Creating a Lightbox for Indoor Photography Okay, so all my posts until now have been pretty much related to systems administration. It's time to take a turn and focus on the hobby that has recently been consuming a portion of my time, photography. The temperature was around 60 the past several days and the weather has been great ... until today. It dropped all the way to the mid 20's, it's overcast, and just gloomy in general. I decided this afternoon after work that I was going to find something to photography. I got some street clothes on, grabbed my camera, and headed out the door to find my photography subject(s). Not more than 30 seconds after walking out the door, I noticed that my hoody wasn't keeping me very warm, and before another 15 seconds passed, I was complaining to myself about how cold and windy it was. Due to my determination, I continued on for a couple minutes and went to my apartment complex's commons area, which has a nice pond and a path around it, expecting to find something to photograph. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the path, I was done, and I sure wasn't going to find any good photos outdoors today, so I headed back home.

Determined to not be phased by the unfortunate turn of events this afternoon, I decided that I was going to make a lightbox. After all, I have been wanting to do close-up photography, and the weather can't affect what you're doing inside :-) I did some quick searching online, found a basic idea for a lightbox, and headed over to Home Depot, and then Hobby Lobby in search of my materials. In an hour's time, I was home with everything I needed to get started! I documented the process of building a lightbox for anyone who has never done it before, and I have just posted my first video in the short series on Youtube. For all of you out there, here it is:

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  Windows XP Shortcut Key Frustrations Okay, so my machine at work was imaged for me when I started here, and unfortunately, one person seemed to think that using ctrl+alt+home on a shortcut file to a script, and then sticking it in the All Users profile was something that everyone should use. Since I have other uses for ctrl+alt+home, specifically Winamp's global hotkeys to pause my music, I really wanted to get rid of this shortcut. At the time, I didn't know the shortcut existed, much less where it existed, so after searching around, I found a utility that lists out shortcut files with XP global shortcut keys assigned to them. I deleted the shortcut file, but lo and behold Winamp still wouldn't register my global shortcut key!

Great ... I figured I was stuck, but then I thought of a workaround: Find another shortcut file, assign the global hotkey to it, apply the change, and then remove it. Voila ... after doing this, Winamp was able to successfully register the hotkey :)  ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments