Magnolia flowering in Claytons Way 17th March 2014

Hi Balcony ..
Lovely tree :o)

oh, that's a shame, Balcony. but at least it flowered, and maybe will again this year, if the wind permists. Great pic, thanks for sharing

Glad you like it. TT! :-)) I love to take photos of almost anything in flower! Thanks to modern day tech I can "snap" pictures to my heart's content then pass them to my computer & delete them if I'm not happy with them. If I'm happy with them I name them & enhance them & then save them to my hard disk & potentially share them with others who might appreciate their beauty as well!

remember the old days when you had to send a roll of film off to be developed, and only when you got them back you found out that you only had two usable pics on the whole roll?

*s* I've still got a camera ad film, doubt I could give them away, (except maybe to a museum) - and even digital camera are on the way out, I've read, cos of cameras on phones.

What software do you use for enhancement, Balmocny? I hae Paint Shop, and older version - it does "one step photo fix" but sometimes that doesn't help; I don't know enough to be able to use one elemnt of "enahnce" on its own.

Yes, I remember them all too well! As it was often months before I took a roll of film in to be developed I'd forget when I took the photos! Therefore I started putting bits of paper with the date on in the plant I was taking a picture of! It had to be visible - of course - but not be too obtrusive so that it took away from the flowers.

I also remember having to throw away many photos in disgust because they were so bad! I garnered fame as a head cutter - especially with my wife as I was always cutting people's heads off in the photos I took! :-D) LOL! We used to joke about me having been an executioner in a past life! :-D) LOL!

I can now simply erase them if I don't like them - no more waiting for them to come back to see my errors any longer!

I use Picassa for all my photo editing. It's quick & easy & allows me to put the titles on my photos. I can also quickly upload them to Google photos, (used to be just plain Picasa till Google bought them out) & store them for use elsewhere or share them with other people. It searches your hard drive for photos which it then imports. There after every time you open the programme it will search for & import any new photos you might have saved since the last time it was opened.

You can do simple colour corrections just by choosing 'Autocolor' &/or 'Autocontrast'. To add text you just click on 'Text' & a little box will pop up on top of your photo where you can write what you like. I copy the text from the name of the file. I always like to name my photos & put them in folders on my hard drive, when Picassa identifies the folders it imports them with the name you've given them & the photos you have put in them.

I've been using the programme for many years & couldn't do without it!

prob for a newbie is, there's so much out there, all claiming to be the"one" that will do everything, and how do you know which is best for you? i've tried a few, but sooner or later thre was something about them, something they could'nt do, so it'd be back to Paint Shop - only 8, but still don't understand half of it, and the bit I do understand is ok - apart from adding text! I often go right back to Paint for that - it does stuff that Paint Shop don't.

I've never had Paint Shop on my computer so I can't judge its performance. Picassa does all I really need & I can upload my photos immediately, from within Picassa to Google +. Then I can access them from other forums I post on. I can share them form there & don't have to search my computer's hard drive. (Though as I keep everything well organized in folders I have no difficulty in finding what I want - usually!)

I put captions on all my photos & that way I can compare photos of the same plants, or place, at different times to see the changes. We forget so soon!

don't we just! and some sooner than others, alas!

I've tended to resist Google+, as I resist Google Chrome - always wary of "creeping annexation".

I'll check out Picassa, it sounds good, thanks for that tip.

I try to label pics in the title, date and place, but sometimes it takes a bit of double-checking.

And I do need to get more organised - or less! got so many folders that sometimes I can't remember which one to look in - but the search option comes in handy.

I understand your reticence about "creeping annexation" as I'm very much the same! Trouble is that the "big'uns" are swallowing up the "littl'uns" & there is little other you can do but to go along with the "Big guy". :-((

Picassa used to be independent when I first started using it then along came Google & bought them out "lock,stock & barrel". All the photos I'd been uploading over several years were now under Google control so what could I do? Then Google+ was invented & now all my photos are visible to anyone who cares to look at them - fortunately the immense majority of them are my plants or the allotments, though some were of other people's gardens. I don't upload many pictures of people (not that I've got that many really either!) just that now I don't upload any at all!

To top it all Facebook has bought out Whatsapps, a mobile phone messenger that just uses your text allowance for photos & messages. In essence it's completely free as you are using text allowance you probably wouldn't use anyway.

Facebook has a bad record when it comes to privacy so I rarely upload photos of people there either. Through Whatsapps however I been receiving & sending 100s of photos, principally of our grandchildren, but now I feel more apprehensive & to top it all, Facebook now wants us to pay for it much more than the 69p it cost me this year, after a year of free membership. They also want to introduce ads to make more money. I may very well not renew my subscription in December when it comes up for renewal. I'm concerned about privacy - not the cost so much.

I only use a few applications, so who owns what isn't much bother to me - apart from Google taking over YouTube and forcing everyone to have a stupid Google email (had one already, but didn't use it much).

And refuse to have Google Chrome, mainly because it keeps trying to mug me into installing it, including sneaking it in with upgrades for other stuff!

I'm still using XP, and just had a notification that MS is going to stop all support - "follow this link", so I did, and got a page "how to upgrade" and if the upgrade deson't take "buy a new pc"

yeah, right! chuck my pc and buy a new one, spend a year trying to configure it back to something like what I have now - and then chuck it all again when they come out wiht another forced upgrade.

I mean, how would a car maker get on if, every time they brought out a new model, they tried to force everyone driving older models to throw them away? or if they said, "we're bringing out a new gear box, if it doesn't fit your old car, throw it away and buy another"????

Like you I also use XP & my computer can't support Win 8.1 either! I had the last updates installed yesterday & the computer is working very well so I'm not buying another computer till this one "gives up the ghost" either! Can't afford to anyway!

We bought a £50 tablet computer a couple of months ago but this week it will no longer "boot" into the operating system! The Android logo comes on & stays on! That's as far as it goes! I suppose I'll have to take it to a place in town that does computer repairs & see if they can fix it - for less than we paid for it! Otherwise ...

Given my vision, I'm limited in waht PC or similar I can have - well, limited in what I can use! Tablets etc are a closed book to me (even laptops until they do one with 42" screen!); I'm stuck with a desktop.

I've been told that I can plug a laptop into a TV for a monitor. Yeah, and plug in a proper keybouard (learned to touch-type on the ancient manual typewriters, and cannot get on with laptop keyboard laout; even the "modern" keyboads tih "hot keys" are useless, I kept putting the PC to sleep when I meant to tab!), and a mouse, and a mains lead cos I've heard the batteries don't last very lone ...

i even thought about buying a projector to link to the PC, to project the screen on to a wall.

As far as I'm concerned, XP ain't broke, so it don't need fixing. I keep getting messages on websites "update your browser" but IE 8 is the latest that XP will support. Of course there are others, but Firefox uses my pc settings for its tabs, which means it uses large text that makes the toolbar overflow the screen with no scroll bar to bring it back, and I already said why I don't want to try Google Chrome.

If I may ask, what browser do you use, and would you recommend it, given that I need different screen resolutoin and large text? (pm me the answer (if you want to answer and don't want to advertise!)

lol I'm, not one of those that queues up all night to be the first to get the new iPlayer that's got one more button on it than the rpevious version had!

I do need a new pc, though, this one moans and groans most of hte time and often freezes. I need expert advice, but the main prob for me is finding a pc tech that knows what s/he's talking about - they only have to know a little more than me to sound like an expert - I've had to get PC people in to put right what the last "expert" fixed!!

MS is quite arrogant in other ways, too - when I plug in a new USB device, if it "can't find" it, a screen comes up telling me that I should replace the device. yeah, right, just cos MS can't tell its glutueus maximus from its humerous!

lol sorry, I seem to have diverted us away from the theme of this picture! I'll go and stand in the corner ...

"lol sorry, I seem to have diverted us away from the theme of this picture! I'll go and stand in the corner ..."

You can come out of your corner now, Fran! LOL! I think 2 days is more than enough time to stand in a corner! (You're lucky I came on here today or you might have been in that corner all week - or more!

I use FireFox but it seems you have already used it & found it doesn't meet your requirements. A similar one to FireFox is Opera, but you might experience the same problems there as well. I used Safari (from Apple) during the time I was making up some webpages a few years ago. It was, & probably still is, a great browser but I prefer FireFox.

I was using 4 different browsers for a couple of years to see how my webpages looked on each one, to see if I needed to make changes so that it was optimized for each one as they all display things slightly differently. The same page doesn't always show up as you expect it to on different browsers.

If IE does the job for you then stick with it. I believe they don't have the safety issues as they did years ago & it's at least as safe as other, more modern browsers. MS has worked hard on it to get it up to the level of modern browsers.

I just can't imagine what it must be like to view a computer screen on a 42" TV! I've only got a 15" monitor! Just one word - a short one at that - would probably fill my screen at the size you are forced to use!

Don't worry about going off-track - conversations have a "knack" of doing that! For fun I sometimes try to remember a conversation I've had with someone & how it had developed form how it started out to where it finished up! You wonder if you were ever on the same track!

In written conversations I do however try to keep to the original theme - not always successfully! LOL!

Don't you have a spell checker installed in your browser? I have one installed in FF & in IE so I avoid making too many mistakes! I've had to use it often in the 15 minutes I've been writing this! LOL!

I tried Opera for email, trying to get away from Yahoo, but that had the same problem, going offscreen and no scroll bar. Same with a lot of other emil services: I had the screen res set at its lowest to give the biggest display, and most software don't like it - I've got some discs that I've never been able to install because they sulk when I refuse to change the rez.

I did try a "contact us" for Firefox, to ask if I could amend the settings to make their fonts smaller, but, as with Google and Yahoo, no email address, "help" only takes you to a FAQ whiich is no help at all.

I'm using Internet Explorer 8, the highest I can get iwth XP; often I type long answers in Word, which has auto-correct, then paste it into here. A lot depends on how tired I am; I need forearm support, which I can't get till the"office" is organised, so the longer I sit at the pc, the more tired my wrists get and the more typos.

lol I'll see if I can get a pic of me at the PC so you can see for yourself!

I can understand why you would use MS Word as it would be more adaptable to your physical difficulties. As it includes its own spell checker it's useful for making corrections on the "move". I also use it a lot but not for the same reasons as you do. I do some translation work for a Columbian magazine on endangered wild life & conservation efforts.

I receive emails with a Word document that I then download, translate & send back as a Word document as well. Otherwise I have no use for the programme other than writing an occasional formal letter to some gov. organisation I have to correspond with.

It would be interesting if you could arrange, what they now call "selfies", which is a photo taken by you of yourself, often doing something silly! Before they received that name I'd taken a few of myself sitting at the computer with my webcam but one of the photos (Selfie) I like best was when my Amaryllis, (I grew from seed which took 4 years to flower!) flowered for the first time 4 years ago. I took a photo of myself standing to one side of the dozen or more plants flowering on our living room table.

At the present moment the table looks similar to when I took that photo 4 years ago! There are 11 pots at the present moment on the table with at least 16 flowers open the majority of which are as big as your hand with your fingers stretched out to their limits! Last year I measured some of the flowers - a couple were 8 inches across! Even then I couldn't do it properly because the flowers recurve a little & it's impossible to straighten them out with just one hand while trying to hold the tape measure over the delicate flowers without breaking them! There are still some buds on the plants on the table that will need a few more days before they open.

sorry for the delay, life caught up with me!

In some ways, I prefer WordPerfect (it could do things twenty years ago that Word still can’t do) but Word is the “industry standard”.

90% of my PC time is in Word – I’m a writer, trying to get a book of poetry together, and Word is pretty easy to use (at least Word 2003 – I tried 2007 and was glad to go back to a system that had proper toolbars!).

I’ve put in so many keyboard shortcuts, two at least on most keys, saves all the mouse-to-menu-and-find-the-item-you-want-then-click-on-submenu (when you can't easily read the menu anyway) – and some of my shortcuts can’t be found on any menu or toolbar, lol took me ages to find them in the hundreds of “customize” options! So now I just have to CTRL or ALT (or both) and hit key to get result. My latest shortcuts are to change font size, typeface and size, lot easier to do than keep going up to the menu toolbar. And I created my own toolbar for things that won't go on shortcuts, so I only need one toolbar open - otherwise at least half the screen would be taken up with them!

And it does spellcheck as it goes along – I really wish I could delete “US English” from the language options, or at least downgrade it from top position – when I copy and paste anything from the net, be it GoY or any other site, the spelling defaults to US English. Lol this PC is going to learn to recognise *proper* English!

That Columbian magazine sounds interesting! How did you get involved with it?

I keep asking organisations for attachments in Word rather than as PDF – I can change the font size to suit myself, whereas PDFs are frozen in their original format – I know that a Word attachment is bigger than a PDF of the same document, but they can do Word in small text to minimise it as much as possible. I get a bit irked when I’m told that they can’t do Word – if they do them in PDF, there must have been a Word original in the first place. Lol I told one company that until I get something I can read for myself, they’ll just keep getting the small-print stuff back, and we’ll see who gets fed up with it first!

I’m not sure I could do a selfie of me at my PC – I only have a ten-second delay on the camera, and to set that, put the camera down (gently and stably!), and get to the PC and look as if I’m working might be a bit of a scramble! But I’ll see what I can do – lol amazing what one finds one can do when one actually tries! I could ask someone to take the pic, but I think, to get all of the PC and me in, they’d have to stand right in the corner (which is still stacked with boxes), or better yet, outside, shooting through the window!

I used to be good at taking pics of the ceiling, or the wall, when trying to self-snap. I tried taking pics of ,my hew hair, using the bathroom mirror, and that took about fifty goes – okay, maybe twenty – to get a couple of half-decent pics.

Four years for the amaryllis to flower! Wow, that’s patience on your part. I’m not very good with seeds; either I forget to water them, or I overdo it and only grow mould. I must check your pics to see what you’re describing with the other plants – I do mean to keep up to date with GoY friends, but always seem to be a step behind.

Don't worry yourself with the time it takes to respond! I'm not on here either everyday - I do post on 3 other forums! Two of them are mostly about gardening but the other is where I mostly post articles about space & its exploration as well as many other themes. I copy many of the blogs I make up here over there! This is the best site I know of to make up blogs that I can then copy & paste on my own site!

I also get a lot behind trying to keep up with other people but I mostly read blogs & make a comment. I no longer have the time to make up several blogs a month - one is about all I can manage!

I understand about the use of Word, I use it for the translations I do & I also copy things of particular interest to me when surfing the web which I copy & paste into a Word Doc to save for the future.

My wife likes to use Word Perfect as well but like you say, she also has problems getting other programmes to read them. We bought a cheapo tablet computer to take to Spain back in March. She found she couldn't copy the programme over to be able to read her files! I found a programme that would open many different formats that are not nearly so common or popular nowadays but she didn't seem to be able to use it. She also converted a lot of her files to PDF & I installed a PDF reader but again she didn't seem to know how to use it. We had internet access only at our son's place but she spent most of her day at her mother's place or at our other son's cafeteria with no internet access. In the end she took her (heavy) laptop with her. We hardly made use of the tablet! To top it all it no longer starts up!

that space one sounds fascinating - as with gardening, I'm totally obsessed at the same time as being almost totally ignorant with it (the only crossover I an think of is the film Silent Running, forests in space)

I never thought of having my own site with blogs I wrote for here! hmm, worth thinkng about. prob with blogs is that they only have date entries, not subject; bit of a drag to have to search every date through years to find an item, rather than clicking on a subject. Though my very occasional blog (not been there for over a year!) does have subject tags. lol I don't write much in it, certainly not weekly - like, Twitter, it's slighlty arrogant to think that the world is agaog to hear what *I* think about things

when i worked for the council, only two pcs in the whole borough had Word Perfect on them - guess what mine had?? it was such a pain to send or receive documents from everyone else. But WP had some advantages: one could split a page into 4 postcard sizes, and they'd stay put, whereas with Word you have to make a 2x2 table and the size aries according to contents. and WP opened a panel at the bottom of the screen to show all formatting, and I mean ALL -Wor's "show all" should be called "show some" - it certaintly doesn't show where you change typeface or font size or font colour!

But I suppose that not even WP does that nowadays; with MS being the standard, evertying else has to get closer to it until ther's no basic difference any more. sigh. a monopoly is a dangerous thing!

If you would like to take a look at my forum here is the URL:

http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php

It is bi-lingual, English & Spanish. Although I principally write in the space threads I post on virtually anything! The are threads about plants, pets, computers, sport, health, weather, the environment, religion, literature, history, astronomy, as well as many others - in Spanish as well! LOL! :-D)

It's now over 8 years since the site was set up & I'm the main poster - not to say practically the ONLY poster! I'm one of three admins but the only one that maintains the forum open! That's why I tend to refer to it as "mine" though strictly speaking I'm only an admin. A couple of years ago I asked the guy who owns the forum if he would be willing to sell it to me but he never answered me!

Just a couple of weeks before going to Spain at the start of March I asked him to update the forum software, it's still the original version that came out in 2006! He said that as an admin I had the permissions to do it myself but when I tried it wouldn't let me! I got back to him about it & he said he'd fix it but he hasn't.

looks interesting, Balcony! I registered, then logged in, and it told met hat username didn't exist - maybe it needs a bit of time to absorb the info :-} I'll try again later.

There seems to be more Spanish activity than in English - or more subjects, anyway. first time I've seen a bilingual site, well done to you.

I had a writing group on Yahoo, and it ended up that I was talking to myself, sigh - didn't help that my PC was down for about five yeras (while I tried to get PC World to admit htat it had screwed up my previous PC and to make recompense)

must be even harder to be the only active member of a group that won't let you change anything, or fix anything. lol thought about starting your own? you'd get at least one new member!

sigh, it's still saying my registered nick don't exist. I'll try a different one, but if it don't work, I'll reinforce my prevous suggestion!

nope - still telling me that I haven't registered, despite doing so three times under two nicks. looks like it'll never let me in.

Send me a PM with your name, surname & the email address you would like to use. Choose your username & I'll create an account for you. Once you log in you can choose to change your password but I will need to create one for to start with.

I'd really love to have you on board! :-)

pm heading you-wards, thanks dear x