Showing posts with label Ready. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ready. Show all posts

Friday, 9 November 2012

Holiday Lighting Idea: Get Ready for Christmas

Holiday Lighting Idea: Get Ready for Christmas

Christmas is coming. When you are decorating for Christmas, you can choose decorations that provide brightness and can add a warm and pleasing touch to your home. For an unexpected and stylish decoration, you can look for alternatives to traditional Christmas lights by using ornaments or metallic materials or mirrors to reflect light and candles to create a glow. As you plan for your decorations, consider locations that receive both natural and artificial light to ensure that every addition makes the greatest impact.

A centerpiece can be a good way to bring Christmas decorations and holiday lighting into the kitchen or dining room without disturbing the function of the space. For a simple centerpiece, you can arrange square pillar candles in varying heights on a flat metal serving dish; place evergreen branches around the candles' bases for a fresh scent. You can also pile Christmas balls in a large clear vase, jar or bowl, and place tea light candles underneath to create reflections on the surfaces of the balls. For a minimalist, natural centerpiece, collect bare branches, wind white Christmas lights around them, and lay them on a long serving dish.

In order to make the most of the natural light from a large window, use texture and reflective surfaces. Cut lengths of satin ribbon in different lengths and tie a Christmas ball or ornament to the end of each ribbon with a bow. Tie the ends of the ribbons to the curtain rod or use tacks to attach them to the top of the window, arranging them so that each one hangs at a different length. During the day, the ornaments will reflect the natural light from outside, and in the evening, the electric lights will cast a soft glow on the ribbon.

For an unexpected, environmentally friendly Christmas candle decoration, use old sweaters. Find cable-knit sweaters or sweaters with a Christmas print around your house or in thrift stores and cut them into pieces. Glue the pieces around tall, thick candles to add texture. Create an elegant look for a centerpiece, mantle or sideboard by using white sweaters wrapped around white candles; when lit, the candles will appear to glow.

Buy a LED bulb with a clear glass base. Fill the bottom of the vase or jar with sea salt, which can double as snow, and make a miniature Christmas tableau inside. You might include a family photo, a bough of evergreen, a nativity scene or Christmas balls. The light from the lamp will highlight the scene, which you can change as often as inspiration strikes.

sandyev is from http://www.ecvv.com

holiday lighting

LED bulb

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Sunday, 29 January 2012

Get Ready For VLC Media Player 2.0

VLC is one of the most popular third party media players. If you check the download stats on portals such as Softpedia or Betanews, you will notice that it is always listed in one of the top spots. That’s not because of the player’s pretty name but the functionality it provides. VLC plays nearly every media format out of the box, without codec hunting and installation. There are other players, like the excellent SMplayer that offer that functionality as well, but none managed to reach the popularity of VLC.

The developers of VLC Media Player have just announced on their Twitter account that they will release the first release candidate of VLC 2.0 at the end of the week. The latest release version right now is VLC 1.1.11 which is available for Windows, Mac OS X, popular Linux distributions and even other operating systems such as Android or OS/2 (anyone still using that?).

vlc media player 20 Windows 64-bit version of VLC Media Player running the Spin Demo

Once a suitable release candidate has been found, VLC Media Player 2.0 will be released for all operating systems. Existing VLC users likely want to know what they can look forward to in version 2 of the player. Here is a list of important changes taken directly from the latest nightly build of VLC 2.0.

Major Video Core and Outputs rework and rewrite: Subtitles, subpictures and OSD can now be sized and blent inside video outputs x11 (Unix), OpenGL (Unix) and Direct3D (Windows) are such video outputs.Almost every video filter can now be transcodedPort to Android, iOS, OS/2 and Win64Multiple files are now supported inside RAR filesExperimental Blu-Ray Discs support using libblurayYou can now use ffmpeg-mt in conjunction with vlc, to split decoding load on multiple cores. H.264, VP3, VP8, JPEG-2000, Mpeg-4 ASP/DivX and RV3/RV4
are notably concerned.C64 SID file playback support of using sidplay2Support for WMV Images, aka WMVP and WVP2, as used by Photo StoryNew video output based on Direct2D for Windows 7 and Vista (with Platform Update), New video output for iOS platform

Probably the biggest improvements are the 64-bit version for Windows, the port to mobile operating systems and Blu-Ray playback support.

You can get a taste of things to come by downloading the latest nightly build from the VLC build server. Remember that nighly versions are not necessarily stable, as they are development builds. (Thanks Mike)

While we are at it: Which media player are you currently using?

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday January 18, 2012 -
Tags:media-player, vlc



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