Blatant Plug: We have just launched a brand new course at PCMech University which is designed to give you tactics you need to know on how to take professional photographs using any standard digital camera. No, you don’t need the expensive model to make good images. The secret is in the person holding the camera, not the equipment (in most cases). Come by PCMech University for more information.

But, that’s not the purpose of this article. I promise. Let’s say you are taking some cool shots with your camera. What can you do with them besides impress yourself?

Go Quasi-Pro Online

Anybody who is a hobbyist photographer would love to make some money doing what they love - namely taking pictures. The Internet makes it much easier to do.

In the old days, you would need to make the right contacts and even strike up a deal with an agency. You’d have to send in your negatives and get approved, yada yada. Today, stock photography sites are online. And with photography being mostly digital today, you can now simply upload your photos.

One such site is iStockPhoto. iStockPhoto is a large online marketplace for stock photography. Anybody looking to buy a photo for use on the web or in print advertising, for instance, can come to this site and buy rights to use a photo. That is what stock photography is all about. As a photographer, you can submit your photos to iStockPhoto and earn money if anybody purchases your work. Pay rates usually hover around 20% of the purchase price. You can set the purchase price yourself (ranging from $1 up to $40).

Now, to keep the quality of the collection up, yes you do need to get approval from Istockphoto before you can participate. They will check the quality of the work as well as any possible copyright issues and appropriate model releases (if there are people in your photo).

Other sites you can check out are ShutterStock (pays 25 cents per purchase, which can add up if you keep things fresh) ShutterPoint, Fotolia (between 30 cents and $1 per download) and Dreamstime (pays between 50% and 80% commission).

Some Tips

As I end off this article, here is some quick advice if you want to start making money doing this:

1. Takes LOTS of pictures. As any photographer will tell you, you snap snap snap to end up with a few good ones.
2. Pay attention to what sells and take those kinds of photos. Feed the demand.

If you take it seriously, then yes, you can make money with your digital camera. It doesn’t have to be a full-time job, either. It could be a spare time thing and still work out in your favor.

1. It’s too big to fit on the desk.
2. It uses an insanely thick cable with a Centronics connector to connect to your computer.
3. Your computer (especially if a laptop) doesn’t have the port where that insanely thick cable is supposed to plug into.

Assuming you can acquire a printer ribbon (if dot matrix) or replacement toner (if laser) for it, you can resurrect that printer using modern tech.

Converting Centronics to USB: Only takes a single cable to do this. And being the printer is old it’s more or less guaranteed to be recognized by your computer without the need to install any drivers whatsoever.

Connect printer directly to the router: Requires a miniature print server. This connects via Ethernet directly to the router and network-enables the printer. No connection to the computer required (but some setup does need to take place.)

Connect printer over Bluetooth wireless: Requires an (expensive) adapter. Also may require another (not-so-expensive) USB Bluetooth adapter if your PC isn’t Bluetooth-enabled. The adapter mentioned for the printer does Centronics and USB! Wireless range is stated to be 100 meters (328 feet) but in practical application you’re “safe” with about 25 meters (82 feet) at the most. Works well in most instances. The best part is that you can have the printer in a completely separate room - leaving you more desk space.

Some quick truths about older printers

Dot matrix printers while loud and have a slow PPM (page per minute) speed have two distinct advantages.

1. Tractor feed paper, if available, is dirt cheap.
2. You can easily go for an entire year without having to change the printer ribbon.

Older business-grade HP LaserJet printers also have a slow PPM but have the following advantages.

1. New toner, shockingly, is sometimes cheaper than inkjet replacement cartridges.
2. Toner lasts far longer than inkjet cartridges do.
3. Biz-grade LaserJets can be easily serviced. Chances are high that there’s a local certified HP tech close to where you live - and he does house calls.
4. Older LaserJets require no stupid proprietary drivers because support is built-in to the OS. Windows, Mac and Linux will “see” these printers with no fuss, no muss.

No thanks we said and went over to eBay and found the exact same part number, brand new, for $80. We placed the order and the part shipped the next day. A 375+% savings isn’t bad at all.

So the next time you need a part for something off-warranty, consider eBay. There are tons of surplus resellers which are running constant “Buy It Now” auctions so you can get exactly what you need.

Well, give your overclocked PC a power reducing tune-up with the help of this Tech ARP article titled “Reducing The Power Consumption Of Overclocked PCs“. From what I gathered in the article, the steps which decrease power usage have no noticable impact on the performance of your overclocked PC, so you have nothing to lose… except some power consumption.

After all, if you are overclocking, you probably like to tweak… this helps you make more tweaks to save some cash to apply to your next project.

The Tandy 1000, introduced in 1984, was manufactured to compete directly with the IBM PC. The one I had came standard 128Kb of RAM, one double density 5.25″ floppy disk drive and a 16 color RGB monitor. As add-ons, dad had the foresight to also purchase a matching dot-matrix printer and a Tandy joystick. The system ran on MS DOS 2.11 (maybe the most stable Microsoft OS to date?) and came bundled with DeskMate 1.0. DeskMate was pretty remarkable for it’s time. It was a word processor, spreadsheet, database and calendaring suite that fit on a single 5.25″ floppy…let’s see Microsoft Office do that!

Messing with DeskMate (not me and version 2, but still the same DeskMate)

That’s what I cut my teeth on. There was nobody to ask questions to, no classes to take. I taught myself BASIC programming from the rudimentary manual that came with the system and hours of trial and error. We still had this system up until last year when an unfortunate flood at my parents’ washed this part of my past away…but the memories remain.

What was your first computer? How did it all start for you? Leave a comment and share with the community at large. I would sure be interested in hearing about it.

–START OF THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE–

It has been announced that DirectX 11 will include a completely new type of graphics rendering called ray-tracing. Wait a minute. It’s not new. In fact, it’s been around since the 80’s. How come it took so long to be implemented for public use? How does it work? What advantages does it have over current-gen graphics? These questions are about to be answered.

Ray-Tracing

Ray-Tracing was first introduced in 1986, and is basically defined as tracing the paths of light as they interact with objects. This is essentially what our eyes do, so it creates quite a vivid and realistic picture. Unfortunately it wasn’t practical to use in everyday graphics because it took up so much raw power to compute. It was used scarcely in the 90’s, but only for demonstrations and now in the 21st century with multi-core technology it is finally possible to make Ray-Tracing practical.

So what happened? Well the movie-industry took advantage of it right off the bat. Many special effects were ray-traced to give a more realistic look. The movie Beowulf was entirely ray-traced. It wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close, and a heck of a lot better than what people have now. To give you an example of how much power it takes to ray-trace though, a person created a video of real-time ray tracing of a convertible on YouTube, and it takes the combined effort of THREE PS3 consoles. You can check it out here, it’s pretty cool. Remember each PS3 has 8 processors (6 active), so we are looking at over 20 processors for one, non-moving object.

Hmm. This is starting to explain some things. Like Why Nvidia did not support DX10.1 on their 9-series cards, and not have any new technology on the cards other than smaller chip-sizes. They realized that the old ways of graphics are dying. What’s the point of Directx 10.1 anyway? Rasterisation, what Nvidia and ATI use, has reached its peak. They both have perfected the art of essentially faking graphics. Now it’s time for the real stuff. It’s an open field, and apparently Intel is planning on joining the competition. They recently have been experimenting with combining a processor with the graphics card with successful results. This could spell bad news for both ATI and Nvidia, but knowing the way Intel prices things I’m sure there will still be close competition.

An interesting thing about ray-tracing is that it is fairly scalable. With rasterisation, you notice less and less with each improvement. For example the new 8-core skull-trail beast from Intel hardly earns gamers a few FPS on rasterisation. For ray-tracing however, it will be exactly 8 times better than a single-core. So what will this do? Well there will probably be a new multi-core processor every couple months, possibly reaching over 100 before 2010. If each has implemented graphics with ray-tracing technology, you can see the benefit of that over getting a separate graphics card.

Benefits of Ray Tracing

By now you probably want to see what ray-tracing can do compared to rasterizing. Well take a look at this image on the right. As you can plainly see, the ray-tracing image has more realistic reflections and shadows. Nvidia has worked their butts with their 3D shader processors, but they could never get anything close to this. It’s very encouraging to see the difference, but remember we are a ways off from getting objects of that clarity interactive on our computers. Directx 11 is only going to support a few limited things, so that the transition to ray-tracing is gradual, and not all at once. I won’t be surprised if Ray-Tracing Processing Units (RPU’s) are implemented on the Nvidia 10 series cards. At first maybe only characters are ray-traced. Then as new hardware is introduced, textures and objects within certain draw distance are ray-traced, until eventually everything as far as the eye can see is ray-traced and rasterisation becomes a thing of the past.

And This Matters Because…

Is this a good thing? Maybe. Everything would be a lot more predictable and you would be able to confidently tell which brand of graphics card is better just by looking at the data sheet, unlike today, where the only real way of telling which of two cards are better is by rigorously testing them in 3D programs, measuring their temperatures, calculating wattage, etc. So there will be two consequences. Either we will finally end the number game by being able to really tell what is what without any background info, or, more likely, it will simply enter the next stage of confusing the common public in return for profit.

We have a couple of cats and a dog, all of which shed a good bit. Of course, this creates a problem as whenever I clean out my computer, there is an abundance of pet hair which accumulates on the inside (having hardwood floors doesn’t help this either) of the computer.

If you do a Google search, you can find a variety of methods for managing this, from the very simple to the really extreme, however the most effective method I have found is that by simply moving the computer case off the floor, the hair doesn’t accumulate nearly as much. Granted, you do have to give up some desk space to accomplish this, but overall it is very effective.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to keep the pet hair out, please post them.

• Blowing out the inside of the case with compressed air.
• Wiping the case (not the components!) with a slightly damp cloth.
• Making sure all the connections and plugs are tight.

Of course, before you do any of this, you should take your computer outside (you don’t want to get dust everywhere after all) and make sure you ground yourself before opening your computer.

It takes about 10-15 minutes and I do this about every 6 months, give or take.

VPN (Virtual Personal Network) is very convent way to connect while you are away from your normal network. This is a network protocol that builds a private path or tunnel from your computer to the network you want to connect to. A lot of companies utilize this protocol for their employees to connect to the business network while traveling or working from home.

As with all network devices, once you leave the safety of the local area network (LAN) and connect to the Wide Area Network (WAN) or World Wide Web (WWW) your protocol is subject to attack by the unscrupulous that inhabit the WWW. Hackers, thieves, and criminals have tools to defeat a normal VPN’s security. To be safest, you or your company should invest in a commercial VPN package.

A commercial package will have encryption as part of the VPN. With the encryption you will have two keys, a private key and a public key. Only you know the password to the private key and only the company knows the public key. For a hacker to gain access to the encrypted data you are sending back and forth on the VPN they have to crack both keys the public and the private key. By the time they have cracked the key you will have ended your session and move away from their locality. That is unless you establish your VPN and leave it on for a long period of time, a very long time. At this time the best programs that can recover passwords take anywhere from two days to a week to get the password to a 16 bit encrypted key. Newer programs use 58 bit or 64 bit encryption keys.

So now you want to know if your VPN is encrypted? Well one way to know is ask your IT department. Another is when you installed your VPN did you have a ‘Certificate’ that you had to install and then create a password? If you have a certificate and had to create a password then type random characters on the key board to create the key you have encryption.

If you don’t have encryption I suggest you contact your IT Director or Manager and find out why your VPN is open to anyone who wants to connect while you are connected. An open VPN is an invitation not only to the data you are transferring back and forth but to the sending and receiving computers. It is like an open door on a hot summer day, any thing can and will come in to the house.

To read more about the VPN Protocol see this RFC:
Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol
http://www.diy-computer-repair.com/vpn.html

About The Author: Monte Russell is a certified Systems Engineer with a degree in Computer Electronics Technology, MCSE, CNA, A+, and many commercial hardware certificates. His web site www.diy-computer-repair.com offers insight in to self computer repair. His free monthly newsletter is always intriguing and full of insights about computing. Subscribe for free at http://www.diy-computer-repair.com/newsletter-signup.html

I inform that yes I use a Microsoft Lifecam VX-3000. It does the job and does it well for live streaming.

However I will be the first to admit it’s not perfect. There are drawbacks to webcams, such as:

Tiny lens

The itty bitty lens only allows for the bare minimum of focal length. In layman’s terms that means anything over 10 feet away will most likely be out of focus. If you’re sitting in front of your computer, you’re good to go. If it’s far away.. well.. don’t expect a perfect picture.

Light overcompensation

Aside from the manual focus ring on most webcams, all functions of the webcam are software based. While this is convenient it is at the same time very frustrating.

The single largest complaint of anyone who uses a webcam is that “static” appears when the light is too low. What the webcam tries to do at that point is “grab” light from anywhere in the frame, and if it finds none it will literally fabricate pseudo-light which appears to the eye as static.

Minimal data transfer

Your webcam is most likely connected via USB 2.0 spec. As anyone knows, USB is great but not exactly fast concerning transfer speed. Your best bet is to stick to 320×240 resolution. Some webcams do 640×480 (and even 800×600 for some), but the end result is that you’re pushing thru USB 2.0.

If you ever wondered “Why does my video look so much better at a low frame rate compared to high?”, it’s because the lower frame rates allow for higher bigger-data frames at the expense of frame rate.

The advantages of using a camcorder

Big lens with true optical focus

The larger lens makes a huge difference, and additionally has true optical focus. Even if you were standing 50 feet away from the camera, you would still be in focus.

Auto-focus

The vast majority of webcams don’t have auto-focus. Camcorders do and they adjust very quickly.

Colors that look more “real”

Again this is from the larger lens; it’s able to capture more of what the true image looks like and the difference can be seen easily.

Firewire

Firewire (IEEE 1394) is obviously superior to USB in every way. You can transfer much more data over the wire.

Vastly superior microphone

The on-board microphone on almost all camcorders have built-in noise reduction and compression. If you’re right next to the cam it’s almost the same as speaking into a vocal microphone.

It’s sadly true that on even the most expensive webcams the microphones are absolute junk. Not so on camcorders.

Any disadvantages?

There are two.

The camcorder is bulky and usually requires to be mounted on a tripod. If you can deal with the bulky-ness of the camcorder, go for it.

Connecting devices over Firewire, while great, may sometimes cause your computer and/or software to “think” about it more because of the high data transfer rate. USB 2.0 never has this problem. While it’s true you can run a Firewire-based webcam and still multitask without issue, periodically you may encounter a software lock-up (usually your camera software). This happens no matter what OS you’re using, be it Windows or OS X.