For those who are unfamiliar with bokeh, it is the blur in the out-of-focus areas of an image. This effect is easily achieved by using a DSLR camera. On a compact camera, it is difficult to have bokeh because of the small lens and sensor.

You could however “simulate” bokeh effect using an image editor. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to do it using the open source GIMP.

1. Invoke GIMP and open the image you want to edit.
2. Click on the Free Select Tool.
3. Trace your subject with the Free Select Tool.
   
4. Once your subject is selected, click on Select -> Invert to invert the selection. The background is now selected.
5. Click on Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur… to bring up the Gaussian Blur dialog.
   
6. Enter the size of Blur Radius. You have to experiment a bit to figure out the size. In this example, it is a 10MP image, and I used 20.0 px for the Blur Radius. Click on OK to close the dialog.
7. Save the image under a different name so that the original is unaltered.

Here are the sample photos.

BEFORE

AFTER

The thumbnails are a bit small for you to notice the difference. Click on the thumbnails to see the full size images.

When I used OS X as my main OS, I used iPhoto to manage my photo collection. One feature that I like the most is the photos are sorted by the date taken. I could not find a similar photo management program on Windows.

What I want to do is simple. I want to sort my photos into directory structure by year, month and day. I found an application that does this and more. It’s called AmoK Exif Sorter. It’s written in Java, so it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Here are the steps I did to sort my photos.

1. Create a directory called Unsorted and move the photos you want to sort into this folder.
2. Create a directory called Sorted for the destination.
3. Run AmoK Exif Sorter.
4. Click on Move in the Sort method.
5. By default, the filename is changed to year_month_day_hour_minute. To preserve the filename, click on the edit icon next to Filename and enter %filename%.
   
6. Click on the browse icon next to Target directory to select the Sorted directory you created in step 2.
7. Click on the Directory … to select the directory in step 1. You might want to save a profile so it’s easier for you next time. Here is a screenshot showing the photos added for processing.
   
8. Finally, click on Start to move the files.

You can do more by using different format tags. For example, you can sort the files by aperture(%aperture%) or focal length(%focallength%). To learn more about the format tags, click on ? -> Help. The help page is in German, but the tags are in English. It’s not hard to figure out what each tag represents.

Download link for AmoK Exif Sorter

I recently got a used Kodak Pro SLR/c camera. It shoots excellent pictures at a low ISO. However, the picture quality degrades greatly at a higher ISO because of noise. One time I accidentally set the ISO to 800, and almost all of the photos were not usable.

There are quite a few Photoshop plug-ins available to tackle the problem. However, Photoshop is very expensive, and, in addition, the plug-ins are not free. This combination is quite out of reach for most of us.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to reduce digital photos noise using free tool – GIMP and the wavelet denoise plug-in. Here are the links for these tools:

GIMP

Wavelet denoise plugin (Windows binary of 0.3.1 )

Please refer to the aforementioned links for installation procedures and the location where you should place the plug-in. Once you have GIMP installed with the wavelet denoise plug-in, follow these steps:

1. Invoke GIMP and open up a photo.
2. Click on Filters -> Enhance -> Wavelet denoise … to bring up the Wavelet denoise dialog.
3. There are 3 color modes to choose from. You don’t have to use them all. Just pick one. I like to use CIELAB.
4. After the color mode is selected, adjust the Threshold and Softness for each channel. Make small adjustments, and keep an eye on the preview window. If you set the Threshold to high, you might lose the sharpness of the photo.
   Before
   
   After
   
5. Click on OK to exit out the plug-in and apply the results to the photo.
6. Click on File -> Save As to save the file to a different name so that you still have the original.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the results. The plug-in author mentioned that it is possible to mask the filter effect with selection to further improve the results. That might be something you will want to try if you are well-versed with GIMP.

PopCap offers a free Peggle Nights game for the PC or Mac for your friend when you sign up for their Passport membership along with their newsletter subscription. The sign up process is easy, and it only takes a few minutes. You will receive a confirmation email from them after you sign up. Follow the link provided in the email to the page and look for the link Gift-a-game. You can only send the game once. The game retails for about $19.00 and has a high rating.

Here is the link to the signup page.

PopCap Games – Passport Signup

I use Thunderbird for my work emails. It works pretty well except there is one thing that troubles me for a long time. I have several IMAP shared folder on my account. Thunderbird does not check the new messages on these folders. I had to manually click on these folders to check. This is very inconvenient and I have missed some time sensitive emails because I forgot to check them.

I decided to find a solution this morning. To my surprise, the solution is simple and no plugin is required. My problem is due to my ignorance of the features that Thunderbird supports. By default, Thunderbird doesn’t automatically check for new messages on the folders, you have to configure it by yourself. Right click on a folder of your choice and select Properties. Make sure the box Check this folder for new messages is checked.

Click on OK to close the dialog. Afterward, Thunderbird checks the folder for new messages without manual intervention.

Microsoft Press is offering an eBook – “First Look Microsoft Office 2010″ for free. Two formats are offered: XPS and PDF. Please follow this link to get the free eBook.

Free ebook: First Look Microsoft Office 2010

The destination page is temporary. If you want to get updates about it, don’t forget to register on that page.

A feature of Firefox is that it calls your Anti Virus program to scan the downloaded files automatically upon completion of the download process. This feature is nice that it adds an additional layer of protection. However, there are times when you want to disable it. I was downloading a huge file from a trusted source. After the downloading was done, Firefox froze while the file was scanned. It took me a while to kill the crashed Firefox process.

There is no option to disable this feature in the Options dialog. You have to use the configuration editor. Here are the steps:

1. Enter about:config in the address bar and press Enter key. You might see a warning dialog. Click on I’ll be careful, I promise! to continue.
   
2. Enter scanWhenDone in the Filter box. Notice the the preference name browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is set to the default value true.
   
3. Double click on the preference and it changes to false.
   
4. Close Firefox. The next time you use Firefox to download files, it won’t scan the files.

Once you have downloaded those files that have problems with scanning, you might want to enable this feature again.

The first time you start up Thunderbird, you notice that it’s indexing your emails and feeds. If you do not think indexing is going to do you any good. You can disable it.

1. Click on Tools -> Options….
2. Click on Advanced and uncheck Enable Global Search and Indexer.
   
3. Click on OK to close the dialog

Microsoft offers Family Safety, a parental control program, for free as part of its Windows Live Essentials initiative. The program runs on Windows XP (32bit only), Windows Vista (32bit or 64bit) and Windows 7 (32bit or 64bit). This program offers the following functionality:

• Windows Accounts: Create different filters for each account and get reports.
• Content Filtering: Protect your kids from online contents using filters.
• Activity Reports: Detailed reports about what web sites your kids visited, what programs they used and how long they used the computer.
• Contact Management: Limit who your kids can talk to in Windows Live Space, MSN and Hotmail.
• Anywhere Access: Change the settings even when you are not at home.

Please visit this site for download.

http://download.live.com/familysafety

If you have downloaded some online videos for offline use, you might run to the situation that a large video file got split into several small video files. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to join multiple video files. Note that in order for this to work, all the video files should be of the same resolution and they should be encoded with the same codec.

The tool I use is called avidemux and it’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Here is the official site for avidemux. The version I use is 2.5.1 and the tutorial is for Windows. The input files are part1.mp4, part2.mp4, part3.mp4 and part4.mp4.

1. Run Avidemux.
   
2. Click on File -> Open … and browse to the first video file part1.mp4. If the mp4 file is encoded with H.264, you will see a confirmation message that you can choose another mode which is safer. Click on Yes or No depending on your own decision to continue. If the video file format is different, you will not see this message.
   
3. The video file is a MP4 file, so we click on the Format selection and set it to MP4. If you use a different format, be sure to pick the one that matches your files.
   
4. Click on File -> Append to select the second video file part2.mp4.
5. Repeat step 4 for part3.mp4 and part4.mp4.
6. Finally, click on File -> Save -> Save Video… to save the combined video. Note that no extension is given by default, so you need to enter it by yourself.