26/07/2010 by Bertha.

Flickr is a wonderful site for photo sharing. Have a look HERE for my photostream.

I’m not the only one though. As from today the Queen has a huge selection of photos which you can browse through, be warned though, there are a lot! View them HERE

Anyone can share their photos using Flickr, so that anyone throughout the world can enjoy your memories. All you have to do is open an account, take some photos and then download. Even downloading is simple with an excellent FAQ section answering just about every question you might have (and a lot of other too!).

You can group by things such as location, holiday or even who. It is even possible to put the photos on a map so everyone knows where the shot was taken.

Give it a try it really is simple.

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19/07/2010 by Bertha.

One of the great strengths of the Internet is the ability to find information about virtually anything. Personally, being a photographer, looking through photograph collections, especially older ones, is one of those things I do to idle away time.

You’d be surprised just how many photographs there are available and where they crop up.

National Libraries and Museums all hold extensive collections though some are better at giving access than others. The US Library of Congress is up there with the best and not just with photographs but everything, you can loose yourself for hours HERE. A couple of photographers with collections in the archive worth browsing through are Roger Fenton (the first war photographer) and Dorothea Lange ( dust bowl photographer). Perhaps Lange’s most famous photograph is shown below.

George Eastman House (as the founder of Kodak) have a huge collection of photos. Among them is a superb collection of P H Emerson’s East Anglia photos. In similar fashion (and date) Whitby’s Frank Meadow Sutcliffe was a prolific photographer. Some of his work can be viewed and bought HERE.

In Bradford, the National Media Museum hold a large collection of photos (obviously) which can be viewed HERE as does the Imperial War Museum. The IWM archive can be searched HERE though it must be said that it isn’t the easiest collection to meander through.

Commercial sources are often a good source of photos (and other resources). Francis Frith have online sales of photos, maps and even books all searchable by town name.

Other enthusiast type of sites are also a good place to find old photos. A couple of examples are Old Airfields and Disused Railway Stations. Often such sites have a mix of old and new photos along with other things like maps and other memorabilia.

Finally there is always Google. If you search Google in the normal way all you get is the usual list of results. Look up at the top left of the page and you’ll see "Web" "Images" "Videos" "Maps" etc. Click on Images and Google will show all the pictures it can find related to your search. Often a good place to start.

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12/07/2010 by Bertha.

After an awful lot of prevarication, discussion and general "to-ing and fro-ing" Facebook has finally created a "panic" button for younger users to report inappropriate behaviour to CEOP.

For those of you who don’t know CEOP is the UK Government run Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and is "dedicated to eradicating the sexual abuse of children". That sounds a somewhat grand ideal and more than a little off putting so why not visit their site to see the excellent work they carry out. More importantly, you will be able to see how they do it.

Basically today’s joint announcement by CEOP and Facebook is about an app that places a link to CEOP on your Facebook page. From there you can get advice about how to deal with inappropriate behaviour, the different types of behaviour and who you can tell. This isn’t just for younger users (there’s different age groups from 5 to 16), there’s also sections for both parents and teachers. You can browse through what’s available HERE.

For more details about the release check out THIS BBC article which gives a little more explanation.

This is a great help to all involved but please remember, technology alone can not keep your children safe online. This app is only useful if the children understand both what is inappropriate behaviour and recognise when they are being subjected to it.

The best way to help them is for parents to follow the instructions in the Bertha Guide to Parental Control. Once you’ve done so make sure you monitor which web sites your children are visiting, taking special care to note how often they visit each site, how long they stay at each site and if there’s any change in their behaviour.

Get your copy of the Guide by clicking the button below and start keeping your children safe today.

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05/07/2010 by Bertha.

Love them or loath them TV ads are forever pestering us to buy something. Unfortunately, modern day ones can leave something to be desired in the quality stakes.

Don’t despair, the older they are, the better they are. Here’s a few to be going on with.

To find you own favourite oldies why not visit www.tellyads.com and brows their collection of vintage ads.

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28/06/2010 by Bertha.

I have a client who is having big problems with her computer at the moment. Turning it on is a bit like Russian Roulette - sometimes is works without a hitch, other times is refuses to start properly.

While it might be possible to track down the cause for this "interesting" problem it will be much easier to bite the bullet and re-install Windows. That way she will end up with a computer that is as it was when she first bought it, a pristine installation of Windows and lots and lots of nice empty space on her hard drive.

And therein lies the problem (as you might have noticed).

The downside with reinstalling Windows, is that you loose everything you have saved on the hard drive. That’s all your documents, pictures and music. All the programs you’ve installed will disappear - though that’s not always bad as everyone has some programs they installed to try out and never used them again. Even your desktop and favourites will revert back to the standard Windows version.

Don’t worry all is not lost if you do three tasks. Ideally you should be doing these all the time but, as long as the computer will start, you can get away with doing them before reinstalling Windows.

Firstly, back up all your documents, pictures, music; everything you have saved, value or worked on. It is possible to save these onto CDs or DVDs but you can soon run into space problems. It can therefore be better to use an external hard drive which just plugs into a USB socket, is a lot cheaper than using CD/DVDs and is a lot quicker to copy your files over.

Secondly, make sure you keep the disks or downloads you used to install the programs you use regularly in a safe place. Don’t forget to keep any serial numbers, login details or other such codes somewhere you can find them. With some programs (Google Earth for example) you will be able to download the latest version though if your computer is getting on a bit you might prefer to stay with an older version. Try www.oldversion.com where there is a huge library of such older versions.

Finally, it is a simple task to save both the Desktop settings and the Favourites from Internet Explorer. Both are stored in the same place but it varies between XP and Vista.

XP users need to look in C:\Documents and Settings\Users name while Vista users should look in C:\Users\Users name. In both cases once you get to the folder you’ll see two folders called "Desktop" and "Favourites" respectively. Just copy those to your external drive or where ever you’re backing up to.

Once Windows has been re-installed all you need to do is re-install your other programs and copy the backup files into the same place they originally were. That is "Desktop" to "Desktop", "Documents" to "Documents" etc. Don’t forget, there will be folders with the same name already there so your computer will ask if you want to replace these with the ones you’re copying from your backup source. Its just being captious so say yes to replacing.

The entire job isn’t hard just takes time, allow at least a day from start to finish.

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