Evdokimos personal blog

Lunar Eclipse 4 march 2007 in Greece

evdokimos — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:00:00 -0600

Moon eclipse as seen in Greece 4/3/2007 11.30pm to 5/4 1.30am. The view is amazing and it looks like you see planet mars from earth, like scenery from sci-fi movie. Look how from full bright it become dark bloody red.

Explanation for the phenomenon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse

Sending pictures over the net

evdokimos — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 17:00:00 -0500

Save Bandwith and Time!

You just took pictures with your digital camera.
You want either to email them or to upload them to a web site.

The email seems impossible to be sent out. The uploading seems to never end.

Your first thought is that there is problem with the speed of your connection.

Before you call your ISP, for an upgrade at your internet connections, consider that images must be compressed before uploaded to the net.
Not only you 'll send your email or upload to the web faster, but also your viewer will see your email faster, or will not get bored waiting your web page to download (probably he will exit your site, before your picture downloads)

Anyway, all this extra size is useless for internet viewing and could be useful only in case of DTP, if you want to print some magazine or something.
Also, do NOT expect that any upgrade, at the download speed of your ADSL connection, will eventually upgrade significantly your upload speeds!

How to compress the pictures?
You may use one of the free utilities that are available, like irfanview or xnview

The procedure for irfanview is the following :
make selection - Edit -> Crop image, to take out the parts of the picture that u don't want to show
Image - Resize/resample picture so that the picture is suitable for viewing at its 100% zoom.
Save the image as JPEG format with 85% quality

You just saved time, bandwith and storage space for you and the recipients of your message / viewers of your web page

4.7R earthquake shakes Thessaloniki, Greece. Live Earthquake information sites

evdokimos — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:00:00 -0500

4.7R earthquake shakes Thessaloniki, Greece. Live Earthquake information sites
Thursday, 19 July 2007

An earthquake shaked Thessaloniki, Greece around 10pm yesterday 18 July 2007. The magnitude was around 4.7 R and the epicenter almost next to the city.
The feeling of the earthquake was very strange and different than other earthquakes. The earthquake moved the city up and down very strong just for around 5 seconds. The earthquake did nothing more than scare the citizens. No injuries, no damages mentioned.

The following sites provide detailed information and maps for the earthquake.

You can write also your report there, about how you felt the earthquake.

Map at Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology

European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre
EMSC Live Earthquake mashup
U.S. Geological Survey
USGS Live Earthquake mashup
Map at Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology

Greece True Experience

evdokimos — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:17:41 -0600

The Greek tourist organization published its new campaign for year 2008.
The motto of new campaign is "Greece the true experience".
The ads are like personal videos taken from a tourist's point of view showing his personal experiences at Greece.
For first time some aspects of Greek tourism are presented in such an international campaign, making complete presentation. It includes aspects such as countryside, mountains, agrotourism, cities, business.

The General Video

Culture

Seaside

Countryside

Touring

Nautical Routes

Luxury

Meetings

Health & Wellness

City breaks

Thessaloniki at Lonely Planet

evdokimos — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:21:06 -0600

Lonely Planet is a famous company for travel guides.
It included Thessaloniki at Top 10 Pick Cities for 2008, describing as an energetic city and cultural center of Greece
Have a look : http://www.lonelyplanet.com/bluelist/index.cfm?fa=main.viewList&list_id=...

Lunar Eclipse February 2008 Greece

evdokimos — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:02:01 -0600

Almost after a year from the last lunar eclipse, the same phenomenon is repeated this night.
The whole phonemomenon will take place at the night between Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 February 2008, 03.43 to 07.09.
The full lunar eclipse (red moon) will be take place from 5.01 to 5.51 am.
The sky will be clear and the temperature ok.
The earth will be between the moon and the sun. Earth's shadow will cover moon, but moon still takes somes light from the reflection of sun from the earth surface.
The color is red thought because the reflected light (that goes from earth to moon) has been filtered by earth atmosphere and blue color is missing.

New Pidgin version

evdokimos — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:32:33 -0600

Pidgin version 2.4.0 has a lot of bug-fixes and new feutures (changelog).

Pidgin is a lightweight instant messanging client, that let's you connect with many networks on the same time. MSN, Yahoo, Google talk, jabber (XMPP), ICQ, IRC and skype (with special plugin) are some of the networks it supports.

It is very convenient to combine all the networks where you have accouts, at one light and clean-interface program.
Now you can easier keep in contact with people in various IM networks, and organize your contacts in a more clean way.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) released! What's new.

evdokimos — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:34:04 -0500

Today Microsoft released the much expected Vista Service Pack 1.

A lot of people was waiting for this service pack before they migrate from XP to Vista.
Other users had already vista installed and were expecting for this service pack to resolve their everyday problems.

The most noticeable improvements :
Better hardware support for : direct3d, flash memories, sd cards,
Reliability Improvements : NTFS-formatted removable-media, drivers going to sleep, ad-hoc wireless, P2P connections, file backup, startup recovery tool
Performance and Power Consumption Improvements : faster network browsing, power consumption and battery life , hard disk spin down, faster moving directories with a lot of files, faster copying of files either locally or remotely upto 50%(!), faster copy progress estimation, faster resume-from-standby time, reduced media playing glitches, faster (upto 60%!) RDP
Security Improvements
Support for New Technologies and Standards
Desktop Administration and Management
Setup and Deployment Improvements
Interoperability Improvements
Feature or API Changes
General Improvements and Enhancements

There are some cases where some older programs do not work with SP1, or that some drivers will not work with SP1.

More detailed information from microsoft technet.

You may download Vista SP1 from
Microsoft download center.

What's new in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron released - install or upgrade

evdokimos — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:24:10 -0500

Ubuntu is an variant of linux (more specifically based on debian linux). Linux is a complete operating system, free, open-source, that can do for you anything that you from your computer for free.

The new version of ubuntu 8.04 hardy heron is released, If you are a Windows user, now it is easier than ever to try it: Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation.

If finally the Windows users decide to make a normal install of ubuntu : umenu : a simple launcher that lets the user install Ubuntu from Windows using Wubi, install Ubuntu to a partition without having to make their CD-ROM the first boot device.

What are the most important new feutures:

Xorg 7.3 better autoconfiguration and new Screen Resolution utility to dynamically configure the resolution, refresh rate, and rotation of a second monitor. This resolves problems that laptop users had to connect to a projector or external monitor.

GNOME 2.22 ufw - easily configurable firewall, Memory Protection, bugfixes and improvements, policy kit, pulse audio, Brasero CD/DVD burning application, world clock, KVM, ActiveDirectory integration, iSCSI support.

Linux kernel 2.6.24

Give it a try Download it from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

If you want to upgrade from older version just go to your update manager, check for updates, and upgrade.

What's new in skype

evdokimos — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:29:55 -0500

Skype very often produces new releases and beta versions.

Many times we wonder "Does it worth to spend time to download and install?"

You can check at the following link what's new in each version and decide yourself! :)

https://developer.skype.com/WindowsSkype/ReleaseNotes