Wednesday, 31 March 2010
UK Parliament - Free Parliamentary training
Parliamentary Outreach offers free training to organisations wanting to know more about the UK Parliament and how they can get involved with the work of the House of Commons and House of Lords.
Each training session is tailored to the specific interests of your organisation. It could include any aspect of Parliamentary work
NumberQuotes Gives Perspective to Your Statistics, Is Great for Presentations - Lifehacker
Numbers—especially big ones—can seem pretty abstract. One way to help people better understand them: Provide context based on numbers they do understand. Free web service NumberQuotes spits out related statistics containing any number you throw at it.
For example, if you wanted to give context to a number like "50 billion", punching it into NumberQuotes returns things like "the 2008 GDP for Bulgaria," or "50 billion dollars would buy a 2010 Cadillac Escalade for everyone living in Indianapolis City, Indiana." Similarly, punching in "15" returns "the population of Friendship town, Oklahoma," "15 iPhones would buy 1.49 MacBooks," and, strangest of all, "15 hot dogs laid next to each other would reach as far as 1.18 dollar bills." All you do to get a quote for your number is type it in on NumberQuotes' home page—you'll be instantly greeted with a bunch of other statistics pertaining to that number (or one close to it). Some of them make a lot of sense, and some are just downright random.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Astonishing sculpture of church is carved... into a single grain of SAND.
A talented micro-sculptor has proven you really can see the world in a grain of sand - after carving this incredible church from a single granule that fits inside the eye of a needle.
Willard Wigan, 52 made a name for himself by sculpting tiny recreations of everything from Barack Obama and his family, to Neil Armstrong on the moon's surface.
He was challenged by his girlfriend Sarah Slade, who lives at the foot of Chosen Hill in Churchdown, near Gloucester, to sculpt the hilltop parish church St Bartholomew's.
Micro view: Willard Wigan carved the St Bartholomew's church into this grain of sand and then put it in the eye of a needle. It's so small that it can't be seen with the naked eye
Friday, 26 March 2010
Free AVG Rescue CD ~ Essential for your rescue toolkit.
Key technologies
- Anti-virus: protection against viruses, worms and Trojans
- Anti-spyware: protection against spyware, adware and identity theft
- Administration toolkit: system recovery tools
The AVG Rescue CD is essentially a portable version of AVG Anti-Virus supplied through Linux distribution. It can be used in the form of a bootable CD or bootable USB flash drive to recover your computer when the system cannot be loaded normally, such as after an extensive or deep-rooted virus infection. In short, the AVG Rescue CD enables you to fully remove infections from an otherwise inoperable PC and render the system bootable again.
Apart from the usual AVG functions (malware detection and removal, updates from internet or external device, etc.), the AVG Rescue CD also contains the following set of administration tools:
- Midnight Commander - a two-panel file manager
- Windows Registry Editor– simple registry editor for more experienced users
- TestDisk - powerful hard drive recovery tool
- Ping - to test the availability of network resources (servers, domains, IP addresses)
- Common Linux programs and services– vi text editor, OpenSSH daemon, ntfsprogs etc.
Free of charge
The AVG Rescue CD is a free-to-use product that anyone can download. This also covers any new program versions and virus database updates. If you have any other paid AVG license, you are also entitled to receive our full technical support.
Thursday, 25 March 2010
O'Reilly Tech Books as iphone Apps - £2.99 in iTunes App Store - HotUKDeals Forum
Most people who work in IT will know that O'Reilly books are very expensive. I'm sat at my desk looking at a 'Learning Java' book that cost me the thick end of £30.Well, whilst browsing the app store on my iPhone I found that O'Reilly have bundled a load of their books up in the Stanza ebook reader app and are selling each title for peanuts (£2.99 seems to be the most common price point). That 'Learning Java' book I paid £28 for? £2.99.
Hard-up Scots councils spend £115,000 every _day_ on consultants - Scotsman.com News
SCOTTISH local authorities have paid out more than £40 million in fees to consultancy firms in the past year, new figures have revealed.As councils wrestle with looming budget cuts, data released by 28 of Scotland's 32 councils showed £42m – roughly £115,000 a day – was spent on management and finance advice, with many consultants hired to help councils cut costs.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Macmillan to allow professors to change textbooks online, on the fly
Macmillan, one of the largest textbook publishers in the world, is introducing a new software for instructors that will allow them to change the online versions of textbooks that their students use.According to the New York Times, with DynamicBooks, "Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations."
Learn a New Photography Trick or Two; Entire BBC Photo Masterclasses Now Available Online - #Lifehacker
If you loved browsing the archives of National Geographic when they opened up their vaults last November and found yourself wanting to take your own impressive nature shots, you'll definitely want to check out the BBC Photo Masterclasses.
Published in the pages of the BBC's Wildlife magazine, the Photo Masterclasses are articles written by Wildlife photographers and specialists in their genre of nature photography. You'll find articles on macro photography, landscape photography, and photographing different creatures under all sorts of different conditions. If you love learning a new photography trick or two you'll definitely want to dive into the archives of the BBC.
The Complete Guide to Ripping and Converting Flash Videos - #Lifehacker
Whether you want to save and watch a Flash video offline, convert a Flash music video for your MP3 player, or do something else entirely, learning how to rip and convert Flash videos is a useful skill. Here's how it works.
When it comes to ripping Flash videos, there's more than one way to accomplish the task, and in many cases it depends greatly on where you're grabbing the video. We'll cover a number of different options for downloading Flash videos, as well as several ways you can convert them into more useful formats. Once you've seen the options, you can choose the one that works best for you and your situation.
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Get Mac-Like Scrolling and Gestures on a Windows Laptop ~ At last! ~ #Lifehacker
Once you've used the hand-helping, time-saving, two-finger scrolling and three-finger gestures on a MacBook, a standard Windows trackpad can feel kind of, well, dead. Here's how to get total finger control with a tiny app, or go further with a driver swap.
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Score Free AudioBooks at BooksShouldBeFree - Audiobooks - Lifehacker
You can find quite a few free audiobooks online but they're frequently scattered all over. Save yourself the run around by checking out the thousands of free audiobooks cataloged at BooksShouldBeFree.
BooksShouldBeFree houses thousands of books in the public domain, available as both MP3s and as iTunes format audiobooks. Each entry for a book includes links to the full text, supplemental text, and reviews.
Scottish councils: audit of services - Times Online
The first comprehensive survey of performance across Scotland, based on figures provided by the authorities themselves
Look at Data Like a Statistician, Minus the Ph. D - Data - #Lifehacker
Nathan Yau is a doctoral candidate in statistics, but the most valuable lessons he's learned in analyzing and working with data don't involve formal math. Here's how he suggests looking at lines, charts, and numbers to find interesting things.
Eight (or so) Easy 2.0 Pieces to Piece Together ~ Educational Wiki
Eight (or so) Easy 2.0 Pieces to Piece Together
Excellent source for Web 2.0 educational resources.
Commercial Break: First Apple iPad ad appears in US | BitterWallet
As seen in the United States of A during last night’s Oscars binge. Launch date across the pond confirmed as April 3rd. Does it make you want one then? Does it??
Yes. Yes it does.