The Tor Browser

The book I read to research this post was Online Privacy An Introduction by William Rowley which is an excellent e-book that I read at Kindle Unlimited. This book is mostly about The Tor Browser and accessing the darknet. The darknet is a rather seedy version of the internet I think only accessible with Tor that isn’t indexed by the major search engines. Domain names are random series of letters and numbers and sites are things like drug dealing e-commerce ones, guns for hire and some unregulated polical ones. It is like a version of the internet rather like the wild west depicted in westerns. The Tor Browser developed by the US Navy and described as like as like a series of onion rings with many layers of encryption and security does the job it is meant to do extremely well. It can’t have it cover of many voluntarily IP addressed of which there are hundreds and the route to your computer is routed through these penetrated in any way other than susceptible software on your computer that can maybe expose your identity. Tor is based on Firefox another more commonly used browser and Tor has other layers of securiy like the ability to use multiple identities. If you go on many many mainstream sites like Twitter and Facebook they are sometimes able to interogate it and despite it not being used to access those sites find out all sorts of information. I don’t think I personally would have any need for Tor as it is very clandestine but this remains an interesting book. The book is only short at around 35 pages. I did enjoy reading it and do recommend it.

Amazon Kindle Fire TV Stick

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Fire TV Stick User Guide by Tom Edwards et al which is a very good book that I read at Kindle Unlimited. The Fire TV Stick is a TV streaming stick that competes directly with the Roku and Chromecast in doing a simlar job on a wireless network. They stream television via a router and go in the HDMI connection. There are quite a lot of websites like for example Hula that stream video and audio content that is then streamed to the Fire Stick. There is also a souped up larger device called the Amazon Fire and both devices take apps that can be downloaded and run on them. These devices are in that respect almost like game consoles. I think this book is on a fascinating topic and there are other good books about it too. I did buy a Fire TV Stick at one stage and then upgraded to a Fire TV at a later date. I think the Fire TV although more expensive is better value for money and has much geater capabilities.  This book is around 65 pages so is fairly short. I enjoyed reading it and do recommend it. This book is part of a series on similar products also like the Apple TV. It does do a decent job of covering the features on this device.

Scrivener

The book I read to research this post was Scrivener Essentials by Karen Prince which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This book is a low cost desktop publishing software available over the internet. You can publish kindle e-books as well as adobe digital edition ones. To do kindle ones in epub format you need to download kindle keygen and kindle preview. The former lets you create e-books in that format and the latter lets you preview them prior to uploading them to the kindle site. There is also a plug in you can download to publish in digital editions. Bear in mind Amazon likes you to publish e-books exclusively to their site. There is a corkboard feature to brainstorm ideas for your novel. It has several pages displayed on what looks like a virtual board hence the name. There is a novel feature for actually working on your book. Scrivener is around 40 pounds but comes with a 30 day evaluation version that actually has the days spread out actually spend working on your novel. The text to this book is somewhat small and it is only a basic guide. I enjoyed reading the e-book nonetheless and do recommend it.

Basic Photography

The book I read to research this post was Basics Of Photography by Irene Sheerow which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is only around 30 pages so is quite short. This is a basic guide to photography and making money from your photos. There is also websites like twitter, flickr and instagram where you can display your work. It generally is best to specialize in one aspect of photography ie fashion. You can also display your work in a blog. There is a wide variety of types of cameras. Many use a camera phone for normal use like when out. When you are posing for photos women should keep hair away from their face and can sometimes play with it to get a nice effect. You can tilt the head slightly and have the subject slightly off the centre of the picture. Men can part there legs slightly and women can cross their ankles for full length shots. If you cross your arms it looks defensive. Men can put their weight on the front foot and women on the back foot. This gives men a more masculine appearance and women a more feminine one. This is a very interesting book I do recommend. I certainly enjoyed it and did learn a lot from it. A telephoto lens if used wrongly can decrease pixels in image and you should consider just coming in a bit closer if possible to get the subject.

Climate Change

The book I read to research this post was Climate Change A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Climate change consists of various cycles on the Earth one of which is the ice ages of the last 25 million years. In these ice sheets form in America, Asia and Europe and cover once temperate regions. There is also global warming where the Earth a cycle of warming up and cooling. these are dictated by convection flow between the various regions. It is estimated that currently 2-3 % of the worlds GDP would cover existing damage repair but this rises to over 20 % if tackled in the middle of the century. One thing is of course dependence of fossil fuels which cause global warming and the greenhouse effect with increasing the carbon dioxide increasing the tempertaure. There is also CFC’s that deplete ozone and increase the solar radiation getting through the atmosphere. There is also the depletion of the ice caps caused by warming that raises sealevels flooding land. With a rising population less and less resources is being spread more and more people. People in poor countries want the latest standards of living which can further make pollution worse. This book is around 200 pages so is a decent loength. It is interesting and I do recommend it.

Exposure and the Histagram

The book I read to research this post was Exposure and Understanding the Histagram by Andrew S Gibson which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is around 60 pages so is fairly short. This book is part of a series of e-books on exposure and the various aspects associated with it and digital photography. The histagram shows your various light levels in a photo and this book looks at both adobe photoshop and photoshop lightroom. Many photographers only photo-editing is adjusting the light levels and you can achieve a lot with a pic in this way. In particular you should look at the curves slope which generally should tend to be gradual with out sharp breaks. You should bear in mind a photo is normally made up of red, green and blue and where these are all combined in equal measure makes white. You may have to adjust an individual color especially where it is an old photo that has decayed. Also you may have to adjust an individual color where it has either been under or over exposed. It also has some info on using raw mode which you generally use with DSLR cameras and provides more options especially with Photoshop. I did enjoy this book and do recommend it.

Digital Photography

The book I read to research this post was The Digital Photography Handbook by Doug Harman which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book is aimed at hobbiests. There is some stuff on photo-editing as well as photography. The book is around 220 pages so is a decent length. You should buy the best camera you can afford. A mid-range DSLR camera is recommended. Get one that takes interchangeable lenses. You also need photo-editing software. The industry standard is adobe photoshop but many people use picasa which is a free program you can download. Many cameras have one permanent lens with different modes like different telephoto settings. These are mostly adequate but not as good as the real thing. I’d suggest for people doing photography and photo-editing as a serious hobby get adobe photoshop lightroom which is a photo-archiving program. Most people only have to adjust the light levels in their photos and this program does an adequate job of this. Finally if you are considering doing heavy duty photo-editing consider gimp v2.8 which is a free program you can download.

Electronics

The book I read to research this post was Electronics Made Simple by Henry Jacobowitz which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1982 so is quite old. It’s around 280 pages so is a decent length. It also contains lots of graphs of the characteristics of components on an oscilloscope which are mostly partly dependent on its rating. I thought these were quite useful. Of course since 1982 there have been huge developments including components shrunk on a minute scale. A diode is simply a component with an anode and cathode and the voltage is kept constant. There are triodes, tetrodes and pentodes with various numbers of anodes and cathodes and these can reduce the voltage. Trtrodes and pentodes can have shielding on the outside to form capacitors. A capacitor stores electricity for a brief period.You can have switches that often have gas in side and 2  apart contacts that can close or open depending on what you need. Magnetism is often used to close these. You can have mercury filled ones for a heavy duty rectifier. A rectifier changes AC current to DC current normally. In electronics there is also radio waves that travel at the speed of light and bounce off the ozone layer in the atmosphere and reflect a signal back to earth but a long way away. I did enjoy reading this book and do recommend it.

Smart Photography

The book I read to research this post was Smart Photography: Get Off Auto Diane Griffiths which is a very good book that I downloaded from kindle. This book is part of a Smart Photography series. This particular book looks at the basic manual settings for a camera and does a good job of it. Shutter speed is like a window shutter and you vary the speed it opens and closes. Too fast a speed darkens an images and too slow blurs it. A fast speed is needed for something moving or bright. Aperture is like the pupil in the eye varying the light getting but never blocking it entirely. Higher numbers darken an image. ISO is a left over from film speed days and for normal use use 100. A dark image might require 400 or 800 like a cathedral interior. A high number can create noise in the image. Photos are normally taken as JPEGS but can also use RAW which gives more options when working in photo-editing software. It can also be used with things like HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography where several photos at different settings are combined to create a more complete one. The camera doesn’t have the light range of the human eye but this can be overcome in HDR Photography.

Modern Chemistry

The book I read to research this post was A Modern Approach To Comprehensive Chemistry by GN Gilmore which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book is intended for British A level students and is around 370 pages so is a decent length. You must get a minimum of 2 A levels and 3 O levels at good grades to stand a chance of getting to university. At A level and doing a university alot of self teaching and studying is expected. The time you spend with a teacher is limited and there is a steep learning curve. This book was published in 1982 so is quite dated. Carbon is able to bond to other identical atoms hence you can get very complex molecules especially living tissue. The majority of substances known to man are organic in nature. A molecule that is organic can also appear in 2 or more forms with identical numbers of atoms which we call polymers. Diamond the hardest substance known to man is essentially pure carbon with each atom linked by 4 covalent bonds. Graphite also a form of carbon by comparison is very soft due to different bonding. The size of an atom compared to carbon 12 is called its relative atom mass. There is more than 1 form of carbon such as carbon 14 and we call these isotopes. These unusual forms can often be radioactive. Due to being radioactive they decay changing maybe in several steps to eventually something more stable. We call this decay its half life. It is measured in the time it takes for half to decay and anything from a fraction of a second to millions of years. I did enjoy reading this book and do recommend it.