Creative Learning Systems
I recently found myself searching eBay for a 50mm prime lens and wandered across a seller with several lots of the Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens. Having read reasonably positive reviews of this particular piece of glass I decided it was worth a chance, and arranged to meet the seller in Colchester.
This is the stuff of dodgy deals… meet up outside a well known PC shop and hand over cash for a boxed Nikkor lens? One of several available? Well, for £70 it was worth a punt!
Every now and then I get the urge to start Adobe Acrobat when I’m using my Mac. I don’t like doing this, because Acrobat is a bit of a beast and I’ve had more failures with it than successes. It’s probably of my own doing, but I don’t seem to get on very well with the application.
Avoiding Acrobat is one thing, but there is a feature of it that comes in very handy, and that’s combining different PDF documents into one single document. Up until recently I have always had t use Acrobat, but today I bothered to look beyond. Today, I used ‘Automator’ that little app that sits in the Applications folder and seldom gets used. Read more
Earlier this month I wrote in fairly scathing terms about the previous version of this software, which to all intents and purposes seemed prematurely released. It was slow, clunky, didn’t run well on a Mac (I understand Windows users were more satisfied) and generally wasn’t worth the money. I couldn’t then review version 2 as it didn’t even install for me, so as you can imagine I was less than positive about it all. Read more
I’m a bit of a Firefox fan, despite the fact the browser seems to render colours with less saturation. One of the very nice things I like is the search bar at the top right, which contains links through to some of the most frequently used search engines. You can customise the list easily enough, but you can’t customise the default search locations… or can you?
Normally, I like to search UK domains first, particularly when looking for a price or simply heading towards eBay or Amazon. I don’t mind the US versions, but I don’t head there by default. Until today I have been stuck with using ‘UK’ in every search term. Today, however, I decided to investigate it further.
Using a Mac, go to the Firefox application, control+click on it and select ‘Show Package Contents’ . Next, navigate to ‘MacOS/searchplugins’. In there you’ll find some simple XML files which are readily editable. I opened the Google, Amazon and eBay files and changed the settings manually from ‘.com’ to ‘.co.uk’. You can also change the title so that in the search bar it tells you where you are looking, too! A quick restart of Firefox and the new settings are in place.
Each time I search Google now, I default to the ‘.co.uk’ version and get the option of looking at the entire web, or simply pages from the UK. I’m happy with that! Similarly, Amazon now defaults to the UK site, as does eBay. Oh Joy 🙂
Of course, I fully expect an update will wipe out those changes, so a quick save of the files for later use is also necessary…
I am getting fed up with Multimap as a site. It used to be excellent, but they have tarnished themselves in my opinion by introducing unsolicited windows that appear in the background when you search for an address.
Why? It was pretty good before, but I am losing the will to continue visiting the site. As far as I’m concerned this is a pretty poor strategy from Multimap. Maybe others don’t feel so cheesed off by it, but for me it’s enough to make me turn to the AA web site instead.