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Another area that remains a mystery to many people is the saponins that Horse Chestnut and Butcher's Broom contains. These strengthen the walls of the veins in a person's body, especially the legs. They also add flexibility and elasticity and all around good healthy vein wall structure. What is really the mystery is why the only things suggested for varicose veins are usually heavy stockings and/or surgery. However, they warn that the problem may return, so how is that helpful? Many people have pain that radiates from the ankles and even numbness. These people are encouraged to try Horse Chestnuts and/or Butcher's Broom and even the Leg Herbal Food Formula that http://www.botanicchoice.com/ has. It may take about 3 months for the symptoms to go away, but isn't that better---to be able to walk again? Your veins will not bulge out anymore either. What is contained in most leg herbal food supplements is cayenne pepper. Cayenne Pepper in small amounts acts as a stimulant to circulation and so aids in the entire process. So just remember, be patient, but you too can be helped as well as the next person. Please note that I am not a doctor, and this article is not intended to diagnose or treat any specific disease or condition.

One can't forget the lowly onion or the high ranking garlic, and deservedly so. Garlic when combined with tomato juice, lemon juice and hot sauce can have a marvelous effect on opening up one's sinuses. You sip on the warmed concoction and voila in a matter of minutes the swelling of your sinuses has gone down and you can breathe again. The effect of the onion, on the other hand is much subtler. No matter how much injest of the onion, the effect is the same. Apart from some fiber and some vitamins, it doesn't do your cold or chest congestion any good. So why does the onion deserve to be elevated? It does contain an antibiotic-like substance that obviously gets destroyed during the human digestion process. Hence, the onion must be applied topically. So, get a teflon pan and peel and cut up about 3 medium sized onions. Put the cut-up onions in the pan and heat slowly until just soft and hot and moist. Putting a lid on during heating will go a long way toward speeding up the process while keeping the needed moisture in. When hot, wrap the onions in an old towel and use as a poultice on the chest. Keep putting it against the skin and removing it as the skin gets too hot. In about 30 minutes or less, the onion poultice will have cooled down to almost cold, but it will have done its job and you should be breathing easier. Please note that I am not a doctor, and this article is not intended to diagnose or treat any specific disease or condition.

So the question is asked "Why have we been told that all these seeds are poisonous- that they have cyanide in them?" Quite obviously if everyone ran out and either purchased bags of these seeds or bought the fruit containing the seeds, there would not be a lot of profit in this to the drug companies. Or rather the drug companies would cease to exist. Unfortunately, most of the people did believe what they were told and so have cheated themselves out of easy and affordable means of getting rid of or not getting cancer and other diseases. Also, they even made it illegal to import the bitter almond tree which also has large concentrations of Vitamin B-17 in its fruit. So be aware with anything you are told in the media, that you may have to dig deeper to find the whole truth because half truths are not good enough.

This reminds me of what I have found out about Apricot pits and anything that contains the nitrilosides(vitamin b-17). This vitamin b-17 has been said to contain cyanide and so this has kept many people from the truth. The answer is yes and no. Yes there is a cell that produces cyanide like substance but there is a helper cell associated with the cyanidic cell. When the cyanidic cell comes in contact with a normal human cell, the helper cell renders it harmless. However, if the cyanidic cell comes in contact with an abnormal human cell, the helper cell does nothing and that cell is destroyed. This might work the same with the virus aforementioned. However if the virus is able to hide inside the human cell, I don't know how it would react. So when they did the research they found that 4-6 apricot pits was enough to get rid of the cancer. My thinking is that you can't make very much money off selling apricot pits so an advertisement blitz was developed to discredit and even make it appear dangerous to eat pits or seeds of any kind. I remember that I would be careful to spit out any apple seeds because they contain "cyanide" or so I was told. I always wondered why I did not get very ill when I would inadvertently swallow some? :-) Now 4-herb tea or eissac tea named for the nurse that found the old ojibwe recipe has also been shown to fight against cancer. I know that it cleanses the liver and for me personally has naturally relieved constipation and muscle aches and pains and has even gotten rid of migraines that I believe were caused by exteme muscle tightness in the jaw. Why do i say this? I remember the warm loosening of the jaw muscles I felt and at the same time the migraines disappeared. Oh I had started again to regularly take the 4-herb tea when the jaw muscles loosened. 4-herb tea has been shown to shrink tumors as well as be a natural pain reliever. It contains burdock root, slippery elm, sheep sorrel, and turkey rhubarb. A relative faithfully drank this tea a few times a day for 7 years before she died (She had cancer.) One thought I have is that perhaps the 4-herb tea gets rid of and shrinks the tumors but may not destroy the abnormal cancer cells? Is this possible? If apricot pits and the like do destroy the cancer cells, then maybe a combination approach is in order. 4-herb tea can be found at herbalhealers.com I started out with a couple of bottles of 4-herb tea which was pricey. This was to get me used to what to expect in taste and coloration. Now I buy the bulk herbs, already portioned out but not combined, which is cheaper. This makes 2 gallons. Actually I half this to make 1 gallon at a time. Of course, I put the newly brewed tea in either opaque or brown glass or plastic bottles. I heat up water to almost boiling and dunk my bottles briefly in that. That seems to sterilize them good enough as I keep the filled bottles in the refrigerator at all times. Also my filled bottles seem to last a couple of months. If it gets cloudy or milky then it needs to be reboiled. However, mine rarely do. My secret? I do not put the solution through any cheesecloth. I just ladle it into the bottles, cap them, allow some hours for the newly filled bottles to cool to room temperature and then place them in the refrig. Before, when I sieved them as the instructions called for, they were going bad in 2 weeks! When I ladle I am careful not to disturb the sediment on the bottom of the kettle. And even when I get to the sediment, it goes into a bottle and I will chew on it. I have done this and have experienced no side effects whatsoever. A friend and her sister have both gone through bouts of cancer. Their other sister never did. Why? My friend complained that the other sister always ate the pit after she ate the peach. They probably kept warning the other sister not to do that as she was going to get sick. But of course how could they know the truth with all the propaganda that they and ourselves have been fed? Lastly, this vitamin B-17 is found in large concentrations in nuts and berries, especially wild berries. For some reason, the more domesticated a berry becomes, the less vitamin B17 it contains. This is exciting to me, because pits can be bitter tasting and for some reason my stomach gets upset when I eat something bitter. Another sad commentary on our times is that the more people go in for "landscaping" their yards with flowers and etc the more the "unsightly" wild berry patches are being gotten rid of. For myself I am finding less and less roadside berry picking areas available to me. To show you how "valuable and rare" berry bushes have become to me, I traveled 20 miles to a lady to pick up 3 gooseberry plants that I have since repotted and are doing fine. She offered them through the local freecycle and I jumped at the chance. :-) Yes, we have local forest preserves, but the rule is to not take anything out of them. You can find the nearest freecycle to you by going to freecycle.org Lastly, if you are interested in any more of my home remedies let me know. In addition, I would be interested in your home remedies as well.

How about trying out your brain power vs your brain age. There are some fun tests at myBrainTrainer.com. However, after you take the evaluation you are encouraged to join for 9.95 for 3 months or 29.95 for an entire year. If the PC is not your cup of tea, try out Brain Age by Nintendo.This is the first one out. There will be more to follow. Evidently there is alot of liberty taken to judge the player, so be prepared for it. There are tests to take here as well although you can have up to four players. You can even try Sudoku on the Sony PlayStation. Maybe the playstation technology is coming to grips with an older generation and seeing that they have something for them as well.

Mind games are the newest way to pass the time and they can be educational too. Gradeschoolers up to high school age can really benefit from Mind stretchers, a grouping of testing games at Queendom, the land of tests. Some students freeze at the thought of tests and these fun games or tests would help them go through that fear, arriving at the other side to the realization that tests can be a fun. It is almost a challenge to be undertaken. Tests can now invoke a response asking oneself what do I have to do to ace this test instead of just kicking the can and strolling away. Mind stretchers start with simple word matching or groupings and ramp up to math word problems. Not enough can be said about word problems being a stumbling block to many students. They either haven't been taught or have mind-blocked out the math meanings of many of the words in the word problems that enable them to speedily come to the answers. All this can be found in the Top Five section. The other sections deal with matching pictures and patterns and can be great if you want to improve your powers of observation. We take too much for granted and even though we see things we really don't observe in nearly the detail that we think we do. Not sure? Check out the Mind Toys section and see for yourself. If these seem to tame for you got to Braingle. You will first find the Most Popular Teasers, but the major categories are Trivia, Mentalrobics and Games. The Brain teasers can be anything from Optical Illusions to Riddles and these have been submitted by other Registered users. Getting an account is free and records where you've been on the site as well as allows you the privilege of submitting a game or teaser yourself. There are Math word problem teasers as well as Cryptography teasers. There are cryptic messages hidden in the stories and it is your job to decode it. Don't forget about the Probability and Science teasers. These can get pretty hairy, especially the Probability teasers. Trivia includes questions concerning Technology, Nature, Hollywood, Geography, History, and more. Yes, tests and games can increase our brain power, as long as you know where to go to enhance it.

to be created by Open Source. AMD will provide the skeleton for the drivers and then watch out. The drivers can then be created by opensourcers. (I think I just created a new word) That is, programmers can create drivers that are no longer proprietary. This means that AMD will really be giving Intel a run for its money. Even though some people believe Intel to be faster, they just might consider switching over to AMD. This means that the competition will heat up and that is a good thing. To read more about this announcement click here on AMD Open Source Drivers

Wow this is only the tip of the iceberg-not meant literally, of course. There is an army of sand figures marching to somewhere---anyone's guess is good here. Then traveling to Russia (and the site is in Russian) you will see a lioness guarding her cubs. There is even a unique concept of using various sand creations as a Walk-Thru that raises money for charitable causes. All the elaborate sand sculptures of Star Wars, basketball sports arena, dolphin aquarium, and Wizard of Oz took 200 to 500 tons of sand to create. It is still amazing that the sand statutes stay intact as long as they do and don't start to disintegrate as soon as they are made. I guess there must be a technique to it which apparently many persons have mastered! Don't forget to keep clicking on all the links on the WOW html in order to view all the sand monuments listed there.

Summer is almost over, or so it seems. And what can you still do? How about some Sand castle making or some Sand sculptures? Many people are doing just that and some creations are very impressive! Some sand sculpturing contests have taken place, even some this very year. Take a look at " sand city" , Antalya, Turkey, where people with some amazing talents created creatures including lions, lizards with humourous faces, and cyclops. You will also find a women peeking out of a 'stone' urn and a pyramid-like minature city. There is even a bird with a collar and chain. How creepy is that! Don't pass by the annual Cannon Beach Sand Castle contest where you can view the sand fortress. Cannon Beach is a town in Oregon that was hit by a tsunami in 1964. That did not get the media's attention for any length of time, but a year later, it having the lowest tides in a century did provide a nice focus. Hence, with all that extra beach and the world looking on, the annual Cannon Beach Sand Castle contest came into being. Other sand sculptures abound throughout the world. When you are in Canada, check out the life-sized Chevy Volt sculpture at Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver. Why this car? Supposedly it is very environmentally friendly. Hop a plane to Belgium and find Lommel. There you will discover many Sand Sculptures by many different artists. Can you find the one of a girl eating some huge Gingerbread cookies? Hopefully, if you visit Lanikai Beach in Hawaii you will still see this Sand Fortress or perhaps a replica of this one. That bridge looks really cool! Next take a train to Berlin and look for a television tower. There you may spy this sand city of cones. Now, you ask, how can I participate? Well, get on a flight to the New Jersey shores for your first lesson. Next you can build a Mayan temple with these instructions. Lastly, if you need some review on How to build a Sand Castle read this and enjoy the rest of your summer!

...of photos and new found friends. New Friends, that is, if you participate in the Flickr forum and share your photos with others. Now, since you read the former reviews, you have just gotten Picasa2 and are having fun bringing out the best in your photos. But, you wonder, does a place exist where you can share your photos automatically, or almost automatically? Why not download Flickr Uploader 1.0 and let the fun begin. However, you know the saying that nothing is free. Well this is true here, if you measure cost in time. In order to get Flickr Uploader 1.0 to work you have to download the 12.3 MB Yahoo Widget Engine 3.0 ( a link to it is at the same site you downloaded Flickr Uploader 1.0). No problem if you have DSL or cable, but a big delay if you have dial-up. You also will need Windows XP or 2000 or greater; the older Windows operating systems will not do. The Widget Engine generates a multitude of widgets on your desktop. It feels like an invasion, even though in reality there are only 5-10 widgets most connected together. My recommendation is that unless you have a powerful computer, right click on the widgets and close them. It is nice to have the temperature displayed and the stock market prices on your desktop, but not at the expense of valuable computer system resources. After a bout of authorizations, finally the Flickr Uploader 1.0 is sitting on your desktop taking up about two thirds of the window. (Oh, after you take the tour and authorize it to connect with your Flickr online site or space, it will shrink to about one tenth of your desktop. Not intrusive at all.) The Flickr Uploader 1.0 brings the internet to your desktop. Think of it as one huge slide show. You can interact with it through the icons in the upper left hand corner of your photo. There are icons to allow you to see the previous or next photo, see a photoâs profile or tag it as a favorite. In the upper right hand corner of your photo are 3 additional icons for finding photos or sharing them. After the right clicking on the first one, a Choose Photo Source menu drops down. Here you can choose pictures from your Favorites, your Sets, your Groups, and your Contacts. You can also check the Interestingness of the photo as well as Everyoneâs Photo. Lastly, you can get information from Flickr Widget Help or even Sign out from Flickr here. Sets are a way to organize your photos. Sets are not copies of your images, but merely pointers to them, so you can view some of your images together in a specified category of your choice. Groups are an entirely different cat. Groups are actually groups of people all interested in a specified topic or subject matter. As a member of Flickr, you can choose to join an already established Group, or if you are interested in a more specific niche, you can Create a Group of your own. Of course, since this Group resides in Flickr, there are some rules and regulations to the establishment and maintenance of a Group. One group I found was a tiny Homesteading group, but I also found another group with considerably more interest: Cold process soaps. In a group, you would naturally upload or share your pictures pertinent to that group and some discussion and dispersal of good information can also result. For example, a person was interested in making cold-process soaps and another group member directed her to a specific website that gave individual and group lessons about many aspects of soap,s including cold process soap making. Groups can be private or public. This particular Cold Process Soap group is public. When you allow public viewing of your photos, an Interestingness number or spot is attached to your photo. One (1) is the highest ranking and goes down steadily from there. There has been some discussion as to what propels these rankings, but just when people think they have it figured out, it changes. For example, a person could have a picture rated with a high ranking for daysâshould mean that many people are enjoying viewing it---and all of a sudden it drops to an obscure place. Just as Google has rankings that are generated by their closely guarded secret algorithms that they tweak from time to time, so Flickr has a algorithm that adjusts Interestingness as well. (Personally, I think the word Interestingness is a bit long and tedious. They should probably rename it to something like Happy to make is more perky and interesting. J) The second icon of the 3 icons in the upper right hand corner of Flickr Uploader is the mysterious eye. In reality, it only means that this opens up the Photo browser. Here you can organize your photos, quickly creating or viewing batches of photos as a slideshow. In addition, if you ar logged in you can choose from your own photos or your friends photos. This is accomplished with a little browser window popping up within your Flicker Uploader widget. Here you can click on Choose Photo Source and filter your photos and then pressing the Display in Frame button will bring up the pictures as a segment of the slideshow. Finally, the 3rd and final icon that we have been all waiting for, the Uploader icon. Although it appears to be hiding, once you recognize that the picture of a rounded rectangle with a upward arrow underneath it means Upload, you will always be able to spot it and to open it. Here we can handle each and every photo before we upload it into Flickr. We can add a title and description to it. This is important as some websites are taking public pictures from Flickr members and offering them free to be put on people's cell phones. Flickr has assured their members that they have no part in this stealing of their pictures. By having a title, you can keep track of your pictures, demanding them to be taken down from other sites if need be. Of course, you can select Private here and you wonât have that problem, but then sharing the pictures is half the fun at Flickr. Sets can be made here of your pictures and Tags can be put on as well. There are about 70 tags to choose from. Some important and some whimsical. Your choice. There is even a place here to drag and drop the pictures into for ease of transference. Uploading 6 pictures on a slow DSL connection took 3 minutes. Not good, not bad-just reality. We all do not have good internet service, especially when we have to rely on phone lines installed many years ago. After you upload your pictures onto the Flickr site, you are set to live in a world of photos. So what can you do? When you are on your account in the Flickr website you have a menu that goes across the top of the browser. You can start to Organize your pictures, you can go to You(your account-has your pictures in it, etc), you can look at your Contacts, join or visit Groups or pick Explore to go exploring. Exploring means looking into all the free services that Flickr offers and continues to add to. Now do be aware that you can upload only 100MB of photos each month. This refers to bandwidth, and not storage space. If you need more than that you should sign up for their Pro services. However, for amateur photographers or for those who choose to make their photos lighter, this 100MB limitation will do just fine. The only complaint I have about Flickr is when I want to show pictures to others I only have three choices: Public, Private-family or Private-friends. Please correct me if I am wrong, and I would so love to be wrong. This means I have to know my family and friends in order for them to see the private pictures. I could not give a friend or, say this forum, the authorization code to show it to whomever they wish. If I could give out an authorization code, like Piaza2 does, many people could see it, but not just anybody. As it is, I have to make these pictures Public if I don't know exactly who I am sharing the pictures with. This needs to be changed. For all those who are thinking, this is all well and good, but there is Yahoo! Photos. I will keep and share my photos from there. In a short period of time, probably one month is left, Yahoo! Photos will close and only Flickr from Yahoo will remain. The owners of Yahoo! Photos felt that this is old outdated technology and so must make way for all the new technology that Flickr does have and will have. In the future Flickr will allow for video sharing and other technology that is on the cutting edge. Yes, the cake keeps getting better and better and better.

Well, as far as another way to organize and share photos, check out my review of Flickr Uploader 1.0 and your Flickr online site or space. I am realizing more and more that each piece of software has something it does really well. For example, I still use Photoshop to crop and make jpegs or gifs from Printscreen. From now on I will use Flickr when I need to upload photos fast. Piasa2 doesn't really upload all that fast, although I personally love it for the ease of saving shots I otherwise would have to throw away due to being too dark or washed out. Finally, for making photos to be really lightweight, I would have to go with the Lightbox software developed by the person whose name starts with a "P". Hence, I've yet to find a software that does it all extremely well. I guess that is the fun of the hunt.

Tired of Photo Albums that are long on promises, but short on delivery? Try Picasa2 by Google. Instead of all the pictures displayed on one page, they are organized into views. After downloading Picasa2 , you are asked whether or not you want the entire computer searched for pictures, or just the Desktop, My Pictures and My Documents. The scan of the entire computer is good if you have pictures scattered throughout your C drive or if you have multiple drives. Otherwise it is unnecessary to scan the entire computer. Using picasa2 by Google you can easily get your pictures up on the web. Talk about customer delight. Picasa2, as well as it being free has Photoshop beat in the intuitive features department!! The double clicked on features do not float around in little boxes above the application, they become the application. For example, you select a picture, right click on it and choose edit. Now the selected picture is 5 times its size and is the focus in a seemingly new application, all dedicated to modifying the picture selected. There are 3 tabs to choose from. The first tab called Basic Fixes allows you to Crop, Straighten, get rid of Redeye, do Auto Contrast and Auto Color. For darker pictures, the Iâm Feeling Lucky and Fill Light features are superb. The horse picture was too dark to see. When I used the slider to adjust Fill Light, it was hard to decide which was too light and what was just right as it was obvious that this picture was going to turn into a painting, due to the extreme darkness in the picture. Here is where Iâm Feeling Lucky came in and saved the day. One press of the button, and my painting was right, and done and delivered with optimum colors, optimum light and optimum dark in the horse to make it seem real. The Tuning tab, also, has a Fill Light slider, and in addition Highlights, Shadows, and Color Temperature sliders as well. Donât forget the Neutral Color Picker at the bottom of this tab page. For all of my sun-washed photos, the Shadows slider was able to restore a lot of the original color to the photo. Simply amazing! Finally for all those extremely washed out human pictures, the Effects tab is so very helpful. After Shadowing a washed out photo, you will find Warmifying will add some yellow into it and help the skintone come out better. There are a total of 12 special Effects: B&W, Filtered B&W, and Focal B&W; Sharpen, Sepia (Pinkish), Film Grain, Tint (Bluish), Soft Focus (one point is focused, while the rest is in a slight blur), Glow and Graduated Tint. It is evident that you have many buttons to select from. There is yet another feature that allows you to pick a point on the picture and Zoom in on it at 100 per cent. Also donât forget that you can Add a Caption to any picture you are editing. Just donât depend on the cut and paste feature, because it isnât there. In all three tabs, whatever you pick you can go to the lower left hand corner and undo whatever you did. Photoshop was notorious for not being able to undo what you did. Sometimes pictures in Photoshop would be so far from pretty, that the best you could do was delete that one, and grab a fresh copy from the original to start over. I see that as such a timewaster. Here the Undo button allows one to experiment and if it is not favorable, the picture is restored back to normal. Donât forget the slide show feature in the View Edit mode. At the uppermost section above the picture being edited is a tiny Thumbprint strip. The picture edited is in the middle of 3 successive pictures to its left and to its right. This is very useful if you have a large photo album of over 50 pictured or more. You just click once on the picture you want to edit, and it appears in the large picture display below. This is so Ajax. These features actually make this application fun and I can envision myself using Picasa2 for many years to come. Now you want to publish your pictures in a Web Photo Gallery for all to see. What do you do? Click on the Web Album button on the bottom of the page. You will need to tell whether you want to Create a new web album or Add to an existing one. Here you can modify the Albumâs title and set the Upload setting to Optimized (Fastest), Medium or Slowest uploading of the photos. Once you click OK , the Upload Manager takes over. With DSL it can take as long as one hour to upload 100 pictures. However, if you selected Optimized, it could take less than that. After you have the pictures on the Web, you can select Edit Album Properties where you can choose to make your Album private or public and you can even choose an Album cover. If private, you are given a authorization key that you give to those few you want to view your album. If public then the url above where you are at will do just fine. Ease is speed and with our life crammed with interesting adventures, who wants to spend a lifetime organizing pictures in a Web Gallery. Ease of use is the key here. Picassa is so intuitve and has so many features that it is a dream to use. The fact that it has a brand new feature--- the Web Album ---that allows you to seamlessly upload your pictures from Picasa into a Google Web Album is like frosting on the cake. That cake seems to get better and better.

You have taken pictures and have made a Web Gallery using Lightbox and Adobe Photoshop CS2 with Ajax, of course. You have enjoyed the experience, but now your Adobe Photoshop CS2 30-day trial is about to expire. What do you do? Grab the LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator ! My hats are off to Mr Pranas. While it was good experience to learn the ropes, so to speak, working with Lightbox and Adobe Photoshop CS2. I really like the crispness and freshness of the Web Gallery that LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator produces. One new feature is the ability to have your own web galley show right in the middle of the Web Gallery. Clicking on any picture, causes it to "rise" above all the other pictures while the background is darkened. You are told what image number you have selected and the total number of images. Hence you have no doubt in your mind as to where you are at in the Web Gallery and how many pictures you have left to view. In addition, in the upper left hand corner appears a Prev and in the opposite corner a Next when your mouse hoovers over that space. In this way you can view the entire Web Gallery from one spot. No more scrolling across or down to view the entire Picture Show. This is a nice Ajax touch, indeed. What do you need to activate the LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator? You do need to have .NET Framework installed on your computer. Some of the newer Windows XP or 2000 comes with it preinstalled. If not then you need to download .NET Framework and maybe even the Windows 3 Installer. (You may have to google the Windows 3 Installer for a different site if you have less than Windows Service Pack 3) Once you have .NET Framework installed on your computer, just leave it and forget it. It is just a prerequisite to get your LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator to open up into a nice small application that can sit on your desktop, if you like. If you have looked at my Lightbox and Adobe Photoshop CS2 review you really don't need a tutorial. Just scroll down on the LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator download site and see what the application should look like and what the Web Gallery produced looks like and you're in business. This application is similar to the Adobe Photoshop CS2 panel in that it has a Source and Destination folder that you must specify. In addition if you want to add the Web Gallery to your website you need to supply the LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator with a web page from your site that you put <%WG%> in the body. The generator will find that <%WG%> and substitute your new Web Gallery onto that page, otherwise it will produce an Error Message. The only feature I see missing, is the ability to automatically add captions if you do not want to use your image filenames as captions. To add captions, instead of filenames, to your pictures you still have to manually go into the html pages generated and add them. To find out how to do this please see my Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Web Gallery review. Well, this was a pleasing surprise to be able to produce a Web Gallery just as good, and in some ways better than using Adobe Photoshop CS2 by just using free software, and a simple application like the LightBox JS Web Gallery Generator where everything is done for you. Well, almost everything.

So you've just downloaded the trial Adobe Photoshop CS2 and you have a bunch of pictures from an event or you just want to have a web gallery of pictures showing how to do something. What do you do? (Oh yes, you've heard about Ajax as being what people expect in a webpage, so you would like to include that too.) First, you need to modify the program files in Adobe Photoshop CS2 or rather you need to add a folder and put in it some Lightbox files. At the Lightbox Web Photo Gallery you will find an excellent tutorial to get you started. In a nutshell you will find the folder named Simple, duplicate it and rename it to Lightbox for simplicity sake. Or you can name it whatever you like just so you remember its name as it will appear as a Style in the Adobe Photoshop CS2 Web Gallery panel. (Refer to the above tutorial for the exact location of the Simple folder.) Also create a folder within the Lightbox folder and name it Images. Next you will want to download the Lightbox v1 files into the Images folder. (You will even find some Lightbox modifications at the huddletogether website, which will not be addressed here as this post is solely concerned with modifying the Web Gallery in Adobe Photoshop CS2.) Again, at the Lightbox Web Photo Gallery you can choose from a list of Web Photohop Gallery tokens provided. You need to provide an HTML skeleton for yourself and then add whatever tokens you want. Make sure you link any css files in the <head> section and call this new html file IndexPage.htm and place it in the Lightbox folder. Follow directions to modify the Thumbnail.htm, Caption.htm, SubPage.htm files in the Lightbox folder and lastly modify the lightbox.js file in the Images folder. To proceed to the final stages, open up Adobe Photoshop CS2 and click on Automate -> Web Gallery. You will see a Web Photo Gallery Panel appear. Now for the important selections: Select Lightbox as your Style and Browse to the location of your photos or images. Whatever folder you choose, make sure all of its contents are what you want in your Web Gallery as all these images will be included. Next choose the Destination for all the folders and htm files that the Photoshop Web Gallery will generate. This is also important as these folders that Photoshop generates are the very folders you will be putting up on your website. Now you can have fun with the Options area. By selecting General you can change those pesky extensions from .htm to .html at a whim. Selecting Banner allows you to choose the overall content for your site such as the Site title and date and name of the photographer, etc. ( And if you want more to choose from you need to go into your Lightbox folder and make the changes there.) Next, selecting Larger Images allows you to select the quality of your images. I would suggest you click off the check next to Filename as it will place the entire name of the file beneath the image-even the extension name. This may look strange, especially if you use numerical names for your images. Selection of Thumbnails allows you to size your Thumbnails from small to medium to large to a custom size where you would choose the pixels. Again unchecking the filename here might also be a good thing. However, if you used good descriptive phrases in your filename, then you might want to try it checked. Also, when selecting Custom Colors you can easily modify your css values such as Text, Link, Active link, and Visited Link. Pressing OK automates the making of your Web Gallery, but two final aspects are needed if you want captions next to your images after they are selected and you want a way to navigate between the Web Gallery webpages that are produced. First go to your Destination folder. Here you will see index html pages. They are labeled index, 2nd index, 3rd index and so forth. These are your Web Gallery webpages. Now open them up in an Html editor like HtmlKit and add your caption to each images title="Caption goes here" and save the file. Do this for each image and each Web Gallery webpage and, voila, you have your captions added to each of the images. These images will be seen either as tooltips when you hover over a picture, or at the bottom of the picture after you have clicked on it to enlarge it. Lastly, add another js file to this folder. Mine is called a.js. You can see the code below (make all your necessary personal substitutions): document.write('<style type="text/css" title="HomePageNavigationStyle" media="screen">#HomePageNavigationBar_1 #D_1,#HomePageNavigationBar_2 #D_2,#HomePageNavigationBar_3 #D_3,#HomePageNavigationBar_4 #D_4{text-decoration:none;font-weight:bold;}</style>'); document.write('<A id="D_1" href="http://lygo.com/ly/sitemissing.html One</A>\n <A href="#" style="text-decoration:none">|</A> \n<A id="D_2" href="http://lygo.com/ly/sitemissing.html Two</A>\n <A id="D_3" href="http://lygo.com/ly/sitemissing.html Three</A>\n <A href="#" style="text-decoration:none">|</A> \n<A id="D_4" href="http://lygo.com/ly/sitemissing.html Four</A>'); Now go to any of the above Web Gallery pages and look between the container id and the stats id in the beginning of the body of the Html page. Here you will find the corresponding code for the Navigation Bar wrapper. Substitute for your webpages and you can now navigate between all your Web Gallery webpages. ( I will say this, that on my webpages, this navigation bar setup is not perfect yet.) So with these simple modifications you can use Adobe Photoshop CS2 to automate the making of a Web Gallery for you in short order and you also allow the viewer the ability to close the image without pressing the back button on the top of the web browser, which is so often the case. This is the beginning of using Ajax features in your Web Gallery. As you continue to modify it, it will appear more and more ajax-like. Now, you can have your cake and eat it too.

Create some solar cookers By setting up some solar ovens in your yard, will the aliens feel right at home? Seriously, although having solar ovens in your yard may look weird, the number of solar collectors is increasing as people in different areas of the world design them to fit their climate and their needs. There are 3 basic types of slow cookers: box cookers, panel cookers and parabolic cookers. In addition there is a fourth type used to pasteurize water. The cone is effective in that after the evaporated water collects on the walls of the cone it is inverted and collected in a bottle. Voila! You have fresh drinking and cooking water. What also works well is the Soda Bottle Pasteurizer , which is made from its name as in that after the evaporated water collects on the walls of the cone it is inverted well as a soda pop can, all put on a panel type cooker. The water needs to be heated to 158 degrees for 15 minutes or more. Solar ovens are said to be slow to medium cookers when compared to our modern day gas and electric stoves and ovens. The fastest types are the Parabolic cookers, but since they focus the sunâs rays down to a point, they can be extremely dangerous. Here, you can set fire to a piece of paper in 3 minutes. Definitely not something you would want to store in a hot shed on a sunny day. Two very fast and efficient solar cookers are the Heavens Flame cooker, Cookit Foldable Family Panel and the Parvati 12 sided cooker. (Of course, fast in terms of that the CooKit takes 70 minutes to hard boil or cook an egg.) The Heavens Flame cooker is a box cooker that has an adaptation on the front reminiscent of a funnel type of panel cooker. The box part is either square or rectangular and is called the collector. The interior of the box is painted black with non-toxic paint and glass canning or recycled jars and/or small dark pots are placed inside the collector. The top part is all funnel reflectors. Although this Heavens Flame cooker is a little more complicated to make, it has the advantageous of a lot of testing done on it and improvements incorporated into the design to make it very efficient in its cooking. The Parvati 12 sided cooker , although a panel cooker has some of the designing of a parabolic cooker. Hence it should be very fast but I would be careful to use handmitts when entering the cook zone as it should be very hot and it does not have a long funnel to protect the person like the Solar Funnel panel cooker has. Enter stage right are the panel cookers that take panels of aluminum foil, usually put onto cardboard and either fold them or put them together at different angles. The principle here is to allow the unhindered rays of the sun to bounce onto the panels until it reaches a black object that would collect its energy. Pure sun is needed here and that high in the sky between 10am and 2 pm. After this time retentive cooking can be used. This involves wrapping the cooking pot or jar in layers of either small blankets or towels and putting in a straw round and deep basket to allow the food to keep cooking outside of the solar oven. Each solar cooker has been developed to meet a unique situation. In KwaZulu-Natal, they have summers that are cloudy and winters that are sunny. (Sounds like a lot of areas I know.) The Pentagon Star panel cooker is one of the simplest to make and very efficient. The lower angles of the sun in the morning and afternoon are adjusted for as well. Wind is not a problem for the Pentagon Star cooker and putting side flaps up or down allows for different changes in the season. In addition it uses some box leftover pieces as pot insulation, which very few panel cookers take advantage of. Another special solar cooker is the Backpack Cone Cooker It is made of plastic instead of cardboard, is in the shape of a long cone that focuses where the sun is at and is propped up against a rock or put into the ground. When time to head out of camp, you simply roll it up. Soups only take 20 minutes. Not bad at all for a solar cooker. A safety caution is needed here. The parabolic designs concentrate sunlight to a point, while the funnel cookers have the hot axis of sunlight concentration deep within the cone. In any case, looking at any reflective surface for any period of time necessitates the usage of sunglasses. So when you do use and/or make solar ovens, please wear dark polarized sunglasses and you shouldnât have any problems-only enjoyment from what the sun has cooked for you. In this day of high gas and electric prices, cooking using the free energy of the sun is looking more and more attractive all the time. Also, who can beat the inexpensive construction of most solar cookers invented today.