So last night/this morning was the much awaited ‘blood moon’ lunar eclipse where the moon essentially passed into the shadow of the Earth and turned a lovely red colour. This happened at about 3am in the UK and we can share with you some great photos that were taken in London by Tim Fleischman. (All photos are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced). The photos were taken with a Canon 5DSR with a Celestron NexStar SE4 computerised telescope.
The blood red moon was seen by many in the UK as the skies were clear in many areas.
Other parts of the world had different phenomena – in the US there was a total lunar eclipse but nothing much to see in Australia which just had a normal full moon.
Plenty of people waited up or got up in the night to see the lunar eclipse and there were lots of pictures posted on social media showing the view from around the UK and indeed the world.
This type of supermoon lunar eclipse last occurred in 1982 and isn’t due to happen again until 2033 so it is a reasonably rare phenomenon.
So, a little while back, I decided that I would look into this business of earning money from surveys that is touted by various websites as being a way of earning some money from home. I had always been a bit wary of the ‘Making money from Surveys’ thing but decided that I would just investigate it myself and see what it was all about.
When you google ‘making money from surveys’ you get a heck of a lot of results and there are a few key players. But also there are companies that get you signed up to quite a few different survey providers. It can all get rather confusing and even now I can’t remember which website I went to originally because they all seem to be linked in to one another!
Anyway, I signed up for a number of them which include Panelweb, Valued Opinions, Inbox Pounds, Global Test market and Opinion Outpost. There may even be more but those are the ones that appeared in my inbox most often. A lot of these companies invite you to other panels as well but I figure this is quite enough for now and I probably can’t even keep up with this lot!
How Does It Work?
So, pretty much every day, if not more than once a day I was getting an email from all of these companies inviting me to take part in a survey. In return for completing the survey I could get points or even in some cases actual money. Some of the sums are quite large (up to £8 so far) but these kinds of sums are not available by just filling in some questions but by actually taking out a trial subscription for something. Most of the emails that come through with this kind of offer I just delete.
The surveys that offer points for completion do enable you, once you have built up enough points, to exchange then for things like Amazon vouchers which would also be just as useful as money as I often spend money on Amazon anyway. But I was more inclined to try and complete the surveys that offered real money more often.
Every morning when I got up there were a bunch of surveys waiting in my inbox as they come in all times of the day and night. If you are going to do this then you really need to keep a good handle on your inbox so that your email does not get bogged down with surveys. Even with what seems to be a small number of companies that I signed up for I was already feeling that my email could get overwhelmed.
The best method of dealing with them seems to be to set aside some times in the day when you will go through the surveys that you have received and try and complete as many as possible.
Can You Really Earn Money From Surveys?
My Inbox was inundated with survey emails
Ok, so here is the rub, each survey you complete you have to go through some questions to see if you are actually eligible to complete the survey. In some cases I have found that these questions in themselves can take a good amount of time to complete and all you get in the end is ‘I’m sorry but you do not qualify’ so you have wasted your time. In fact, for the surveys that I have completed so far I would go as far as saying that I have been ineligible for around 80% of them!
For example I got a survey one morning asking if I had had a fungal nail infection in the last year! But first it asks personal details and information about which TV region you are in etc.
So I tried to complete at least a few surveys a day (a lot of them take about 20 minutes to complete) but after 10 days of doing this I had earned less than £2 due to being ineligible for most of them. Not exactly a great rate of return.
Perhaps I was not the right demographic for doing this and other people might have more success and be able to earn more money!
Is It a Scam?
Well this is the key question and I have to say that I think in a way it is. The reason I say this is the you can tell by the way some of the questions are phrased that the survey is not there to get your opinions about things but it is there to see if you are likely to be interested in a certain product. No doubt the product of the person who is conducting the survey. I will give you a couple of examples of this:
1. I took part in a survey which asked which charities you were most likely to give money to (this was just one of the many questions) – I think there were a list of only a few specific charities. I ticked the box for Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital. A few days later I got a phone call from their office asking if I wanted to give just 75p a week to the charity. So really this wasn’t a survey about opinions as it was made out to be, at least one factor of it was to try and get people to give money to charity.
2. I remember completing a survey where one of the questions was about pre-paid funeral plans. I must have ticked that this would be a good idea as I had a relative who died recently who had one and it made life so much easier for us. However, it’s not something I would do now but maybe in about 10 years time. Anyway, just this morning I got a call from a company asking if I would be interested in taking out a plan.
So, to me, the majority of the surveys are more than likely just companies trying to find people to flog stuff to. I’m a bit annoyed as I don’t generally give out my home phone number so I don’t want now to have a whole rush of cold calls coming in. Perhaps I just won’t answer the phone unless it is a number I recognise!
The other point that I think makes it a scam is the fact that you can fill in a whole lot of surveys without being eligible for any of the rewards, thus completely wasting your time.
If you are eligible for a survey then you can earn really small amounts – but then this is your decision. If you have spare time and it is the only way you might earn some money then you may just do it anyway.
If you are wondering how you can create a photo silhouette with some free software then you could try using Google’s Picasa shoto software to get quite a good effect.
If you use the Neon effect tool in Picasa then this might give you what you are after. Using the Picasa Neon effect is simple and depending on how you use it you can get a silhouette effect or else you can have a level of detail in your photo. Personally I wanted to create a kind of chalk outline sketch effect which blanked out the features and just left an outline of the body. The good thing with this though is that you also get some of the internal lines of the image rather than just having a plain black silhouette.
You can get a good silhouette effect using Picasa’s neon tool
How to Create This Effect
To create this effect firstly open the photo you want to edit in Picasa. Although Picasa does create a backup of your photo itself, you may want to create a copy so that you can play around with that and not worry about messing up the original.
The first thing that I do is to crop the image to how I want it to look. The crop tool is on the first edit page and you can choose what format you want to use to crop the image to: you could keep the image in the same ratio as the photo was taken or you can just crop it manually to a size that you want.
Using the Neon Effect
The Neon Effect icon is on the last page of the edit icons. I actually first used the black and white tool to change my photo to black and white before using the neon tool. In this way the colour I chose in the neon tool would not be clouded by any other colours in the picture.
With the neon effect you have two decisions to make:
firstly, the colour that you want to use for your neon effect. You can choose any colour you like with the drop picker. and you can choose how dark or light you want the colour to be.
secondly, how much fade you want to apply to the picture. The less fade you apply, the more the rest of the picture will be dark and you will just have highlighted areas. The picture on the right (and the one at the top) have no fade applied to them so that they appear more as monochromatic pictures or a silhouette as per the top one.
Other Picasa Tools
There are many tools you can get in Picasa that you pay for in other software, it really is pretty versatile. Obviously it doesn’t come close to tools like PhotoShop that you may need if you are doing detailed changes to images but for the everyday photographer it has almost everything that you need.
I find the crop tool is one of the most useful and also the fill light tool for those photos that come out a bit dark due to lack of light. You can also use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button which sometimes can be a bit hit and miss but other times can give you a quick good result!
If you do use the fill light tool then it can also be good to add a bit more contrast. You are pretty much in charge of what you want to do and can cancel and undo any of the changes you have made if you do something wrong.
I think a lot of people live in a world where they know the chances of their computer crashing are significant and yet they still put off backing up their data. I think in most cases this is due to their lack of knowledge of how easy it can be to back up your data. I know people who occasionally add the files in their documents folder onto a CD or thumb drive but it is not very frequent and chances are if their laptop or PC were to fail they would lose data for sure.
I myself have had no less than 1 PC and 2 Laptops die on me completely, without a hope of recovery, in the last 3 years. The first laptop died due to someone else trying to fix something by removing the operating system and not being able to replace it. I stupidly had not backed up my data before allowing them to do this, my bad. The 2nd one, the PC, died a few months later, it was a few years old and I had started slowly copying the data over but had not finished backing up before it went. Lucky for me I had a friend who, with a lot of effort, managed to rescue the data from both machines. So if you are wondering how do I back up my computer then I’ll tell you the easy way that I do it (although there are other ways but for someone who doesn’t want to delve into lots of settings this one is simple),
Set Up An Easy Plug and Play Back Up
And so it came that said friend decided that I needed an easy back up facility and bought me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive with I think 500 Gb of space. Now I am sure that there are other easy plug and go back up drives available but as I have used this one I wanted to share my experience with it. Basically it has software installed that you can just run and once you have that installed, every time you plug the drive in afterwards it will automatically detect and new or changed files and back them up to the drive.
That is as simple as it is – plug it in and it will back up for you. For someone like me, who never quite gets round to doing a manual backup, it is a godsend. And that was shown to be the case when my 3rd computer, a laptop that was only about 18 months old, also died. Lucky for me that just the day before I had plugged in the backup (I had actually plugged it in to look for a file from one of my old computers that was stored on it but of course as I did that it backed up too).
So really, for less than 100 dollars (on Amazon anyway) you can have a very easy back up system that is suitable for any technophobe to use and really is the simplest back up out there as far as I am concerned. Don’t leave it until it is too late – it is not always possible to recover data from dead computers or can be expensive so save yourself the worry and trouble by getting a back up now.
You can check out the GoFlex drive on Amazon US and the equivalent in the UK below:
There are so many fake facebook pages out there trying to get us to click the like and share buttons with competitions and giveaways. So many of these facebook competitions are actually fake sadly.
There are a number of reasons why someone would set up a fake facebook page and competition even though sometimes they seem a bit unfathomable! But mostly they want us to like and share stuff so that more people like their page and maybe they can get hold of all our details and that of our friends to spam us with stuff or do even worse. Continue reading How Can You Tell a Facebook Competition is Fake?→
