I’ve already been back twice since my first Origins experience – its that good. Next time, I’ll definitely taste their food and venture upstairs to see what else they hiding.

Origins Coffee Roasting. 28 Hudson Street. De Waterkant.

The first stop for me when deciding to buy a camera (well in this case, a camera for my Fiance) is to look at the Camera stats on Flickr – here you can easily pick up which cameras are the most popular across brands and type (SLR, point & shoot, cameraphone etc). Not only can you see which cameras are the most popular, you can then browse photos that were taken with the camera.

So after all my Flickring, as well as chatting to my dad who was a professional photographer in his day, I had my eyes set on the Canon Powershot A590 IS. It has the following features:

• 8.0 Mega pixels
• 4X Optical zoom
• Optical Image Stabilizer
• Face Detection

These are the features on the box, simple and clear. However, some of the other features which I find very useful on the camera are:

• Built in Accelerometer – so when viewing a vertical picture, turn the camera and the image rotates.
• Focus check – after taking a photo, it can automatically show you a zoomed in version of the photo, thus determining if the photo was in focus or not.
• Speed of use – it takes less than 1 second from turning the camera on to the ability to press the shutter button – paparazzi styles!
• Video – the video quality is also very good as well as it has the ability to zoom while recording.

We haven’t taken lots of photos yet, but we will be snapping away at the wedding as well as on honeymoon, so add me as a contact on Flickr and check back soon!

Lastly, you can get this Canon Powershot A590 IS camera from SACamera for R1799. It was the cheapest price I could find online and at retail shops. Along with all the camera accessories they sell, they are also a authorised Apple retailer. In exchange for this review they offered to give me a camera bag and 2GB memory card. So a big thanks to SACamera!

I made the switch over to Mac (by buying a Macbook Pro) about 2 months ago. That being said, I still own a pretty powerful desktop PC that dual boots XP and Vista that my Fiance uses or I use on the odd occasion when my Macbook is out of reach.

My thoughts

I honestly think that Apple’s OS is a lot easier to use and navigate for an end user than both XP or Vista. I also think that Apple hardware is a lot more robust and is prone to failure a lot less than any PC / laptop brands – Dell, HP, Acer etc. It’s not the sexiness factor that sells, its the simple things that make a huge difference – like the magnetic power connection – ever had someone trip over your power cable? With a Mac, the cable just snaps out. On a laptop? Hope and pray that when you pick up your laptop from the floor it still works.

But what about when your Mac breaks? All laptops and Macbooks come with a warranty, and after that, yes a Mac is more expensive to fix, but refer to my previous argument – Apple’s hardware failure rate is way less than any other brand.

How about the software?

Macbooks run Apple OSX and laptops run Windows XP / Vista. A Macbook can also run XP / Vista. So that pretty much covers all the software you think a Mac doesn’t have. But before you go running to parralells or Bootcamp, search the web for mac equivalents to your favourite software. In all cases I have found that the application has a mac version, or there is an alternative on a Mac (that are far sexier and easier to use!)

That being said, I have absolutely no need for any software that runs exclusively on Windows – desktop software is dying (Google Chrome anyone?), and all I really need is a browser and an internet connection.

@Gary – Pastel will run on a Mac, and who actually uses that software that comes with a Canon digital camera? Use iPhoto / Photoshop / Flickr. :-)

All of this being said, if you make your money from Windows desktop software, or are a .Net developer, sure, stick with Windows. They own the OS market and make companies and software developers tons of cash. I’ve worked for 2 companies that did just that – so I’ll never knock Windows development. I also think .Net is an awesome programming language that kicks some serious ass on desktop and the web. Ask Acceleration or Blueworld. ;-)

In the end, stick to your bread and butter. But if you are an individual that emails, writes documents and surfs the web, or a web developer that programs using PHP, Rails, Python or most open source languages, or a graphics designer, or a video editor, consider trying a Mac.

And for those of you that haven’t tried using a Mac (and playing with one in an iStore doesn’t count), can you really write something off you haven’t tried?

What this actually means is that, you will log into your OpenID account with a password, but never have to remember usernames or passwords on any OpenID enabled sites. You only have to remember your OpenID URL!

A Simple OpenID example

I signed up for an OpenID account months ago, but never investigated how to actually use it to log into some of my favourite web services that use OpenID. Last week, I actually decided to start using OpenID and it really is incredible how easy it is to use.

In this example, I am going to show you the steps I took to getting my Blinksale account to use OpenID.

Step 1: Sign up for an OpenID account.

This is pretty straight forward. There are a number of OpenID providers, and some services such as Wordpress.com, Technorati and Blogspot.com logins are actually OpenID accounts already! But for simplicity’s sake, rather use a dedicated OpenID provider, as the features of a dedicated provider such as MyOpenID.com are more streamlined and easer to use.

View the list of recommended OpenID Providers over at http://openid.net/get/ I signed up at myOpenID.com and you can actually view my OpenID webpage here: http://jbagley.myopenid.com.

Step 2: Logging into an OpenID enabled site.

So now that I have an OpenID, I headed over to my Blinksale account and selected login with OpenID. On most sites that have OpenID support, there will be a link very close to your normal login form. Just have a look out for the OpenID textbox that looks something like this:

What happens the first time I try to login with my OpenID, Blinksale redirects to jbagley.myopenid.com. I then provide my password to login to myOpenID.com, or if I am already logged in (either via a browser session, or a cookie that keeps me logged in), myOpenID.com then asks me to verify if Blinksale can make use of my OpenID account. I have options of either selecting Allow forever, Allow once or Deny. After I clicked Allow Forever, I was redirected to my Blinksale account.

The next time I tried to login to Blinksale, all I did was provide my OpenID url and I was automatically authenticated (all behind the scenes as I was already logged into my OpenID provider and Blinksale was set to “always allow”) and taken to my Blinksale account. No having to remember my Blinksale username or password anymore. So from now on, all I have to remember is http://jbagley.myopenid.com!

Why should I start using OpenId?

There is an interesting article over at ReadWriteWeb about password fatigue. Eventually people start using the exact same username and password combinations over a array of websites because it becomes ever increasingly difficult to remember so many different passwords! By using OpenID (and getting more and more sites to use OpenID), you are only required to remember your OpenID url and password. Changing your OpenID password effectively means you are changing your password for all your web logins too!

With the announcement of Yahoo jumping on the OpenID bandwagon, services like Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo Answers, MyBlogLog etc, are all going to start using OpenID logins in the coming months. For me, that means these accounts of mine will become so much more secure and easier to login to.

Google’s Blogger service also now supports OpenID for submitting comments, and the beta version of Blogger blogs also now supports OpenID. So I am sure you will start to see more Google OpenID logins in the future.

For Developers

There are a number of open source code libraries that one can use to get OpenID setup within your web application. OpenID can be used in many different languages, like PHP, Ruby, Java, C++, .Net (OpenID can intergrate with Windows CardSpace) etc. Visit http://wiki.openid.net/Libraries for more information on these libraries.

OpenID for dummies

So there you have it. A simple, yet detailed explanation on how to get OpenID setup and why you should be using OpenID. For my South African readers, are there any SA web sites that are employing OpenID?

If you liked this post, please Muti, Stumble, or Bookmark it at del.icio.us. Thanks. ;-)

Cape Town was wet To this day, Andre thinks I had sold him down the river with the letter.

Huh??? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I read it again, and then tragedy struck. Page 107 turned onto page 141. I searched frantically through the book to see if my missing pages had been incorrectly bound somewhere else in the book, but my worst fear came true. Pages 108 through 140 were gone. They never made it to Newlands on that wet day.

I waited until the new year before contacting the publishers to voice my disgust. The lady was very apologetic and immediately couriered me a brand spanking new glossy paged book. My Christmas present copy was made of that recycled brown toilet paper stuff that is slightly rough on the fingers, so I thought it was a nice touch of Zebra Press to send me a silky smooth paged version of In Black and White.

So the reading continued every evening now and then when I found a gap. I didn’t want to finish the book all in one go, you know. Save some for later I would tell myself.

Shiny Glossy Book Number Two

Then last night, while catching up on a chapter or two (I had now progressed 120 pages or so), I was once again, greeted with some strange grammar and punctuation:

So I learnt a lesson from his experience. given the week I had personally endured, as well as the players we’d lost, I didn’t have a great feeling about the game.

Don’t people use spell check when writing a book, or was the book typed with a typewriter and you couldn’t press backspace? I then cast my mind back to the last incident of this kind and thought, things like that don’t happen twice. It must be the part in the book where the writer took a drag of his zol or something… but once again, my worst fears were realised. Jake White had gone back in time, a whole 60 pages. Page 236 followed onto page 173. “This cannot be possible! Twice!”.

I was just about the give the book one big heave-hoe out the window, when I had a total brainwave! I could read page 237 in my other toiler paper version! Yippee!

I finished the chapter and put the book(s) down and realised this is exactly how SARU run SA Rugby. They use 2 books, that not one of them can be finished, yet, when one throws them together, and hopes for the best, somehow, you are able to produce something worth reading.

All’s well that ends well

You will be pleased to know that Exclusive Books will replace 1 of my books, and are going to give me a refund on the other. ;-) So now I have R200 to buy another book, and for that new book, all I can hope for is that the book-stickerrer-togetherer person can count, because Jake White surely can’t.

My browser of choice is Firefox, with a couple of neat plugins I can’t live without.

1. Web Developer Toolbar – for any sort of web development, this is a must have.
2. Searchstatus by Quirk – Need I say more?
3. Foxmarks – I use multiple computers, so this plugin keeps all my Firefox bookmarks synced.
4. coComment – This neat plugin ties into my coComment account, which is how I keep track conversation on blogs I have left a comment on.
5. Read it Later – When I don’t want to bookmark a site or blog post, and neither want to add it to my social bookmarking sites, but I want to “read it later”, this plugin comes in handy. Simple, yet oh-so effective.
6. IE View Lite – right-click on page and view it in Internet Explorer. Stupid web designers that can’t code make us sometimes have to fireup IE.

I have been using Twitter since the end of last year and have found it incredibly useful to keep up to date with what’s happening on the web. But using the web interface or my IM sucks big time. So Snitter is how I read and write my tweets.

My social bookmarking site of choice is del.icio.us. Nothing fancy here other than saving bookmarks that I don’t often frequent, but will probably need to reference later in life.

I have a couple of hosting and web development clients that need to be invoiced from time to time. Blinksale is a total life saver. I don’t need some bloated accounting system, and neither do I have the time to manually create invoices, so with Blinksale I email my customers their invoices and can keep track of those lazy and late payers pretty easily. My customers also have the option of viewing their invoices online to print or add notes.

For notes or quick todo’s, I use Ta-da Lists from 37signals. Quick and easy to add, quick and easy to use.

Then there is the host of Google products that I am sure most of you use. Gmail for email, Google Analytics for keeping track of my blogs traffic stats, Google Docs for documents and spreadsheets that I need to share or collaborate with people and Google Calendar for yip, you guessed it, my calendar.

I consume all my RSS feeds using Bloglines. I have used Bloglines from the start, and although I have tried Google Reader numerous times, I still prefer Bloglines. Must be a comfort thing. ;-)

For communication and all my IM needs, Skype and Google Talk do it for me.

My desktop email and document processing is handled with Office 2007’s range of products. Outlook, Word, Excel etc. 2007 is quite a change for those that were used to using Microsoft’s previous versions 2003 or Office XP, but once you are up and running, I would never turn back. The UI changes are huge productivity enhancements.

I think that’s about it. I’d love to hear your comments on what you think about some of my choices, and if you feeling up to it, blog about your tools of choice and I’ll share some link love. :-D

Amatomu

Being the older of the 2, Amatomu is becoming a daily stop for me. I love reading what South African’s are chatting about and having the latest posts and a zeitgeist that tracks whats keywords are currently hot. Also their admin panel has a really sweet flashy stats engine, that tracks whats cooking on your blogs.

One thing I would like to see is a favourites section. This way not only will you be able to see the top 100 blogs by hits / uniques whatever it is, you will be able to see which blogs have been favourited the most by users. Very much like Technorati’s Top Favorited Blogs. Stats, stats, stats – we just can’t get enough of them, can we? ;-)

Afrigator

Afrigator is very much in its infancy. Signing up was easy enough, but once I had the tracking code, I had no idea what to do next. I closed the AJAX popup panel and I was back to where I started. Slightly confusing…

I then logged in, and went straight to the stats page and found there were numbers already displaying which shouldn’t have happened as I hadn’t even put the code on my site yet!

You can see that Afrigator is very much in Alpha, but it has great potential. One thing I’m sure everyone would like to see is the ability to add multiple blogs on one account. I really don’t want to sign up for multiple accounts.

A feature I’m trying to decide if I like or not is being able to read the blog posts directly in Afrigator. Clicking on the headline of the post opens up the entire blog post for you to read. This may be awesome to some, I’m thinking from a SEO standpoint, it could be flagged as duplicate content, or even worse I could be flagged! Not just duplicate content flagging, my very own content is being displayed on another site! Any thoughts? Maybe offering an excerpt would be a better option.

I just discovered this while playing around, Afrigator also have a top sites section! I wonder what it’s based on? Everyone loves getting near the top, whether its your latest tetris score or your blog being ranked number one on Afrigator or Amatomu. :-)

One small thing, please add a tooltip to the country flags displayed alongside the posts. ;-)

Final Thoughts

If you run a blog, you don’t really have an excuse not to sign up for both services. Connecting your blog with others is what blogging is all about. Both Amatomu and Afrigator have some work to be done, but from what they term “Alpha”, I can’t wait to see what these sites will grow into in the future.

Apple fan boys around the world are hailing the iPhone as the solution to the worlds problems. Hell it can even cure aids, some have said. Whether it can or cannot do these aforementioned things, one thing stands out. Free Publicity. Microsoft tried to buy that with their Acer Ferrari laptop “giveaway-to-bloggers”, but it backfired because of the way they handled the situation. (requesting reviews, disclosing that they received the laptops, play poker etc.)

Me, a fanboy?

I got my very first Apple product for Christmas – an iPod nano. Apple build some seriously sweet hardware, not to mention iTunes, which is by far the best Mp3 organiser on the planet. So, am I a fanboy? Well not quite. Maybe if I was given an Apple macbook to test, I’m might fall in love like the rest. What I do really love, is the way that thousands of bloggers – some of whom I read daily, will not touch any Computer related thing, unless its made by Apple.

Back to the free publicity thing

The world might not be littered with Apple macs and macbooks like PC’s are, but every single person that owns or uses Apple products, loves the company. You cannot say that for many (if any?) computer related companies out there. Whatever Apple has done, and I think Steve Jobs has a huge part to play in their success, know how to hype and then deliver on those products.

So I’ll leave you with the free publicity I read this morning in my RSS reader. Enjoy.

• Carsonified – I will give my right arm for an iPhone
• 456 berea street – Apple iPhone is cool but where is my keypad
• Jason Santa Maria – Wanted: Apple mobile device
• Duncan Riley – Steve Jobs at macworld iLame
• Mike Davidson – iPhone. S.A.N.D. in your hand
• Paul Stamatiou – my thoughts on todays stevenote
• Business Logs – Real Apple iPhone pictures
• Jason Kottke – The Apple iPhone
• Cherryflava – Geek Centrefold
• Techcrunch – Apple announces iPhone, stock soars
• The gadgeteer – one word. wow.
• TechDirt – Move On, Rumormongers: The iPhone Is Finally Real
• Slashdot – iPhone, Apple TV Headline MacWorld Keynote
• Engadget – Todays Apple announcements at Macworld 2007

The speed of my ADSL

I took the cheapest as well as the slowest ADSL connection that Telkom offers – 384kb/s. When I’m downloading a file using Free Download Manager, I get around 35-50 kb/s download speeds. It isn’t the fastest connection around, but for personal and small business use, this connection speed is optimal.

When browsing the web, I can hardly notice the difference between my connection and the 4mb/s connection I have at work. You really only feel a difference when downloading large files.

I have also experienced 0% downtime, so for those of you using iBurst and the likes – eat your heart out. ;-)

My Internet Service Provider

I’m sharing an internet connection with my office, which is one of the really awesome features that WebAfrica offers us. You can simultaneously connect from 4 different locations, allowing you to work from the office and at home using 1 account.

Their DSL management console contains all your stats and reports, not to mention the interface is really well designed. You can view your account status real time, which for those using Telkom as an ISP cannot do. On top of our 10GB cap, we have the option of purchasing pre-paid bandwidth, that in the event of running out of our monthly allowance, our prepaid bandwidth will save our asses cover us. The prepaid bandwidth carries over from month to month.

We also have had no problems in the 6 months or so that we have been using WebAfrica. I have never phoned them for anything as of yet, not even to signup! It just works.

My Netgear Modem

I purchased my ADSL router through Digital Planet – who gave me a free Netgear wireless dongle to go with my Netgear Router. Pretty sweet I say.

The specs:
I purchased a Netgear Super Wireless ADSL Modem Router with 4-port 10/100 Mbps switch DG834GT. Quite a mouthful. This router combines 5 products in 1. ADSL 2+ modem, router, firewall, 802.11g access point and 4-port Ethernet switch. It has a double firewall in that it uses both NAT + SPI – which I don’t have a clue about, but just that I know it does a damn good job of protecting my connection. My router is also a 108Mbps wireless access point.

The routers interface is also feature packed. The most important thing I’ve configured is to not broadcast my wireless access point, as well as block all network cards except mine from connecting to it. I really don’t need random people knowing I have an ADSL connection – which to some folks also means I just might possess some expensive toys at home. ;-)

The final byte

In conclusion, my home ADSL experience has only been positive. I’m currently paying exactly R344.92 per month for my ADSL connection – bear in mind that this excludes my ISP fees, which my awesome company covers.
The R344.92 is broken up into R99.92 telephone line rental and R245 Home ADSL 384 rental.

It did take around 6 weeks from the ordering of my telephone line to the installation of my ADSL. So that is probably the only negative thing I have to say regarding my ADSL but other than that, having ADSL has completely changed the way I work. I just cannot recommend it enough.

Here’s a pic of my router and free wireless dongle for those interested.

I’m off to go use up our bandwidth cap. Someone has to do it. ;-)

So here is the lowdown on the different file formats and where you should be using them:

JPEG Or .JPG Format

JPEG is a file format that uses a compression technology that looks for similar colour pixels and removes those that are not needed. Then when you open the file, it make a ”best guess” in order to put the file back together. The loss in quality is normally a result of the compression algorithm getting those “guesses” wrong or it creates unwanted blocks of pixels that are out of place. JPEG is usually the standard image format that most people use as it retains most of the picture quality and saves on disk space.
When to use JPEG: Use it when you want to send photos via email, when the image quality will be retained but the file size is kept to a minimum.

TIFF Format

TIFF is a “lossless” format in that it retains the best quality of the image but also uses up the most disk space. TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format, which means it stores a tag with the image that contains information about the colour and dimensions.
When to use TIFF: Use it for printing digital photos as it contains the highest image quality of all image formats.

GIF Format

GIF is another compressed format that was originally designed for the internet. It uses a very limited set of colours (256), and is perfect for graphics that have large even amounts of colour. When gradients and shading is introduced, the GIF format handles these situations very poorly. It makes gradients look “stepped”.
When to use GIF: Not recommended for digital photos, but perfect for graphics used on the internet that have large expanses of the same colours.

RAW Format

This is the file format that your digital camera uses before any camera processing is involved. It stores information about the camera used, the colours, size and dimensions. Usually the software the ships with your camera is able to edit these type of files. Not for the amateur!

PNG Format

PNG is another lossless file format that was created mostly to replace the GIF format. These days most designers use this format for graphics used in web design, as the quality is a lot better than the GIF format as well as it also supports transparency. There are also different types of PNG file format, which also increases or decreases the file size.
When to Use PNG: Ideal for internet use and has a better image quality than GIF.

What formats do I use?

I have mostly been saving my digital photos as high quality JPEG’s which I find works pretty well. Graphics on the other hand, I tend to jump between GIF and PNG, depending on what graphics I have created. Nonetheless, I’m sure this information will help you make a better choice when it comes to saving your digital photos or when creating graphics.