Buyers Guide: How to Choose a Digital SLR Camera

By Admin in Tech on October 28th, 2008

Opera is more than a browser

By Amir in Tech on October 15th, 2008

Browser war huh? After all that posts and reviews about IE and Firefox, today I want to open a new window to those of you who’d love to browse as safe, as confident and as fast as possible!

How many of you have ever heard of Opera?
Do you know that many of those nice features, such as tabbed browsing, already implemented in Internet Explorer, Firefox and the newborn Google Chrome are actually inherited from Opera?

And as an answer to my friends who ask me “Hey dude! If it’s this good, then why it is not as famous?” I can just say “Because it is not AMERICAN! It is Norwegian and that’s why it has every thing sorted and disciplined!
The good thing I love about Opera is its innovative soul! It has been always many many years ahead of its rivals in terms of new and interesting features and services.
The other good thing about Opera is that its damn fast! You have to try it to see, oh no sorry FEEL, the difference!

I warmly invite all of you to go and try it by yourself and comment about it here.

Below is a short list of this awesome browser’s features, as Coxy says:

• Better than Internet Explorer
  If you access the internet using the blue ‘e’ icon you can be considered a bad, bad person. Internet Explorer is made by Microsoft and comes with your Windows computer - and it’s this very reason that most virus/security risks are aimed at Internet Explorer. If you value your security (ie, bank details, passwords, etc) - get a better browser.

• You’re using / thinking about Firefox?
  Mozilla Firefox is the browser that most Internet Explorer users are switching to. If you’ve heard of another web browser, it’s probably Firefox. Whilst Firefox is undoubtably better than Internet Explorer, for most users to make the browser do what they want it to, they have to hunt down and install ‘Add Ons’ making Firefox slower and more cumbersome. Most of Firefox’s popular plugins come built-in as standard with Opera. It’s well known that most of Firefox’s new features are existing features in Opera.

• Speed Dial
  Opening a new tab or window in Opera provides you with shortcuts to your favourite websites. If you’re a socialite, you can be a mere click away from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr and your other favourite social networks - there’d be no need to type urls!

• Opera Link
  Connect your browser to your free Opera Link account and Opera will back-up and sync your bookmarks, speed dial, notes, personal toolbar, search engine preferences and typed history. When you log in at school, work, on any other computer or mobile phone, you have instant access to all your data - and any changes you make away from your computer will still be there when you get home. Get in sync, get a better browser.

If all of us liked Opera, we can ask our IT department to install it on school’s PCs and then we’d get all our favorites and bookmarks, browsing history and Speed Dial everywhere, on every PC we use at school! IS not that great?

• Zoooooooooom!
  Opera zooms pages like no other browser. Seriously. Where other browsers will only zoom the text on the page, Opera zooms everything with the touch of the plus or minus keys. Save your eyes, zoom when reading long articles or small type.
  

• Login with Magic
  The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Return becomes your friend! Pressing it (or the magic wand button) magically logs you into your favourite sites - or fills out long forms for you - so long as you’ve saved that information previous. Login to pretty much any site and hit ‘Save’ when prompted and you’ll never have to remember your username and password again!

• Find Anything!
  Opera comes suited and booted with the latest search engines; Google, Yahoo!, Ask and more. You can also search your history by typing in the address bar. If you can’t remember the name of that lolcats site you were visiting, but remember seeing the word ‘kitten’ on the page, type away and Opera will find it for you. No other browser searches every word on every page you’ve visited! What’s more - you can add any search box on pretty much any web page into your browser by simply right-clicking on it. Another good reason to get a better browser.

• Ultimate Protection
  Opera comes with Fraud, Malware and Phishing protection built-in as standard. Every site you visit is checked against a list of known phishing or fraudulent site to ensure your computer’s not going to get infected with any spyware or viruses and that you’re not giving your bank details away to a fake website.

To be honest, I could go on - but I’ll stop now. There are so many good reasons to give Opera a try; even if you’re happy with Firefox or just don’t give a crap about web browsers - at the end of the day it’ll ensure you’re safe from nasty things on the web, or that you’re browsing that little bit faster.

If one person came up to me after reading this and said “I read you blog, I downloaded Opera.”, I’d be happy for the rest of the day!

Download and installation is free, quick and easy. Opera works on Windows, Mac and Linux… your mobile, your Nintendo Wii, your Nintendo DS and a handful of other devices. Just click the button.

Join the Swinburne Sarawak network on Facebook!

By ember in Swinburne, Tech on September 25th, 2008

When Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, three Harvard students started Facebook in 2004, it was originally meant to network Harvard students to keep in touch with each other. By 2005, Facebook grew to include an amazing 800 college networks across the US of A.

Fast forward 2008. Facebook is now home to more than a 100 million active users worldwide.

All this left me wondering why isn’t there a Swinburne Sarawak network Swinburnites can join. There is a network created for our parent campus in Melbourne, but it doesn’t seem to accept our emails.

So yours truly decided to take this matter into his own hands and attempted to create a Facebook network for Swinburne Sarawak. After about a month of email correspondence with the slow-replying Facebook team using my Swinburne webmail, they finally agreed to create a network just for us!

Great! Now how can I be part of it?

Easy.

If you have a Facebook account. Just head to the Settings dropdown and choose ‘Account Settings’. At your ‘My Account’ page, click on the Network tab. If you’re having trouble reaching your Network settings just follow this link: facebook.com/editaccount.php?networks.

At your Network tab, you should have a section on the right that says ‘Join a Network’, looking like this:

Enter ‘Swinburne’ as the Network name and voila! =D

The next steps you’ll have to fill in are pretty much self-explanatory. Even Swinburne Staff and those of you who’ve graduated can join this network!

For the School Email field, you’ll have to enter your email address provided by Swinburne which looks something like ‘<insert your own student id here>@students.swinburne.edu.my’. Facebook would then shoot you a verification email. You’d have to login your Swinburne webmail via this link: studentmail.swinburne.edu.my to verify your address.

Click on the link included in the email and you’re done!

Now spread the news!

P.S: I’m undecided on what should be the name of the network. It’s currently pretty long, ie. ‘Swinburne University of Techonlogy Sarawak’ Our parent campus’s network is just ‘Swinburne’.

What do you guys think? Should it be just ‘Swinburne Sarawak’ or ‘Swinburne (Sarawak Campus)’?

Uploading Image in Wordpress

By Saad Kamal in Tech on September 9th, 2008

Just some quick updates regarding swintalk.com, those of you who were facing problem uploading photos to swintalk, I have looked into the matter and I belive that it works well now. When writing a post, simply click on : “Add Media-Image” to add an image to the post. Check the screenshoots below:

Once you click the button, you should be able to see another Popped up window like the following: 

Click on “Choose file to upload”  button and select an  image from your computer.  It will instantly upload your picture and will bring you to another screen like below:

This is the final step, as you can probably see, the image is already uploaded and a small thumbnail is being displayed on the top left corner. This window allows you to change different properties of the images such as : how you want it to appear in your post - Left, Center, right etc.  (All my pictures in this post has been centered and thats why they appear in the middle. 

If your pictures are big, you can specify the size as “medium”, then it will automatically make it smaller for the post. But if users click on the pics, it will open another window and show them the big original picture.

Once everything is done, just click on “Insert into Post” and it will automatically add the picture in your post. If you face any difficulties, please dont hessitate to shoot us an email at - info[at]swintalk.com

Happy Blogging! 

Microsoft’s Answer to Google Chrome - Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2)

By Saad Kamal in News, Tech on September 4th, 2008

I’m sure you have already heard that Google has came up with an awesome web browser called - Google Chrome, which is fast, sleek & very light weight.

But now Microsoft has also joined the battle zone with Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2), and IE looks rock solid once again.

Internet Explorer 8 looks more elegant and easier to use, while adding many of the missing features. The brand-new implementation of Standards mode in Internet Explorer 8 offers the best viewing experience of web pages created according to the some of the latest web standards. That means many of the web pages that include code custom tailored for IE won’t look very good, so you need to enable a compatibility view (for some reason, intranet sites are rendered in the compatibility mode by default).

IE has brought several CSS improvements, support for data URIs, AJAX enhancements and support for DOM storage. Internet Explorer 8 has added support for suggestions in the search box and this feature is no longer restricted to Live Search. Microsoft lists many search providers that can be added: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and others.

Another cool feature that should have been added to IE7 is inline search: now you can search inside a page from an elegant bar similar to the one from Safari, Google Chrome & Firefox. 

IE8 includes a security feature that will be rarely used for non-adult sites: private browsing. InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 helps prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no evidence of your browsing or search history. (~This feature is known as Incognito in Google Chrome~)

Overall, this is a highly recommended update for IE7, even though you’ll find some sites aren’t displayed properly.

Google’s New Web Browser

By Saad Kamal in News, Tech on September 3rd, 2008

You may have heard a rumor that Google Team is working on a web browser to compete with Internet Explorer & Firefox. Many technologist previously referred to it as “GBrowser” but now in reality the browser has been just been released with and has been named “Google Chrome”. (Read my blog post on Google Chrome to know more about its features).

Google’s brand new Open Source browser is extremely Light Weight & Fast. The browser loads even faster than Internet Explorer in my Windows XP machine & doesn’t really take up much memory. Each tab is allocated separate memory blocks in the Computer’s RAM, thus there is less chance of browser hangs, memory leaks and so on. Most importantly - it has very nice Google Integration - You can create desktop shortcuts for Google Services like Gmail, Google calender etc. You can also search google directly from the address bar, access your most visited websites, visit web in *spy* mode etc.

Try it today, and you’ll forget all other web browsers that ever exisited: Download Google Chrome