More Cowbell

The Digital Photography School has an article on how to photograph fireworks. I’ve always been curious as to how exactly these photographers make fireworks look like they do. I’m going to try to follow some of these tips on July 4th. I was especially interested in the camera settings section.

And what’s summer on the beach without a good book to keep you company? Authors on the web asks authors what they are reading for the summer and gives you their reading lists.

Updating servers across the nation to point to our new location may take longer than previously planned. Some servers don’t update their records for days at a time, but most do every few hours. With all the web sites that I have built though, it usually happens in under an hour, so let’s keep our fingers crossed. Anyway, you can place comments/questions here or talk about anything you would like.

Here’s Pat Robertson’s latest interpretation of Bible verses in Ezekiel.

ROBERTSON: It’s shocking what’s happening. And I got home over the weekend and read the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, once again, to see a war that is forecast where a nation identified as Russia and possibly some of the Caucasian states, maybe Turkey, but some of those states in that region, join with Iran, Libya, and the Sudan to move against Israel. A great horde of people to come against Israel, re-gathered from the nations in the latter days.

It’s amazing that Iran has come to the fore as it has with a president who says Israel should be wiped off the map, who — it now has atomic weapons. And a year ago, the Lord told me, as I was praying, that Israel was entering into the most dangerous time in its existence as a nation. He confirmed this again in January, and lo and behold, the events in the — in the current affairs just keep tumbling, tumbling, tumbling upon us. And I look in disbelief.

Pat Robertson is frequently the target of agnostics who want to discredit the faith.  Even Christians frown upon his outspoken nature, because of what he’s saying.  Of course, he sort of fits the mold for TV Preachers.

For anyone that spends a lot of time on the web, your bookmarks is almost like a personal phonebook.  The habit of organizing and bookmarking sites you find to be interesting or informational is a great practice.  Until I actually made it a habit, I never realized how many sites I forget about.  I have my bookmarks organized into several categories and bookmark anytime I find a nice site.

The problem then becomes how to save these bookmarks between computers.  I bookmark a site at home, but don’t have the same bookmark at work.  Several extensions have become available to try to help you save your bookmarks, but no service has stood the test of time.  Now Google provides the best hope for the future of bookmarking, Google Browser Sync.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

Basically, you install this Firefox extension from Google, and it uploads your bookmarks to their server.  When you log in to another browser with the same extension, your bookmarks are automatically updated.  Comes in very handy if you need to keep two different computers in sync, or if you lose your bookmarks on your current computer.

If you don’t use Firefox, here are some of the best web sites for keeping your bookmarks all online:

Blummy.com

Furl.com

Spurl.com

A new version of Mozilla Firefox is out, 1.5.0.4.  This is a security fix release.  One of the many things I love about Firefox is how easy it is to update.  You just go to Help — Check for updates, and it downloads, installs, and restarts Firefox for you.  It takes less than 30 seconds on a broadband connection.   While I was at the Mozilla site yesterday, I decided to look through the themes.  I had downloaded a few when Firefox had first come out and they were terrible.  With some, you actually lost buttons and functionality.  I decided to give it another try though and downloaded the most popular one Noia 2.0 (eXtreme).  I really love this skin and the look it gives Firefox.  It’s going to take a few days for button clicks to become second nature, but all-in-all, it’s a very nice skin. 

Microsoft Windows Live seems to be the next big thing from Microsoft and it’s answer to their biggest competition on the web…Google.  Basically, they are trying to get everything you need into one web site.  It looks to basically be MSN 2.0 with all the things MSN has now like search, mail, messenger, toolbar, and shopping.  But, they are adding things you would normally see on your desktop, like Office, Safety Center, and OneCare (which is a comprehensive PC health station).  They are also combining some of their other services, like Expedia (now Local), and adding new ones like the Academic service, and Expo.  It seems like it will be an exciting rollout of new online services for your PC, and really show what a huge company like Microsoft can do with Web 2.0.   Check it out at the Live Ideas beta site. 

CoLT (Copy Link Text) is an extension for Firefox that does something that I’ve always thought the browser should do anyway.  When your blogging about a link you found on the internet (maybe from another blog), CoLT will allow you to copy the link text to your clipboard.  It goes one step further though (and this is the feature I like), it will allow you to copy the link text, the link, and format it for you so when you copy it into your blog, it’s automatically formatted for you.  I downloaded this one immediately. 

MyTunesRSS is a freeware application that lets you listen to your iTunes music on any computer as long as both have network access.  It supports MP3 and AAC files since it’s a Java program, can run on any platform.

With MyTunesRSS you can for example use a Playstation Portable to listen to the music from your iTunes library. The songs are streamed to the PSP through the WLAN feature. Also any other device with a web browser and capable of receiving podcasts can be used. Listen to your music with any such device even if it is not iTunes enabled.

MyTunesRSS