The Catling Mindswipe

No, it's not the latest diet fad. The story goes like this; I started to migrate a Windows Vista machine to Windows 7 (not for myself, I should add). When I plugged in an external drive for 'Easy Transfer'  (this is Vista, so 'easy' is a relative term), the program decided it couldn't cope with a FAT32 format drive. I know; how long has that FAT32 drive sat around? Never mind. My choices to reformat are: exFAT or NTFS. What do I use? I'm no digital storage expert, but here goes...

A colleague just got hit by another one of these insidious little blighters . We know how it got in - Internet Explorer 11 - but not the source. I suspect my colleague clicked on a close or cancel button in a pop-up which actually ran some malicious code. We know what and when it was installed - a program in this case masquerading as Rich Media Viewer , on May 16th. We got the full range of initial symptoms. We also got rid of it inside ten minutes, before it could do any further damage. Rvzr-a.akamaihd.net is another unauthorised adware client; using a full range of false pages and pop-ups, it highlights web page text for adware popups, opens tabs onto Trojan pages when you open your browser, and initiates more popups when you open a new tab.

Microsoft has turned its face away from the enterprise and the stalwart 'home' user in an all-out bid for the hearts and minds of a new generation. And it's not working. Did someone say 'convergence?' The battle lines are firmly drawn over Windows 8. On one side is the (dying) breed of PC professional who manages and maintains PCs. For them, the operating system is only a tool for getting the job done and the Not-Metro-Modern-UI interface gets in their way. On the other side, casual user who uses their commodity PC to surf the Internet, send email, self-obsess on social media and play a few games. These folks don't give a hoot about operating systems as long as the interface serves up some colourful, fat icons to click to get to an app. Everything these days is an 'app.' These folks don't know the difference between Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer; to them Internet Explorer IS the Internet. Microsoft Office is Microsoft Windows an

Original Inkscape artwork under the Creative Commons license from Eric Burke, creator of the apparently defunct It's Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens

GIMP (which is the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source alternative to Photoshop for image and photo editing. Available for almost all operating systems (Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X), it is a powerful alternative to Adobe. Did I mention is it also free? Image blending is a common task, compositing one image onto another with a soft fade effect. For example, I want to place the BBC's Musketeers logo over a photo of the cast. The GIMP is a very flexible tool. My way of doing things goes something like this:

A topic I touched on when I first arrived at Dartington came around again, prompted by an attempt to round up banner images for this week's bulletin... Digital Asset Management (DAM). Now we are spawning websites and expanding content, we are reaching a point where we need to be smarter with image and video management. And graphics, logos, charts, diagrams, icons that we have created. My team is getting more requests for posts and pages and our New World websites have more slots for visual interest, banners, sliders, mood shots and specific content... and I don't know how to find half of it!