This is a really quick and random post about Ubuntu and Ubuntu 11.04. I’ll bet that there are many users out there who have fancied having a go with this great operating system. The reason I’m writing here is because great though it is, there can be a fair amount of messing around when things go wrong. I’m just a normal bloke with slightly above average computing skills and completely self taught.
Unless you are geeky (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) you’d better allocate some time in the event that something goes wrong, but in fairness I’ve been using it for the past 2 months on a daily basis and in that time I bet I’ve had to reboot about 10 times (yes 10 times!) and when I do it takes less than a minute. I also have a Mac (suprisingly, more reboots than I expected!) and a Windows 7 laptop (lost count at the amount of reboots in comparison!), the Mac is a beautiful thing and I would highly recommend getting one. Windows ain’t bad but I prefer Ubuntu 11.04 for pure unadulterated no nonsense speed.
I’ll bet if it wasn’t for Firefox working my nerve I probably wouldn’t have to reboot at all. Yep Firefox. Every morning Firefox hangs and I have to reboot it (not the computer), which saddens me because I have used Firefox for so long (in the same way your favourite teddy bear got banished, I’ve had to look for love elsewhere). On occasion when it is particularly bad, I do have to reboot the machine.
It went through a stage of losing all of my tabs too, which made me turn to Opera. I also use Opera alongside Firefox because to virtually guarantees that my tabs are never lost (you can save the sessions, very useful). Opera is good, but Chromium is superb.
It’s fair to say that I am a heavy user with any number of 30 tabs open at any one time and today, I’m going to hit Chromium very hard and report back on my findings. I’ve loaded it with tabs, so I’ll let you know what goes on. Thanks for reading 
4th September 2011: Chromuim Rocks
Photo Stamp Remover
Having a small online business you may often have to need to edit photographs. This was necessary in my case, as I had a lot of images of products that I’d had permission to use, but were watermarked.
In the past I had used Adobe Photoshop and was fairly adept at removing watermarks and making other corrections on an image by image basis. These tasks ranged from tidying up old photographs to removing the ever present camera stamp, generated by modern photographic equipment.
Anyone who’s used Adobe Photoshop, can’t fail to be impressed at the amount of clever stuff you can achieve with it. However, this becomes a problem as all of this information is a struggle to take in at the best of times, and if you are trying to run a business you won’t want to spend time on tasks that don’t earn you any money. I have literally spent hours learning how to learn a few simple tasks, only to forget them by the time I need them again in the future. It is nice to have an easy program that is well thought out and doesn’t overload you with information.
So, enter photographs and batch processing. I have used programs in the past via Ubuntu/Linux, however I didn’t find them as easy to use as this very clever unique piece of software from Softorbits.
As well as being a very credible watermark remover, you can also remove wrinkles, dust, and tears from your images. Once installed, the software takes care of these individually or via batch processing. Selecting the offending part of the image couldn’t be easier and you will find with the minimum of practice you’ll be overwhelmed by the large quantities of corrected images at your disposal.
Softorbits don’t only do software for removing watermarks, they offer a complete suite including a batch picture resizer, a three-dimensional thumbnail generator, and a tool for adding watermarks.
I can think of 100 uses for this useful program, especially if you’re a photographer and have a need for quick and easy photo manipulation. If I hadn’t found this piece of software I would have either spent hours editing images manually, or I would have had to pay out staff labour costs to get the job done.
The cost of the software is next to nothing when you factor in the amount of time and resources it will save the small business owner. The amount of times I have used this for editing product images is substantial, I can honestly say that I have made money out of using it.