All the firewalls in the world wont stop a thief walking on to your property and stealing your computer and all your data, a lesson that Dr. Zoz Brookes learned the hard way.

Another hard lesson learned, this time by the thief, was that if you really have to steal a computer don’t steal a hackers computer.

Hailing from Australia, Zoz came to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became “Dr. Zoz” after receiving a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science based on research into human-robot communication in the Robotic Life group at MIT’s Media Laboratory.

Here is a talk he gave to an appreciative crowd at DefCon 18, this years Hacking Conference telling the tale of what happened after he discovered his loss.

Note:The actual story starts around the 3:15 mark in the video, so you can skip to that point.

If you want a closer look at the presentation slides shown in the video, you can find them on the DefCon site here as a PDF file.

 

3 Legged Thing LTD have developed a stunning array of Premium Quality Carbon Fiber Tripods, precision engineered to the highest standards. Their new Rock Legend Range has three choices of Carbon Fiber Tripod Systems for you to choose from, as well as Two Alloy Tripods and their 5 section Diamond Weave Monopod, Bob.

The New Rock Legend Range of Tripods, Monopods and Multipods were inspired by the music of guitar legends from England and the United States. Each product was named for the artist that was playing in our design room when the concept was first put to paper.

Download a PDF advert here

and the eddie version here..

Official Release:

Date 16^th December 2010

They Came From Stagsden….

Like creatures of the night the 3 Legged Thing’s descended upon Earth on 1.1.11. Not to be feared, however, they have come in peace bringing a fresh approach, innovative technology and products that are built to last.

3 Legged Thing have developed a stunning new ‘Rock Legend Range’, inspired by the music of guitar legends from England and the United States. With a selection of lightweight Carbon Fiber and Magnesium Alloy tripod systems and monopods, there are also ballheads and accessories available, all engineered to the highest standards.

Introducing the first in the Carbon Fiber tripod range, X1 Brian (as in Brian May – from Queen). This Multipod incorporates the concept of a triple section central column, the part that could make this the most significant advancement in tripod technology in recent history. It’s also detachable and removable. As with all the Carbon Fiber and Alloy Multipods X2 Eddie (as in Eddie Van Halen);  X1a Adrian (Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden) and X2a Kirk (Kirk Hammett of Metallica), are all complete with a built in easily detachable monopod or if it’s a monopod alone that you’re after, the 1 Legged Thing Bob (Dylan) will be happy to assist. For top-flight professional tripods, look no further than  X3 Jimmy (as in Jimmy Page – Led Zeppelin) – a Diamond Weave Carbon Fiber tripod built for the most rigorous conditions.

With a folded height of 40 cm, Brian is the smallest of the range, and yet extends to over 1.9m! Eddie is the great all round tripod, light enough to carry around at just 1.3 kg and the sturdiest has to be Jimmy with a weight capacity of 15kg for heavier equipment, yet still lightweight at 1.6 kg. Adrian is the smallest of the Alloy tripod systems and Kirk is the sturdiest with a weight capacity of 12kg. Bob, the carbon fiber monopod will hold a whopping 14kg.

All the tripods are available to purchase online at www.3leggedthing.com from £109 or as kits with a ballhead of choice. The ballheads are available in two sizes and five exciting metallic colours, so whether it’s Stagsden Blue or Cosmic Rain, there’s a colour to suit all. Individually they are priced from £59.99. All tripod systems come with a carry case and carry strap for portability.

Every product in our catalogue comes with a 5 year warranty, and free servicing and repair out of warranty, for life. (replacement parts are available at cost to original owners who register their products on the website. Labour charges for servicing and repair are free also to those customers.)

For further information and to keep up with the latest on 3 Legged Thing visit www.3leggedthing.com or call 0844 272 7777. You can even join our facebook group www.facebook.com/my3leggedthing or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/3leggedthing. Check out the selection of video’s on You Tube www.youtube.com/user/3leggedthing

 

I am lucky enough to have recently upgraded to a Canon 7D, a beautiful but somewhat heavy DSLR. Slinging this body with a 28-135mm IS lens on the stock Canon strap was not only uncomfortable whilst walking any distance, but very annoying as it kept slipping off my shoulder.

Ok I could sling the strap across my body but then it became cumbersome when shooting. I just couldn’t pull the camera up easily enough to get the shots I needed. In fact it still wasn’t comfortable when walking any distance as it still kept moving around, and the lack of padding meant that it still dug in.

Cue ‘Blackrapid’. This innovative company owes it’s success not only to an amazing product line, but in no small part to it’s marketing, particularly it’s social networking program. It is indeed refreshing to find a company that follows it’s ethos through it’s marketing, actively engaging with it’s customers and potential customers.

This engagement is completely borne out in it’s products, really developed by photographers for photographers.

BlackRapid RS-7

With all the above in mind I have been testing the BlackRapid RS-7 strap with the Brad Mod attached.

From the BlackRapid site:

The RS-7 is specially designed to work with BlackRapid’s MODS system. It features attachment points so you can customize your strap with your choice of storage and other features. It’s constructed of ballistic nylon for extreme durability. With the RS-7, ergonomics are key. It’s designed and shaped to fit perfectly around your shoulder. The weight of your camera is evenly distributed for the ultimate in comfort. Built for speed, for when timing is everything.

I have actually come to think of the strap as more of a carry system, not quite a bag but much more than a strap.

You can adjust it so that when you are not using your camera, on a photowalk or on location, it sits very comfortably at the base of your back. I actually started using it in the studio for noon tripod product shots, it keeps the camera ready to hand but nicely tucked out of the way.

Release the ‘bumper’ buckle and you can very quickly and easily bring the camera to eye level to take the shot. The beauty of the strap is that the camera slides freely on the strap whilst the strap itself remains snuggly in place.

I have also added the ‘Brad Mod’ to my strap. This is an easily affixed smaller strap that connects the front of the strap to the back under your arm holding the main strap even more securely in place.

In Conclusion

Plus Points:

This is not just another run-of-the-mill camera strap, it is indeed a carry system.

It is so comfortable that you could nearly forget you had a camera strapped to you.

The strap gives quick free and easy access to your camera when you need to take the shot.

Very well engineered quality manufacturing.

Negatives:

Fitting instructions could be more in-depth. I’m not on my own in having to pay a visit to the videos on Blackrapid’s website to make sure I was fitting the strap correctly.

Having said that, the videos were well presented and extremely instructional.

Blownpixel says buy it you won’t  regret it..

 

3 Legged Thing Limited is a new, innovative, fresh and powerful brand of tripods brought to you by 7 professional photographers in the sleepy village of Stagsden, North Bedfordshire, England.

The launch date of our incredible Rock Legend Range of tripods and monopods is 1/1/11 and to commemorate the launch 3 Legged Thing are sending a limited edition travel tripod, Brian, around the world on a mission to raise money for charity, and put some of the world’s most interesting, if not famous locations squarely on the map.

The Plan:
Brian will leave Stagsden sometime in late January to begin his journey across the globe. As he arrives at each destination, the receiving photographer will photograph themselves with Brian, take a photo of their location – that which is most representative of their location, using Brian, and make a short viral video clip so that they can blog it along the way and keep you all informed…

They have informed the Guinness World Of Records of their attempt to complete this mission, and are awaiting approval as an official record attempt. Of course, non-approval will not make a blind bit of difference – Brian is going on tour!

Side missions:

• To get Brian around the London Marathon
• To get Brian in a Formula 1 car, and at a race
• To get Brian to jump out of an aeroplane (with a parachute of course!)
• To get as many celebrities to appear on TV or video holding Brian and declaring “My name is …….. and this is my 3 Legged Thing, Brian”.
• To produce an end of year Tour T-Shirt which will go on public sale for charity
• To produce a hardback book with all of the images and blog entries from Brian’s travels, which will go on public sale with all profits to charity

To produce a DVD documentary which will go on public sale with all profits to charity
To raise over £1million for our dedicated charities

 

Two of my photos were featured in Explore on Flickr, one of them managed to get to number six out of 500 worldwide with over 1500 views.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to go and look.

The shots are of a coffee cup with the bokeh simulating the steam on one and the coffee spilling on the other.

Wikipedia definition: In photography, bokeh (pronounced /bō’kɛ/) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—”good” and “bad” bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

 

When the site was displayed using the .com domain it threw up an invalid api key error.

Here is the fix:

Some applications may be hosted on multiple domains. For example, many content management systems push the same content to different domains (e.g.example.com and example.net) and wish to have that content single-sourced. Since Google Maps API keys are generated per domain, you’ll need to generate separate keys for each domain and configure your application to use the correct one. The easiest way to do this in JavaScript is to dynamically generate the 

tag using 

and assigning the correct domain-specific key within the src attribute’s URL as a parameter. In doing so, you’ll need to pre-generate and hardcode the list of keys within your application.

Create an object which contains a mapping between domain names and its corresponding Google Maps API keys. Use 

to retrieve the domain name your application is running against, and pass it into the object to select the appropriate key.

Below is a JavaScript snippet you can copy and paste into your application. Replace property names labeled 

on the left with your list of domains and assign to each entry its corresponding and unique Google Maps API key.

When using the snippet above, be sure to include it within your HTML document above any script tags or JavaScript containing references to Google Maps API objects.

 

Iron Baby is an amazing ‘spoof’ of the Iron Man film series.

Made by a French Canadian autodidact director, Patrick Boivin. For most of what you can see on his YouTube channel, he wrote the script, operated the light, the camera, the directing, the editing, the animation and the special effects… For some of them, I also made the sound and the music.

 

In a 2009 Department of Health survey of 2,000 adults, four in 10 admitted they didn’t know those facts about calories in alcohol.

The survey also revealed that the average wine drinker consumes 2,000 extra calories each month. Over the course of a year, that’s the equivalent of eating 184 bags of crisps or 38 roast beef dinners.

Calories in alcohol are empty and extra-fattening

Wine, beer, cider, spirits are made by fermenting and distilling natural starch and sugar. The high sugar means alcohol contains lots of calories – seven calories a gram in fact, almost as many as pure fat!

Calories from alcohol are ‘empty calories’ – they have no nutritional value.

It’s not just the calories that are a problem for our waistlines. Drinking alcohol reduces the amount of fat your body burns for energy. While we store nutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat in our bodies, we can’t store alcohol. So our systems want to get rid of it – and doing so takes priority. All of the other processes that should be taking place (including absorbing nutrients and burning fat) are interrupted.

Alcohol and appetite

Along with drinking alcohol comes the temptation to snack, once you’ve had a drink your will-power goes and you give-in to the take away on the way home, the bag of crisps or chocolate that you have been refraining from before. According to the Department of Health survey, almost one in three people order crisps, nuts or pork scratchings to accompany a drink, while nearly a fifth regularly opt for takeaway food.

More than six out of 10 drinkers have an unhealthy breakfast if they have a hangover.

How many calories are in my drink?

With a pint of bitter the same as a medium slice of pizza, and a standard size ‘ready to drink’ bottle (‘alcopop’) the same as 100g of cookies, the calories from alcohol soon add up…

Gin or vodka and tonic =126

gin or vodka with diet drink = 56

Dark rum and coke =142

Medium glass of white wine (175ml) =130

Medium glass of red wine (175ml) =120

Bottle of wine (white) =555

Bottle of wine (red) =510

5% Lager (pint) =240-50

Cider (pint) =180-250

Stout (pint) =210

Bitter/Ale =180-230

Liqueur (50ml) =100 -170

Brandy (50ml) =110

Whiskey (25ml) =55

Mixed drink (Ready to drink) (275ml bottle) =160-228

The Government guidelines recommend that women should not regularly exceed 2-3 units daily and that men should not regularly exceed 3-4 units daily. Drinking within these guidelines, and trying to give yourself a couple of days off alcohol every week, will help you avoid piling on the pounds.

 

It seems that their PR or marketing companies had uploaded the programs and failed to provide a disc of originals to the organisations. The first couple of times this happend I put down to lethargy in the organisations internal marketing departments not wanting to be bothered to send me the files, but after the fifth time it seemed to be a trend.

So I had permission to use the footage but no way of embedding clean visuals without the YouTube logo, I also would much prefer to host and control the footage myself.

There are a few online sites that will rip the video for you and allow you to save it as .FLV or .MP4.

Some examples are:
http://keepvid.com/
http://vixy.net/

These worked ok but were quite slow and wouldn’t rip the HD versions of the video. After some searching I stumbled across MacTubes.

This neat little app (yes Mac only I’m afraid), is free to download and use and works fantastically well. It allows you to search, play and download videos from YouTube even in HD 720p and 1080p versions if they are available.

System requirements:

• Only for Mac OS X.
• Universal binary application supported PowerPC / Intel(R) processor. (Maybe)
• Mac OS X 10.4.2 or higher / Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.(Maybe)
• Safari 2.0 or higher / Adobe Flash Player Plug-ins 9.0 or higher

Download:

http://brpg.hp.infoseek.co.jp/mactubes/index_en.html

Screenshots:

 

Everyone needs to exercise.

It amazes me as a personal trainer, the amount of people I meet who do no exercise at all. They get out of bed, drive to work, sit at a desk, drive home from work then sit on the sofa and watch t.v, before going to bed. Does this sound like you? Most adults today spend the majority of their time sitting in front of a computer or a TV. Our increasingly sedentary lifestyle has led to obesity rates higher than this country has ever seen before. Even our children are battling obesity. Your children learn eating and lifestyle habits from you, so if your inactive you can expect your children to be also.

I’m sure for most of you guys who are stuck behind a desk all day, you probably think you don’t have time to workout, or your not overweight, so it doesn’t matter?*
Wrong!*

I’m sure most of you spend copious amounts of money and time protecting your computer form viruses, make sure its running smoothly and keeping at its optimal health. Yet you do nothing for yourselves?! Read on to find out why its important for us all to exercise and simple ways to do it.

What happens if I don’t workout?

Before the age of physical maturity at about 25 years, our body is continually growing and developing and during this phase muscles and the entire body stays strong even without specific exercise. After we reach the age of 30, we basically have two options available to us. We can either begin the long process of becoming weaker or we can work to maintain our strength for the rest of our life.

After this point, if the body does not receive the necessary stimulus to trigger muscle growth, a slow process of muscle wasting begins. This loss of muscle tissue hastens the degenerative processes and conditions that characterize the dreaded ageing process.

Muscles and the bones they are attached to become weaker, joints deteriorate without strong muscles to support and cushion them; the metabolism slows (the rate the body burns fuel) allowing body fat to accumulate; body shape and appearance change. All body systems weaken including the immune system leaving one exposed to life threatening disease and illness.

The really good news is that it does not matter how old you are when you start, 60 year old muscles respond to strength training and exercise in exactly the same way 20 year old muscles respond – they get stronger. It is easily possible to become 100 to 175 percent stronger, even stronger than you have ever been in your life.

“Being thin doesn’t automatically mean you’re not fat”

Doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas — invisible to the naked eye — could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin.

“Being thin doesn’t automatically mean you’re not fat,” Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create “fat maps” showing where people store fat.

According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim.

Without a clear warning signal — like a rounder middle — doctors worry that thin people may be lulled into falsely assuming that because they’re not overweight, they’re healthy. Just because someone is lean doesn’t make them immune to diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease,

Even people with normal Body Mass Index scores — a standard obesity measure that divides your weight by the square of your height — can have surprising levels of fat deposits inside. They believe that internal fat disrupts the body’s communication systems. The fat enveloping internal organs might be sending the body mistaken chemical signals to store fat inside organs like the liver or pancreas. This could ultimately lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, or heart disease.

The good news is that internal fat can be easily burned off through exercise or even by improving your diet. Even if you don’t see it on your bathroom scale, caloric restriction and physical exercise have an aggressive effect on visceral fat.

How to keep active:

At Work

• Walk to work if you can, or park as far away as possible and walk the rest.
• At lunch, go for a walk/jog or bike ride.
• Get a personal trainer to come to your office at lunch. That way your committed to working out.
• Have a gym near work? Go lift weights or ride the stationary bike on your lunch break.
• Instead of sending an email across the building, get up and walk to your co-workers office and talk in person.
• Take the stairs instead of the lift.
• Live close to work? Bike or walk instead of driving.
• Arrange for your office to have a group trainer visit at lunch times. Its great for team building, fills you with energy and will make your afternoon far more productive!
• Make an appointment in your diary to workout, the same as you would for a meeting and keep to it.

At Home

• Go for a walk/jog before or after work…or both! There are lots of ‘early bird’ classes and gyms open now.
• Work in the garden or mow the grass.
• While watching TV, lift some weights, do an exercise dvd, walk on a treadmill.
• Walk the dog–they need exercise too!
• Get a personal trainer to come to your own home either before you start work or when you finish.
• Play with the kids.
• Housework burns a huge amount of calories.

Spare Time

• Plan your holidays to be as active as possible i.e biking, hiking, backpacking, walking, swimming.
• Take your kids to the park for a picnic. Take a Frisbee, a football or other games and just have fun as a family!
• Go out with the family swimming.
• Turn the music up and dance in your living room!
• Like to golf? Walk instead of renting a cart.
• Join an adult sports team. Gym or just start working out with a friend.
• Get out and about where you live. Instead of spending weekends at home in front of the t.v, go out for a walk. Dorset has the most amazing countryside and beaches in the country. Make the most of it.

All it takes is a little creativity and a bit of effort to fit some extra activity into your day! Try to find things that you enjoy or that you can easily incorporate into your daily routine so that extra activity simply becomes a way of life. Give it a try.

Your office based workout.
Try this great little workout at your office, you only need a couple of meter’s space. Do only as much as you are able to and slowly build up to completing the reps and times. Listen to your body, if your feeling tired or unwell, stop.

1 minute skipping
30 sec. alternate squat thrusts
15 press ups
REPEAT X3

1 minute skipping
30 sec. squats – finish as low as you can, making sure the knee does not travel over the line of the toe.
30 sec. cycle crunches fast then 30 sec. slow – 1 leg in per second.
REPEAT X3

30 sec. burpee’s
30 sec. split squats (static lunges), (each leg)
1 minute plank
REPEAT X3

Followed by a whole body stretch for 5 minutes.

Remember folks, fitness should be fun, if its not, change it and find something you enjoy!

For further advice on Personal training, group classes or just general health and fitness questions, don’t hesitate to email me on charmaine@trainwithcharmaine.com or call 0782 444 6561.