Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Some of the cool things I have found lately that are photography related.

Tools

• Flickr Screensaver – this is awesome! can pull any users or group of users photos from flickr as a screensaver, by tags even! And it runs on multiple monitors. In my case all 6! Download Flickr .Net Screensaver free from CodePlex
• Producer for PowerPoint

Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint provides users with many powerful new features that make it easier to synchronize audio, video, slides, and images to create engaging and effective rich-media presentations. Producer gives content and media professionals, as well as everyday PowerPoint users a host of new content authoring features.

• Compfight – a flickr searching tool – excellent for finding photos for use in blog posts. Its where I found the picture in this article of the tools.

Local Camera Groups and Clubs (for me)

• Photographic Society of Queensland
• Brisbane Camera Group
• PSQ2010 Photography Convention

Other

• Dreamstime Stock Photo Site
• 1x.com – premium quality photo site

There is just so much going on with the whole change over from Office 2007 to 2010, and for those of you still stuck in 2003, even more important for you to start convincing your organisations of the need to go straight to 2010.

We have been running the beta 2010 here solidly an all our main machines here for 2 months now, with some individual test machines previous to that. Unfortunately now we have to have test and development environments in both 2003 and 2007 so that has doubled our required number of Virtual Machines.

Following are some of the latest news and bits and pieces as well as some other MS Office related information I have come across recently.

Excel 2007 and 2010

Conditional formatting. Conditional formatting in 2007 is one of the main reasons people come to Spyjournal.biz. These two articles are the single most hit articles of the thousands here with over 50,000 views between them:

• Conditional formatting in Excel 2007 - entire row colours
• Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting

Amit Velingkar has written conditional formatting rules simplified while Dick Kusleika has written some code to list out all the conditional formatting rules in a worksheet

There’s been a lot of things happening this week. Not the least being the possibility of a swine flu pandemic. Read on for a scientific explanation of swine flu.

General Microsoft News

• Amit has written article explaining How to Download Images from an Outlook Email.Tip – one of the options works for PowerPoint also.
• Sarah Perez lets us know that PhotoZoom Becomes DeepZoomPix. This is now using Silverlight. I believe this technology has also changed inside PhotoSynth in order to allow Mac users better access to the technology.
• She also lets us know how to Twitter in Excel – how to actually run twitter in side an Excel client.
• Windows 7 Beta keys are still available. The Release Candidate itself is due shortly. From the Windows Team Blog:

I’m pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for  download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th. Link for rest of article.

Here is the last lot of totally unrelated cool tools I have found.

The Coolest Tool I have found in a while is MCEBuddy.

MCEBuddy takes your LARGE Windows Media Center television recording (and other video) files and makes them small saving you disk space.  It also removes commercials and converts your recordings into formats that are usable on other systems and handheld devices.  It does all of this automatically with a minimum of fuss and little or no technical knowledge required.

This tool just works – it is awesome!

Time to clear the tabs in Google Chrome.

SBS2008 news is buzzing with the wrap up of the conferences stateside. Here is some important stuff.

• Susan the SBS Diva screenshots a Hyperv install of SBS2008 and follows up with some Nic settings for HyperV
• Robbie from MSFT Australia has some good technical content on SBS2008 and EBS2008.
• Australians can get their hands on training for SBS2008 and EBS2008 at discounted prices.

Robin Good’s Sharewood guide has a list of the Top 25 screen sharing tools.

Sonia Coleman has 208 free Microsoft PowerPoint templates.

I am now using Tweetdeck to manage my twitter conversations – its great!

TwitterAgency is a Virtual Advertising Agency on how to use / not use Twitter.

Brisbane mountain bike riders, check out Bushranger. They also run adventure tours in New Zealand. And if you are into horse riding the Mountain Lake Adventures crew look as if they provide a pretty decent trail riding experience just west of Brisbane.