Do more with your photos
Show off the best of your photos with a digital slideshow or beautifully printed photo album.
You’ve finally got your photos in some kind of order. But what’s the point of having them buried away in folders if you’ve no means of showing the best of them off? You could invest in a digital photo frame for your front room, run a slideshow as your desktop backdrop in Windows (head over to ‘Settings > Personalisation > Background’ to set it up) or create a photos slideshow running as a screen saver (type ‘screen saver’ into the Search box to find the tool, then choose Photos from the ‘Screen saver’ drop-down menu).
Remember when older family members set up slideshow presentations of their latest holiday? Recreate the effect via a video-based slideshow, with added music, effects and captions to help describe what’s going on and keep your audience interested. Our favourite tool by far for this job is Microsoft Sway – get it for free through the Microsoft Store. Your presentations are stored online but can be kept private or shared as widely as you’d like. The step-by-step guide reveals the basic steps to getting it up and running.
PRINT A PHOTO ALBUM
Sometimes there’s no substitute for old-school prints and photo albums. These days, of course, you don’t just buy photo prints then manually stick them into an album – everything is done digitally before being paid for, printed and dispatched. Many services like Photobox (www.photobox.com.au) operate exclusively through your web browser, but Pixum (www.pixum.co. uk/photo-book/software) allows you to download and install free software for you to create your perfect photobook in.
Once installed, launch the program and select the photo book option. Choose your book type followed by paper quality and then choose ‘start with assistant’. Select your photos folder (you can also link Google and Facebook accounts if you wish for photos stored online). Now give your book a title, drag the photos (or a folder containing your photos) on to the main window, pick a theme and let the program do the rest.
From here you can manually tweak your photobook – add new photos, change page layouts, insert text and so on – before previewing and ordering your final copy.
As we get older, it’s important to stay active both mentally and physically. Exercising your brain has all kinds of benefits, but it pays to vary the types of exercise you do to keep things stimulated and open new neural pathways. Your PC can play a huge role in this – all you need to do is target the right kind of games and puzzles.
First, brush up on your word skills. Fan of crosswords? If you’re happy to do so online, head to w w w. boatloadpuzzles.com/playcrossword where you’ll find over 40,000 simple and cryptic puzzles available to solve in your web browser.
Perhaps you prefer word searches, in which case LR Studios’ Word Search – Puzzles app is free on the Microsoft Store and offers unlimited puzzles. Next, give your maths skills a boost with Microsoft Sudoku, one of the few MS games to be completely free through the Microsoft Store, no strings attached. How about improving your language skills? Duolingo (w w w. duolingo.com) will teach you just about any foreign language and will help you to stay on top of your learning to ensure the vocabulary sinks into your memory.
BigJig (w w w. lenagames.com/bigjig. htm) will keep you occupied for hours with a wide range of jigsaw puzzles and no intrusive ads (a paid-for version allows you to generate puzzles from your own images once you’ve completed those offered within the program), while Brain Workshop (http://brainworkshop.sourceforge. net/) claims to boost cognitive function using the controversial
N-Back mental exercise.
Finally, if you want to really give your brain a workout, visit Braingle (www.braingle.com) where you can select Mentalrobics to exercise your brain on a daily basis with a range of puzzles.