Category Archives: Technology

Sum Up Discount Code

Business, Discount Codes, Money, Shopping, Technology,

sumup_If you run a small business and want to take credit and debit card payments when you are out and about then you might be interested in one of the mobile card payment options that are available.

Sum Up is just one of the those that is available and below I have a discount code for you!

Personally I have been using Sum Up for around 2 years now and I find it really easy to use with only a 1.95% charge on transactions.  it enables me to take credit and debit card payments wherever I am with little fuss and the payments are sent over to my bank account within a few days.

All you need to use it is the terminal and a smartphone to connect to (and 3G/4G/wireless) and you can take payments from most cards including American Express.

This can be really useful if you are somewhere there isn’t a cashpoint nearby or even if you sell stuff that is at a price point where people may not have that much cash on them.

So anyway, if you are interested in taking a look at Sum Up then you an get a £20 discount on the price of the terminal if you follow the link below:

Sum Up Discount Code

How To Use Manual Settings On A Digital Camera

Arts & Humanities, Computers & Electronics, Recreation, Technology,

SLR Camera Settings

If you have an SLR camera, whether it be digital or not, you have the option to choose different settings with which to take your photos. This gives you much more control over how your pictures turn out.

However, a lot of people buy a good camera and then just use it on the automatic setting so that the camera itself decides what speed and what aperture the lens will fire at. It may also choose the ISO setting for that shot. It is very easy just to keep using the camera on the automatic setting and you can get perfectly good shots by doing this, but if you want to be a bit more inventive with your photography then you need to take that step to learn how to use the manual settings.

So, if you want more control over how your pictures turn out, and you want your pictures to look more professional, then try experimenting with the different settings. The best idea is to actually read the instruction booklet that came with your camera but some of those are hundreds of pages long and realistically how many people do that?

So, there are some different settings on your camera – you may have the picture icons which will customise the kind of settings that you might use – for example if you choose the sport option you will get a faster shutter speed at the expense of depth of field and it may also automatically turn on the multi-frame option.

Otherwise you may have the following setttings:

Av – Aperture priority – where you choose the width of the aperture (this controls the depth of field)
Tv – Shutter priority – where you set the shutter speed and the camera chooses the aperture
M – Completely manual – you choose both settings which means that you need to make sure that you have the right combination that will let enough light in for the picture to be correctly exposed.

I will explain the first two options below.

Continue reading How To Use Manual Settings On A Digital Camera →

Hive Discount Code – British Gas

Discount Codes, Home & Garden, Lifestyles, Technology,

So British Gas have a fantastic system called Hive which enables you to control your heating system from your phone (or the thermostat). Usually this costs £250 for the product including installation but if you are looking for a Hive discount code then we have one here.

Hive Discount Voucher – Black Friday Week 2018

If you thought last year’s deal was good then this year it has got even better. If you want to get the Hive heating and hot water system (including professional installation if required) – you can get the whole deal for £148.99 including installation or £108.99 without the installation included (i.e. you install it yourself or get someone to install it for you). Grab the discount price here.

Hive Discount Voucher – Black Friday Week 2017

This year sees the best price so far for getting the Hive system (including professional installation if required) – you can get the whole deal for £159.99 including installation or £119.99 without the installation included (i.e. you install it yourself or get someone to install it for you). Grab the discount price here.

Hive Discount 4 – Black Friday 2016

So there is another great discount on the Hive heating control system for Black Friday 2016 and this time you can get the heating and hot water system for only £124.99 – I think this may be the lowest price so far – but obviously this price will not last long – get the discount price here.

HIVE DISCOUNT 3 – March 2016


Currently you can get the Hive version 2 system for heating and hot water with installation for the discount price of £185.78 – click the image on the left for more info.

HIVE DISCOUNT 2

Currently (February 2016) Amazon have a discount on the full Hive heating system including installation – reducing the price of £250 (which is the current price on the British Gas site) to £203.58.

We do not know how long this Hive discount price will last for but it seems that there are occasional discounts being given for the Hive system on Amazon so click through on the link below to show the currently available price.

HIVE DISCOUNT 1

OK so this Hive discount code only applies for Black Friday – 27 November 2015. If we come across any other codes then we will add them here. Currently you can get a £70 discount on the Hive heating control system from British Gas and believe it or not it is being sold on Amazon for Black Friday.

Here is the link to the reduced price Hive system. Even with the discount it shows the full price below but click through on 27th November and you will get the discounted price of £179. If you click on the link after the discount period is passed it may not work or it may just come up with the standard price:

 

With Hive you can use an app on your smartphone to change your heating while you are out. You can also have different settings during the day so that you are in total control of your heating system. It also has a setting for automatic frost protection so that you can leave your heating on the lowest possible setting without the danger of burst pipes while you are away.

This Hive discount code offers a significant saving on the installation of the system and it could pay for itself in energy savings in a couple of years.

How to Create a Photo Silhouette

Computers & Electronics, Photo & Video, Technology,

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
You can get a good silhouette effect using Picasa’s neon tool

How to Create This Effect

silhouette1To 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

silhouette2

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.