Most smartphones now have an option called HDR, which is short for High Dynamic Range. When you take a picture in HDR, your smartphone camera actually shoots three pictures at three different exposures. Your phone then combines these photos to create one composite image that will be sharper and have more vivid colours.

Try HDR when are taking pictures of landscapes or when you are shooting into the sun or another bright light source. Don’t use HDR for any pictures where there is motion as moving objects will be blurred, unless you want this effect, say for instance when you …

♫ You may think I’m strong
and I can do no wrong
but I’m vulnerable
so vulnerable…♫

Music and lyrics by Pet Shop Boys.

Microsoft has reported a vulnerability in all versions of Internet Explorer.  While Microsoft has posted security workarounds and US-CERT has recommended that users implement them, they only work for the two most recent versions of IE (10 and 11).  Moreover, they are reported to be technically complex.

:

The IE vulnerability is a big deal, said Will Dormann, vulnerability analyst in the CERT Division of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh, Pa.…

I have to confess that I am a reader.  Go figure! Being a reader is trait that has been particularly helpful in my practice as a non-lawyer legal researcher, and given the high volume of use in my law libraries text collection (both print and online), I am not alone in this.

Often texts used in the legal research process are simply skimmed. The index points you to a place of interest, you skim a few pages, and valuable footnotes or embedded citations lead you out of the text to other resources.

Today’s Tip – pick up a textbook and …

I’m just back from an ABA conference and am following up with some of the people I met. That might mean a phone call or an email with a link to an article, and in some cases, it means sending a LinkedIn connection request.

LinkedIn makes it very easy to send a connection invitation. After searching a name, a simple click on a button creates a standard message: “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” and a second click sends it on its way.

While virtually effortless, these generic invites are far from ideal, …

It may not be a giant step for mankind, but it’s at least a baby step toward the technological modernization of Ontario’s archaic court system.

On April 16, 2014, Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General  announced the launch of OntarioCourtDates.ca, an online service that lists daily dockets for all Ontario Court of Justice and Superior Court of Justice courtrooms throughout the province.

Searching the website by municipality and case name, you can access listings of the next day’s pending cases, court room numbers and scheduled hearing times.

The AG’s press release notes:

• The online daily court lists will

Headnotes – a brief summary, comment, or explanation, often prepared by an editor and pladed at the beginning of a court decision. In the opinion of this librarian – the value added information about a decision that quickly and succinctly gives a hint of it’s relevance to an immediate legal research question.

Today’s Tip is a pointer that the definition of headnote applies to CanLII in a new and useful way.

What happens when you select “show headnote” for this decision from the SCC? In addition to the court prepared summary that is embedded in a Supreme court of Canada …

For most photographers, a clean and unscratched lens is pretty much an obsession – and it is something that also is critical for getting sharp pictures.
Many smartphone users take an opposite tact and would rarely, if ever, clean their smartphone lenses. Needless the say, the design of most smartphones isn’t exactly conducive to having a clean lens. On many smartphones you are likely to touch the lens dozens of times a day in normal use.
Take a look at the lens on your smartphone, no doubt it will show a few finger smudges and perhaps even remnants of yesterday’s …

♫ if you could hear my heartbleed
you’d hear me scream set me free
if you could feel my heart bleed..♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by the Peppermint Creeps.

The Heartbleed vulnerability has garnered a lot of press lately.  It has (understandably) set many on edge and left wondering if they are vulnerable and if so, what should they be doing about it?  Our colleague, friend  (and past columnist) Laura Calloway, attorney, past ABA TECHSHOW Chair and Director of Service Programs and Practice Management  Assistance Program at the Alabama State Bar wrote this piece on Heartbleed and we …

I really want to ty Google Glass. I am not kidding.  I think there is excellent potential that this tech – or something like it – will be an innovation bump that directly impacts legal research.

On Monday, a message from Google told me:

As we mentioned this past weekend, we’re opening up a few spots in the Glass Explorer Program this week. One thing we want to clarify is that spots in the program are for US residents only.

While we’d love to bring Glass to our friends around the world (we promise we are working on this), the

Most people don’t realize that you can use multiple address variations of your basic “yourname@gmail.com” Gmail address. Gmail lets you put a plus (“+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your name. For example, yourname@gmail.com can become yourname+contests@gmail.com or yourname+hydrobill@gmail.com.
All messages sent to any of these different address variations will end up on your inbox. The benefit of using address variations is that you can easily add a filter to label and/or archive messages in a particular way, depending on different address variations you have created. This can help you better manage the different types of …