By now, everyone’s seen the revolution that’s occurred in photography in the past ten years or so. It’s reached the point where it is nigh on impossible to buy a film based camera any more – all the companies have gone digital this and digital that – even Polaroid have stopped making the ‘Instant Camera’ and moved to digital – where it’s always instant! Digital photography is fantastic – but it comes with a price. If you don’t have prints of your photos, what happens if your computer crashes? Fortunately, this is also one of digital photography’s strengths – you can make as many copies as you want!

For an easy way to make backups of your images, consider a service like PicasaWeb from Google (picasaweb.google.com). This is a free service provided by Google and gives you a place to store your images (and let others see them) online. This also comes with some awesome free software – Picasa, which is fantastic for organising your images. There is a catch however – you only get 1 GB of storage free with your account, and have to pay if you want more space – which with the size of digital images, isn’t very hard (my wedding photos are over 4 GB in size!).

Another option to consider is Flickr (www.flickr.com), which is owned by Yahoo. Flickr (yes, they intentionally dropped the e) has different limitations – you can only upload 100MB a month for free, and you can only manage the last 200 photos you uploaded, but there’s only one upgrade option you need to purchase – and that gives you unlimited everything for free! As a bonus, if your internet is with Xtra, you get a free Flickr Pro account as well!

Do you know of any other photo sharing site you like to use? Share them with our readers at www.catholic.geek.nz – we’d love to hear from you. Preserve your digital memories!

How often do you think about your web browser? That programme that you click on to view the internet (or at least, the World Wide Web part of the internet)? Chances are not very often. But maybe you should. How about we start with some history…

Back in the early days of the internet (i.e. early 1990′s), there was only one browser worth having – Netscape Navigator. The fact that most of you will not have heard of it speaks volumes to how fast things can change on the Internet. Netscape was the way most people viewed the Internet until the ‘browser wars’ of the late 90′s when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer started to take over and then dominate the browser market.

The biggest advantage Internet Explorer has is that it comes installed by default in every copy of Windows. In other words, unless you have already sought out alternatives, if you are running Windows, it is almost certain that you are using Internet Explorer (the blue ‘e’) to browse the Internet. This is not an inherently bad thing, but we do want to let you know that there are alternatives.

Both Mozilla’s Firefox and the award-winning Opera Browser are free browsers that have some advantages over Internet Explorer – especially for Christians. For example, you can download Firefox and then customise it to your heart’s content – including installing a Bible theme or a toolbar that allows you to search multiple translations of the Bible.

With Microsoft forced to compete, and Internet Explorer version 8 scheduled to be released soon (so as to compete with Firefox version 3), you as the consumer can only benefit from this kind of innovation – provided you know that it’s happening! Maybe check out the alternatives and see if you find something you like.