I’ve started my quest to learn how to use Adobe After Effects, and what better way to start than with Lightsabres!

We’ll be leaving Brisbane and flying into Birmingham on the 17th of June and staying till the 14th of July.

It just so happens the World Cup is on at that time, quite conveniently (i massaged the dates a little to make sure we were back at the right time).

So we’re very excited, hopefully the time from now until June will zoom by.

In typical Val style she wasn’t confident at all. She kept saying to me, “do you think some people are just not ment to drive”?

Well I think she drives pretty well, and now we can get a lot more done during the week, when Val and the girls hit the road.

Look out Australian pedestrians!

The factory had burnt down, for the second time, so they were investigating the questionable reasons behind the fire. The detective asked me if I worked there at the time of the fire. Fortunately I hadn’t as we’d already moved up to Queensland by then.

And that was that, but I was just wondering today and thought I’d Google the story to see if anything might have appeared in the news recently. So I stumbled upon this video. Thought I’d stick it up here for the curious.

Gracies Christening from Simon Pither on Vimeo.

Grace Walking With Granny from Simon Pither on Vimeo.

I’ll start working on the video we took of Gracies christening at the weekend, so that should be up soon.

Looking For Bugs from Simon Pither on Vimeo.

The overall guiding rule here is that the software has to be free and still be actively developed by it’s makers and, or community in the case of open source software.

In many cases you’ll already have paid-for software on your system that does the same job, but if for example, you find paying $50 a year for virus protection a bit steep, I have here the answer to your woes.

• Browser – Firefox
  

Firefox is the most popular alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 26% of the market share as supposed to Explorers 65%. That might sound a big difference but it used to be bigger, in 2004 Explorer had a 91% market share.

Explorer comes packaged with Windows when you get your nice new computer and most people use it without realizing there are alternatives.

Much better alternatives as it turns out, Firefox is faster, has better features (many of which Microsoft have copied and implemented in Explorer, such as tabbed browsing), and much more customization with easy to install plug-in, (I might list an essential list of those another time).

Most importantly though it’s free and open source.

Go and download it here.

You could also try Google’s new browser Chrome. It’s also free and open source. It doesn’t yet support plug-ins, but it will do soon. It may eventually become my browser of choice.

• Virus Protection – Avira

I used to pay $50-$70 a year for McAfee Virus Protection. I was great and I never had any trouble with viruses. When I needed to start saving the pennys though I looked for some free alternatives and found quite a few.

The most popular free anti-virus software is AVG, it does a great job and they’ve just released a new version which i haven’t tried yet, but my recommendation is Avira.

I’ve tried both and in one particular case had a virus that Avira picked up and AVG didn’t.

The one disadvantage to Avira is the annoying pop-up ads that appear every time it updates. These can be closes with just one click though and are a small price to pay for a good quality, and free product.

• System Optimization and Cleaning – CCleaner

If you’ve had your computer for a year or more and wonder why it doesn’t run as fast as it used to, takes about half an hour to boot up and maybe even crash once in a while. You probably need to give it a good spring clean.

I’ve seen ads on the TV for computer ‘experts’ that with make you system run like new again and charge you probably $200 for the favor. What they actually do is probably just run CCleaner.

Again its free, will delete all unnecessary internet files (left over from years of browsing) and clean-up the system registry of files that get left behind when you uninstall programs.

It’s quite painless to use and you should see a noticeable difference in you system speed (especially if you’ve had it a few years).

Find it here.

• Spyware and Other Malicious Software Protection – Search and Destroy

The paid-for anti-virus software usually comes with this built in and for the free ones it’s usually the ‘paid’ feature. Luckily there are free and just as good alternatives.

Search and Destroy with do exactly what it says, search your system and destroy all dodgy spyware that will be on your system if you browse the net. If you’ve never checked for spyware on your system before check it now, you’ll be surprised by how much crap it finds.

Find it here.

So that’s my list of Essential stuff. I’ve enjoyed writing this so I might do another one soon with some more free software that’s not quite so essential, but just as useful.

We’ve had our friends Robbie and Kylee staying with us for the last three week.

They’ve left now and flown back down to Sydney for some more adventures. It was fun having them stay and the girls really loved having some other people around.

Here’s a little story from the last three weeks.

The girls and I had been out for the afternoon and as we arrived back at the house Robbie told us that Kylee had some strange itchy lumps on her body and was having difficulty talking. They suspected she’d been bitten by something in the garden, but weren’t sure what. It was obvious that she needed to go to the hospital. So Robbie, Kylee and I jumped in the car and headed to the local casualty ward.

To cut a long story short, when we got to the hospital she was having real trouble breathing, they pumped her full of anti-histamines and adrenaline and was released from the hospital about 8 hours later.

She was lucky though, the doctors said if we had been another 40 minutes or so she might have not been able to breath at all.

An “acute allergic reaction to whatever it was that bit her”, they said. Could have been a spider or an ant.

We suspect it was spider though, and I took this photo of a spider that was on the chair that she was sitting on in the garden.

We had pest control out to the house two days later and had the inside and out treated for bugs.

In other news,

• we had a family picture taken yesterday by a proper photographer, so stay tuned for that to appear on the site soon.
• I sold my two old computers and got a brand new super-cool laptop that I now love like a third child.
• My Mum will be here from England for two weeks this weekend, and I’ve got the whole time off from work, happy days.