03 January 2014

3 Steps To Learning The Basics Of Photography With A Virtual DSLR



photographer

When you are eyeing the latest DSLR camera on the shop window, a virtual camera application isn’t going to draw your attention. But if that dream camera is still some dollars away, the Outside of Auto from Canon could be the thing to give you a gentler introduction to the basics of photography. The best way to learn photography is by taking thousands of pictures, but learning a bit of theory does bolster the practice. Rather than learning from books, tutorials, or YouTube videos, this web application from Canon Canada is the most fun yet. Canon Outside of Auto is...


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Vagrant: A Quick, Effortless Way to Create Virtual Machines for Local Web Development



vagrant

If you’ve ever worked on a Web development project, you know just getting started can be tough. Even if you’re just making a simple WordPress widget, you’re going to need a WordPress instance to work with. That often means working on one somewhere in the cloud, or maybe setting up a local Web server. And if you’re collaborating with anyone, they’ll have to create exactly the same setup, too. That’s annoying, but it gets worse: If you happen to be working on more than one project at the same time, and both projects use slightly different stacks (different Web servers,...


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The Best MakeUseOf Articles From 2013



best-makeuseof-2013-2

2013 has drawn to a close, and it’s about that time when we like to take a look back over the year and see just what resonated most with you, our dear readers. Here are the stories that got you talking and sharing the most. Top Giveaways The biggest winner this year was the Google Glass review and giveaway. The fact that it’s $1500 and only available to a limited number of people no doubt contributed to this, but what did Danny think of it? Is Google Glass cool? Absolutely! Is it functional? Sort of — not quite, but it...


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How To Backup Gmail Emails To Computer Without Using Third-Party Software



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We all regularly backup our data from phones to computers and computers to external hard drives and then backup our data to the cloud, but most of us never think of backing up cloud data, like emails, contacts, and calendars. When it comes to backing up emails from our Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo! and other accounts, […]

Google Answers And Comparisons



Back in 2009, when HTC HD2 was released, many people complained that it had a huge screen: a 4.3-inch display. Now it seems quite small. Even iPhone's 3.5-inch display seemed very big back in 2007. As you can see, context matters and it puts things into perspective.



When searching Google for [Saturn size], you used to get an answer that was useful, but not that revealing. So the radius is 58,232 km (36,184 miles). It's obviously very large, but how does it compare to other planets? Now Google shows other planets and their size below the answer.






Search for [Earth mass] and Google shows that Venus has almost the same mass, while Jupiter's mass is 317.8 times bigger.






The instant answer for [Earth surface area] confirms that Earth and Venus are close in size.






What about gravity? Pretty close.






"The solar system is a pretty big place. To get a quick refresh on astronomy, you can ask Google 'What is the surface area of Earth?' and find out that it's 196.9 million square miles. But how BIG is that? Clearly not as large as some of our waistlines post-holidays—but is it larger or smaller than Jupiter? The size of Earth makes more sense when considered relative to the surface area of other planets; Earth is similar in size to Venus but more than 100 times smaller than Jupiter! Google now provides these comparisons, helping you understand the world (or solar system) around you," informs Google.



For now, this feature is only available for astronomy-related questions. You can find some similar comparisons when you search for things like [China GDP] or [India population].








What Is Your Tech-Related New Year’s Resolution For 2014? [We Ask You]




It’s now 2014, at least according to the Gregorian calendar most countries around the world adhere to. Each new year marks an opportunity for us all to endeavor to be better people, to do things differently than we have been of late, to improve in at least one aspect of life. While most new year’s resolutions involve losing weight, getting fit, changing jobs, or beating a vice, we here at MakeUseOf are more interested in those related to technology. Because, as we previously discovered with the predictions for 2014, technology plays an important role in the lives of all of...


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No More Location History Dashboard



Google had a cool feature as part of Location History: a dashboard that displayed how you spend your time, how much do you spend at work or at home, the places you've visited, when you visited each country, your flights, the distance you've traveled (including the number of additional miles to the Moon). This feature, which was launched in 2010 as part of Google Latitude and was still in beta, is gone and the dashboard redirects to the Location History homepage.



Google confirmed that the feature was removed last month: "You can continue to view and manage your Location History information by going to https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/, but we've removed the Location History dashboard (the part of the Location History website that provided a summary of your locations, including total miles traveled and trip information). We are not removing Location History entirely or deleting any raw Location History information. We're continuing to explore more useful and relevant ways for you to engage with and view location history."



Here's a screenshot taken by Bogdan Bele:






And here are the features still available:






For some people, the dashboard was one of the main reasons to enable Location History. "I thought the dashboard was a nice record of my travels, and it was the only reason I activated location reporting on my Android phone. If the dashboard has permanently disappeared, then it means that Google is tracking my location for their own purposes, and not giving me anything in return," says Rob Fuller, a reader of this blog.



Location History is actually used by some Google Now cards. "Google Now uses your Location History, which may include locations saved from your use of other Google products, to monitor traffic on your commute route and more," informs Google. There's even a card that shows a summary of your activity. Google Maps also uses it to personalize search results.






{ Thanks, Rob. }

The World At Large: 7 Photography Websites To Feed Your Wanderlust



travel-photography

Travel and photography are so closely linked that we probably don’t wonder at it anymore. It is so commonplace thanks to high-resolution wallpapers and travel websites. Oh yes, we do wonder with awe at the sight of our beautiful landscapes and panoramic vistas; but that takes up just a couple of our senses. True travel photography is something that goes beyond travel brochures and wallpapers. The Photographic Society of America defines a travel photo as an image that expresses the feeling of a time and place, portrays a land, its people, or a culture in its natural state, and has...


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A Better Way to Share Web Pages by Email



When you include an hyperlink in your email message, the recipients will have no idea where that link is pointing to unless they actually click on it.


Clip Better offers a better approach that your email recipients will appreciate as well since it removes the guess work.


Use the Clip button to create a visual preview of the current page.

Use the Clip button to create a visual preview of the current page.



This is how the link will appear in the recipient's inbox.

This is how the link will appear in the recipient’s inbox.



Stop Emailing URLs, Embed Link Previews


Instead of putting raw URLs in your email messages that don’t convey anything, you can use Clip Better to effortlessly create a visual snippet of the page and send it through Gmail or any other mail client that supports HTML Mail.


The tool, possibly using Open Graph tags, will extract the page title, meta description and a thumbnail image and then puts everything into the clipboard as a neatly-formatting block which you can paste into your mail program or even your word processor.


Clip Better is available as a Google Chrome extension, as a bookmarklet and also an iPhone app. Alternatively, if you are on an unsupported platform, you can email one or more links to clipme@clipbetter.com and the service will send you the corresponding previews in rich text.


The tool is useful though it does insert some of its own branding in the link previews. You can however select and delete the branding easily if you wish to.


Available at clipbetter.com. See my other favorite Google Chrome extensions.




This story, A Better Way to Share Web Pages by Email, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/01/2014 under GMail, Google Chrome, Software