Andy Kemp

I have been using my Nikon D50 now for almost a month and learning lots about it and learning how to improve my technique, both with the camera and off the camera (photoshop).

Any how I took it up to the bridge that goes over the Edinburgh City Bypass the other night and experimented with the Exposures of about 30 seconds, an aperture of f25 and an ISO of 200. I used a tripod and took the photo, this is the outcome:

I had to edit the pictures a little bit compensate the exposure etc… but on the whole I Was pretty chuffed with the outcome. I was literally only there for 2 minutes to take these photos.

I am starting to play around with the camera now and constantly wanting to try new things out and experiment with it. I am far from an amateur I would say but I am learning, and more to the point enjoying learning more and more. I quite like the night shots as you get the great natural effect with the lights of the vehicles. However I am wanting to take it into the city centre some time to try it out where there is lots of extra artificial light from the shops etc…

Since upgrading my laptop I have started to look at XP Mode in more depth, my initial view on it was that it was just a preconfigured XP PC that you ran as a virtual on your Windows 7 PC/Laptop when you needed to access a program that does not run on Windows 7.

I was so wrong! I did not realise that when you install applications on the XP Mode PC it creates a sub menu in the Windows Virtual PC menu and would enable you to run the application as if it was a Windows 7 App. As a lot of you know you cannot run the MS Exchange System Manager (ESM) on Windows 7 so I installed it on the Windows XP Mode Virtual and there it was in the menu.

I had to do some other work on the virtual, join it to the domain, unsave the previously saved credentials, but it worked I could now run ESM on Windows 7.

I recently upgraded my laptop’s hardware with 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD (for about £130 RAM £65 and HDD £65), in order to use the full 4GB RAM I needed to install Windows 7 x64, which installed nice a quickly via USB :) see my previous post on that one.

The reason for upgrading was primarily to provision enough resources to maintain a decent performing laptop whilst running 2 VM’s simultaneously 2GB of RAM just was not enough and I was running low in Disk space.

I installed the beta of Office 2010 and then installed the other applications that I used on a regular basis, MSCVMM, Tweetdeck, Google Pack, Windows Live, I then went to install the Cisco VPN client but this was a case of “Computer Says No” after doing some digging it turned out that the Cisco VPN Client is not supported on the x64 platform, Cisco only developed a 32 bit version. so I had everything else running on my laptop but the VPN Client (which would give me a real issue if I needed to connect when out of the office).

Any how after some further digging I came across an alternative: ShrewSoft VPN: http://www.shrew.net/download

Its not even a 3mb download relatively simple install and no reboot required.

after installation I ran it and looked in the file menu to see if there was an import option on the off chance for a cisco pcf file and there was, so I imported my pcf file hit connect, entered my VPN credentials and was connected.

For this you will need:

1. Windows 7 DVD or install files
2. 1 x 4GB USB Flash Disk
3. a pc that supports booting from a usb device.

Follow these steps to the word and you should have an up and running USB Flash Drive that you can installing Windows 7 (or Vista) from.

1. Plug in the USB flash drive and backup the data on it (if you want to keep it). Make a note of the drive letter in this example I am going to use F:\ as that is the drive I have on my PC.

2. Open a command prompt with admin rights.  I have a short cut on my desktop that I right click on and select run as Administrator.

3. You will now need to make some changes on the USB flash drive using the diskpart tool from your command prompt.

1. Load diskpart by running the command “diskpart” in your command prompt:
   
2. run the command “list disk” :
   
3. Assuming that you only have 1 hard drive your USB flash drive should be listed as Disk 1. So follow the commands below:
4. You will need to select the disk you want to work on (Disk 1) so type: “select disk 1”
5. You then need to clean it so type “clean”
6. Then you need to create the partition primary, so type the following command: “create primary partition”
7. Select that new partition by typing in “select partition 1”
8. Set it as active by typing “active”
9. Format the drive with NTFS by the following command: “format fs=ntfs”
10. Assign a drive letter to the device by the “assign” command
11. Finally exit from diskpart by the “exit” command. However do not close the command prompt you need it for the next step
12. Here is what your diskpart command history should look like:
    

4. Copy the boot files from the install files to the flash drive:

1. insert your Windows 7 DVD in to your DVD Drive
2. From the opened command prompt type “E:” (assuming that your DVD Drive letter is E)
3. The go into the boot directory by “cd boot”
4. then update the flash drive the the Windows 7 boot manager by running the following command: “bootsect.exe /NT60 f:” again assuming that g: is your flash drives drive letter
5. here is what the command history should have looked like:
   

5. Copy all the files from the DVD to the flash drive. The easiest way I found to do that was either a cut and paste or select all files on your DVD and then right click and use the “send to” menu and send them to the removable media

6. Boot up your PC and select to boot from USB. for Dells the key is usually f12.

I am guessing that this is the same as what you would do for Windows Server 2008/2008r2 so I will be give this a try soon.

I came across this error today when trying to Remote Desktop onto a windows XP PC I received and error saying that I could not connect due to the awgina.dll.

Now I am not too clued up on what gina does what but I was convinced that the gina that should be loaded was msgina.dll. So I did some digging in the Registry. My first thought was to look in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and in there I saw a value for the gina location pointing to awgina.dll, change this to msgina.dll and reboot your PC and you should be able to RDP to it with no problems.

NB please be careful when editing the registry. It is done at your own risk I cannot be held responsible for any errors/problems that you may get from editing your own registry.

I have been after a new Digital Camera for some time now and really been after a D-SLR as the digital compact camera’s I have always settled for are a little on the “naff” side, they take 1 – 2 seconds to actually take a photo when inside and then there are not may functions on it.

I really wanted to get my hands on a D-SLR, after playing around with (sorry I mean using) my brothers Nikon I really wanted to get something similar. Well I managed to get on, its not brand new, its was my Nephew-in-law’s old Nikon D50 and I have to say I am rather chuffed to bits with it. It came with a standard 18-55mm lens but I have also acquired a 70-300mm lens too which I have to say is superb! now all I need to do is learn how to use it.

The fact that it now takes the shot when I push the button is brilliant. With all the snow around just now I am kinda excited about what I can snap at!

I am also now using Google’s Picasa, I was using Flikr but as I had a lot of other stuff with Google I thought I would stick with that, I am only using it as an online storage facility and 20GB for £3.50 a year, well I cannot grumble.

you can see my online public galleries at: http://picasaweb.google.com/AndyGKemp

I hope to have some more photos up there soon and hope to improve the picture quality by learning how to take shots properly.

The one question I am now asking is what software to use? I have GIMP installed and I have to admit for simple things I like it but it is a bit hard to find your way around in it, or do I buy Photoshop CS4 or Photoshop Elements?