Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

There has been lots and lots of rumours, speculation and conjecture on just what the new release of Windows Live was going to contain. The LiveSide website has been the source of plenty of leaked screenshots, links to downloads and other information on the way.

Download links available at LiveSide

Now that is released into the wild, and people are using it I thought I would write up a quick review of some of the new features – and there are plenty.

Live Messenger

• A whole new communicator window, with integration with Facebook and MySpace accounts – means all your contacts, status updates and commenting can be done in one place, along with access to media like photos and videos. Note the Facebook chat feature has not been enabled in the public beta yet but will come later. (Image from LiveSide)
• A new tabbed conversation window – at last!. No longer do you need to have 75 windows open of all your current messaging sessions, they are now contained in one window with tabs at the top. This is a major improvement.

I love Windows Live Photo Gallery. Apart from the fact that it is free, is the best camera import tool I have found, can display RAW images (with the right codecs installed), can publish to flickr, facebook and YouTube, has facial recognition built in and other cool features, it also has another really cool feature – editing with a revert to original option.

So this week I discovered something about that. I had been noticing my C drive space slowly decreasing. Now seeing as I only have Windows 7 and all my programs installed on the C drive and most of my data is contained on other drives, I was wondering what was going on. A quick search found the bulk of the data was in two folders, my outlook data folder where I had an unused old archive sitting (10GB) and then a folder called

C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images. There was some 20GB in here

When I looked I was amazed to see a bunch of photos. Some research turned up these facts.

If you are a Windows Live Messenger user – you’ll probably find this to be a fun feature to muck around with. I sure did!
So here’s how it works – step by step. Only took me a few minutes.
For this to work, you must have a webcam installed before putting the following steps into practice.

In your Live Messenger, if you click on your display picture you’ll see a box like this…

Select “Dynamic picture…” from the grey boxes on the right.

Then you’ll be looking at a box like this…

I don’t know why I seem to write massive link posts lately – maybe because i have been very busy with my three major priorities, family, work and photography. However this is a priority as well, so I need to allocate some time to write soon. In the mean time I am going to clear my browser of the tabs that are open there.

Here goes – and have a great weekend. Oh – and this photo was my favourite of the week. I took it in low light, no flash using the 70-200 2.8 IS L Lens.

Exposure 1/128, Aperture f2.8, focal length 170mm, ISO 2000

Photography Links

• A Beginner’s Guide to Flickr by Elizabeth Halford – I love flickr also – an awesome tool
• Helping Your Client Prepare for Their Shoot – Dress to Match the Sofa? by Elizabeth Halford
• 5 Tips for Photographing Children – some great tips here
• 3 Affordable E-books to Improve Your Photography by Darren Rowse – thinking of getting these
• How to Capture Motion Blur in Photography by Darren Rowse - learning this technique is going to be fun
• Jasmine Star – an awesome wedding photography blog
• I love this photo gypsy meets gangster
• Jakob Aungiers – this is an amazing portfolio