Zenit 12CD on Flickr.Via Flickr: With a Helios 44M-6 lens, 58mm f2. I bought this wonderful looking camera on eBay as part of a bundle, which also included my treasured Jupiter-37AM. I don’t know a lot about these cameras but from what I could gather from the seller this one was bought new in 1991, had 2 rolls of film put through it and was then boxed and stored since. Looking at it I wouldn’t argue that at all, it looks practically brand new and absolutely everything works, including the LED high-low light meter!

Zenit 12CD on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
With a Helios 44M-6 lens, 58mm f2.

I bought this wonderful looking camera on eBay as part of a bundle, which also included my treasured Jupiter-37AM.

I don’t know a lot about these cameras but from what I could gather from the seller this one was bought new in 1991, had 2 rolls of film put through it and was then boxed and stored since. Looking at it I wouldn’t argue that at all, it looks practically brand new and absolutely everything works, including the LED high-low light meter!

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

This is data mining to perfection! Find out how Target was able to work out that one girl was pregnant simply based on a change in buying habit. What this article explains is a statisticians wet dream, identifying buying trends and using them to calculate a pregnancy probability.

It gets better, the article then explains how Target use mailshots to send offers on certain baby products but so they don’t raise suspicions they also include offers on items they know won’t be purchased. End result? The pregnant lady has no idea they were targeted and assume it’s a generic mailshot that everyone got.

This happens in the UK as well, although I doubt you would get anyone to admit it. Can anyone say “clubcard”?

1 Notes
According to Neilsen ratings, Women spend more time than Men watching television, watching online videos and visiting social networking sites! Neilsen has recently rebranded those previous referred to as “Generation Y” as “Generation C”, with the C standing for “connected”. In the same report it appears Men only outnumber Women in one digital category, the number of people who are tablet owners. On the basis that I am within the ages of 18 and 34, own a tablet and spend little time watching online videos or visiting social networks it would definitely seem that I fit the criteria of Generation C Male!

According to Neilsen ratings, Women spend more time than Men watching television, watching online videos and visiting social networking sites!

Neilsen has recently rebranded those previous referred to as “Generation Y” as “Generation C”, with the C standing for “connected”. In the same report it appears Men only outnumber Women in one digital category, the number of people who are tablet owners.

On the basis that I am within the ages of 18 and 34, own a tablet and spend little time watching online videos or visiting social networks it would definitely seem that I fit the criteria of Generation C Male!

This is Moo, the unloved kitty who found a new home on Flickr.Via Flickr: This is my cat. I’ve deliberately not posted too many photos of her on Flickr, partly because she’s so cute that I fear someone may steal her, but mainly because on the Internet if you continually post pictures of your cat some people may think you are weird. We call her many names but at the moment she is Nana Moo. We rescued Moo from the RSPCA centre local to where we live, her previous owners had recently divorced and neither one wanted to keep her, so she was abandoned. She was 16 months old at the time and had already had a litter of kittens. We were told that she would find it hard to settle in a new home and that we shouldn’t expect too much physical attention as she was not used to human contact. That was 4 years ago last month. Now Moo is the most caring and inquisitive cat you could ask for, in her new home she has everything she could want and more, including her new baby brother, our son Tom.

This is Moo, the unloved kitty who found a new home on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
This is my cat. I’ve deliberately not posted too many photos of her on Flickr, partly because she’s so cute that I fear someone may steal her, but mainly because on the Internet if you continually post pictures of your cat some people may think you are weird.
We call her many names but at the moment she is Nana Moo. We rescued Moo from the RSPCA centre local to where we live, her previous owners had recently divorced and neither one wanted to keep her, so she was abandoned. She was 16 months old at the time and had already had a litter of kittens. We were told that she would find it hard to settle in a new home and that we shouldn’t expect too much physical attention as she was not used to human contact.
That was 4 years ago last month. Now Moo is the most caring and inquisitive cat you could ask for, in her new home she has everything she could want and more, including her new baby brother, our son Tom.

PDO vs. MySQLi: Which Should You Use?

Thinking about moving away from the native mysql wrappers in PHP? There are many reasons why you should, security being one of the top ones, but which alternative should you choose?

This article shows you code examples of PDO and mysqli (in both procedural and OO modes) and once you get the gist of it transitioning from mysql doesn’t seem daunting at all.

Now all I need to do is convince our technical director to move from mysqli to PDO and my work here is done!

2 Notes
Lily Dream on Flickr.Via Flickr: In between taking shots of my son at feeding time I was able to take a few photos of some lilies that I had bought my wife for Valentine’s day. I started off with my “nifty fifty” but then swapped over to a Helios-44M with a 20mm macro tube between the lens and the body. Wide open at f2 it was too shallow to get anything in focus at this range, so this was stopped down to f2.8 and it landed me the effect I was trying to achieve. Back on the computer very little post processing was required, just a slight adjustment to the white balance and tiny increase in definition was all it required. This is my favourite macro shot of the day, although if you take a quick glance through my photostream you will see a few more, including the first lily shot taken on the Canon lens.

Lily Dream on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
In between taking shots of my son at feeding time I was able to take a few photos of some lilies that I had bought my wife for Valentine’s day. I started off with my “nifty fifty” but then swapped over to a Helios-44M with a 20mm macro tube between the lens and the body. Wide open at f2 it was too shallow to get anything in focus at this range, so this was stopped down to f2.8 and it landed me the effect I was trying to achieve.
Back on the computer very little post processing was required, just a slight adjustment to the white balance and tiny increase in definition was all it required. This is my favourite macro shot of the day, although if you take a quick glance through my photostream you will see a few more, including the first lily shot taken on the Canon lens.

There’s no kill switch on awesome!

There’s no kill switch on awesome!

Need a Job? Learn Linux Scott Merrill, techcrunch.com The Linux Foun­da­tion today post­ed their first ever Linux Jobs Report, cre­at­ed in con­junc­tion with tech job site Dice.com. The report exam­ines the cur­rent demand for Linux tal­ent, and iden­ti­fies a few inter­est­ing trends.Of the 2,30… Linux sysadmins rejoice! your talents are finally being appreciated. This survey by dice.com states 81% of companies polled are looking for more Linux experience. This is great news for open source, may I hope it continues.

Need a Job? Learn Linux
Scott Merrill, techcrunch.com

The Linux Foun­da­tion today post­ed their first ever Linux Jobs Report, cre­at­ed in con­junc­tion with tech job site Dice.com. The report exam­ines the cur­rent demand for Linux tal­ent, and iden­ti­fies a few inter­est­ing trends.

Of the 2,30…

Linux sysadmins rejoice! your talents are finally being appreciated. This survey by dice.com states 81% of companies polled are looking for more Linux experience. This is great news for open source, may I hope it continues.

1 Notes
Sunburst through the trees on Flickr.Out on a walk recently I noticed the sun had dropped well under the tree line. I had read recently that you could acheive a “sunburst” type effect by stopping the aperture right down so I decided to give it a try. The end result was a little diffcult to guage at first, as reviewing the shot on camera it looked very underexposed. When I got back home though I managed to recover some of the detail in iPhoto and the end result seems to work out. Definitely not one of my best, but it’s all a learning curve and trying something new definitely seems to be the way forward.

Sunburst through the trees on Flickr.

Out on a walk recently I noticed the sun had dropped well under the tree line. I had read recently that you could acheive a “sunburst” type effect by stopping the aperture right down so I decided to give it a try.
The end result was a little diffcult to guage at first, as reviewing the shot on camera it looked very underexposed. When I got back home though I managed to recover some of the detail in iPhoto and the end result seems to work out.
Definitely not one of my best, but it’s all a learning curve and trying something new definitely seems to be the way forward.

The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty

zdnet.com

The num­bers of users report­ed by Face­book, Twit­ter, Google, and many other sites, are close­ly watched. They reveal trends in adop­tion and they are one of the few pub­lic met­rics avail­able to ana­lysts try­ing to assign value to com­pa­nies…

With up to 50% of all Twitter accounts being either spam or fake, should we still be measuring the success of social networks based on the number of new accounts?

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