on the Luminous Landscape, I was deep in thought about where I am now and where I want to be in relation to photography. Whilst stuck into this review -as I have a habit of doing- my thoughts started wandering off a bit and I came to the conclusion that this type of analysis can be used for any aspect of life and further to that; I realised that I always do this anyway… if not always consciously. So if I take this ‘common sense’ approach and apply it to something else in my life, how much control could I have over being able to take myself up a level and would I be better able to control my ascension by focussing on the significant factors and avoiding the ‘fluff’ that I would inevitably get caught up in? If I can identify the noise… can I be better at anything? Can I take ‘anything’ up to any level I desire by knowing where I have to be?

Now I may have some big ideas at times… and I think this is one of those times… so I am going to try an experiment. Can I get rich (lifelong goal!!) by focussing on it? Avoid the fluff, avoid the noise… focus on taking it up a level… know where I want to be and know how to get there. by the end of this year, I will either be rocketing my way up the levels… or still down here near the middle!!!

Friday is always ‘one of those days’! To help the obligatory Friday foolishness, have a look at this list of valuable instructions… all of them from real products! I swear… 5 mins went by quickly!!

Here is my own addition to 4 billion other blogs!

Apple iPhone - ’nuff said!

Happy New Year to everyone I know! May all your resolutions stick and your ambitions be realised!

Thats it now, here endeth the fun and niceties… it’s back to work for us all and I can tell you, I don’t like it much! I do, however, like the new challenges and projects that I will be working on this year. The aims I have set for myself will be tough to reach but if/when I get there, it will have been worth it! It is back to work, but at least its another year of opportunities to make use of and try to achieve something great.

Should anyone come accross this site in search of a Photoshop script to generate the output required for Pixaria. Then you may have found the right place!!

On this project page you can learn about the script, download it and find instructions for setup and use.

I have updated my homepage photo today and I have a reason for announcing it! Apart from the fact its a cool shot of a racing yacht that got stuck on the rocks during last Sunday’s race…. it is also a picture that I edited using the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4 software. If you have not seen or tried this software yet, you should give it a go. The features and performance are outstanding and I can see that it will be a fantastic part of my workflow from download-to-print/web when the final product is finally released. As I will be receiving a free licence, I am keen to learn as much about it now as I can because other than the hefty image manipulation I dabble with that would require the full Photoshop app, I would say that Lightroom does 97.5 % of what any photographer needs and it’s very very slick.

Check out the latest release and details of the software on the Adobe Labs Website.

Anyone that reads this website may know that I co-own a yacht called Mystere with ‘me-mate-Dave’! As it happens, he recently cut his hair but I have a feeling that this may have been him recently trying to forge a new career as a musician!