Ideal walkaround Micro Four Thirds camera lens

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Recently I was asked “what is the ideal walkaround micro four-thirds camera lens?”. Of course the answer varies by the style and taste of the individual photographer, but for me the ideal walkabout lens is the Olympus 17mm f1.8 prime lens (34mm equivelant). Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm f1.8 (Black) for Olympus and Panasonic Micro 4/3 Camerashttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CI3R4VUThe lens works well on the OM-D-EM1, wonderful first lens for the camera. With micro 4/3 the 17mm is the same as a 34mm lens on

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Hearing aid apps for Android

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Tonight I encountered an unexpected question: my dad asked me if I had any experience with hearing aid apps for phones. I had to tell him that I didn’t even know such things existed! After a bit of thought and research it became quite obvious that such apps would be quite useful. Unfortunately, most Android app suffer from a plethora of issues that prevent them from actually being very useful for the hearing impaired 🙁 However, there are a few

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Use Thunderbird to find online transactions for Quicken

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Tax time approaches. Thus around the Hodges household we are catching up on our Quicken data entry. We track every cent we spend and anything that can make that process easier/faster is appreciated 🙂 That is one reason why I like Thunderbird so much, it makes it very simple to find emails that contain online transaction info (invoices, receipts, etc.) Here is the basic process: #1 Download the latest transaction info using Quicken This will give us a list of transactions

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Changes to the Amazon.com Associates Program

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Amazon associates/affiliates received the following notice recently: We are writing to notify you of some changes to the Amazon.com Associates Program Operating Agreement, which governs your participation in the Amazon Associates Program for Amazon.com. All changes are effective on February 1, 2014. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating/compare And here is my summary of the changes: Magazines go from a 25% affiliate commission (fee rate) to none Video game console products go from a 4% commission (fee rate) to 1% Overall this continues a trend by

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Motorcycle the Ozarks: Highway 19 and Beyond

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At a birthday party this past weekend I heard about a cool new site that details motorcycle day trips in the Ozarks. The trips feature HWY 19 and HWY 106 near Eminence and Winona MO. You can find out more at motorcycleozarks.com: Motorcycle the Ozarks Self-guided Day Tours: Maps and Route Informationhttp://motorcycleozarks.com/Try these great motorcycle rides! Jesse James Getaway Route Distance: 115 Miles Time Frame: 3-4 hours Attractions: Current River, Logan Creek Valley (B Highway), Awesome A Highway and Sinking

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Thunderbird auto spell check not working [SOLVED]

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Thunderbird’s ‘check spelling at you type’ feature quite working for me last month. Since that time I have been working without inline spell check in Thunderbird (and it has been quite annoying ;-)). Today I finally took the time to figure out how to fix the issue! First I tried simply checking my settings: The box was already checked to ‘Enable spell check as you type’ but I went ahead and unchecked/checked it and hit ‘OK’ just to make sure

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[Err] 2006 – MySQL server has gone away Navicat/WordPress [solved]

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Recently I tried upgrading to the latest version of the WordPress Download Monitor plugin. It did not go well 🙁 Thus, I tried to revert from a backup made using Navicat. Unfortunately, the restore would fail every time while trying to import my wp_posts table (a pretty important table!) I tried exporting the backup to a SQL dump and importing that. No luck. Finally, I tried resolving the actual ‘MySQL server has gone away’ issue itself and I had success. This tip

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