Fifa 18 doubting his abilities

If you’ve ever tried to shoot good-looking portraits with your camera and a basic kit lens , you might have been disappointed that the results didn’t match the images you see on social media or in magazines. Part of this is down to the lenses most often used to shoot professional portraits. Let’s look at what makes them special, and whether you need one to get great portraits. What Is a Portrait Lens? Portrait lenses (or rather, lenses-that-are-often-used-for-portraits-but-can-be-used-for-lots-of-other-stuff-too) have two key features: They have a normal or short telephoto focal length. They have a wide maximum aperture . This means that most portrait lenses designed for full-frame cameras have a focal length of between about 50mm and 105mm, with a maximum aperture of somewhere between f/1.2 and f/2.8, or so. ( The equivalent focal range for crop-sensor cameras is between around 35mm and 70mm , so there’s a lot of overlap.). Some typical portrait lenses … [Read more...] about Do You Need a Special Lens to Take Portrait Photos?

There’s more than one Ubuntu. You can download Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or Lubuntu: But what’s the difference, and which should you choose? The answer depends on what you’re looking for: Linux is all about choice. What’s the Difference? To pick properly, you’ll need to understand the strengths of each “flavor.” That might be the bling and polish of Kubuntu, the “set it up and forget about it” of Ubuntu, the retro simplicity and stability of Xubuntu, or the ability of Lubuntu to run on older and less powerful hardware. Despite the different names, all of these are based on the same underlying Ubuntu software. They include the same Linux kernel and low-level system utilities. However, each has different desktop and flavor-specific applications. That means that some are more full-featured, while others are more lightweight—so each feels a little different. Since these flavors are built to make Linux more accessible, they’re not necessarily going to score upvotes in a geeky … [Read more...] about How to Choose Between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Nest Mini can make life easier, but they also present some privacy concerns. Doesn’t a device that responds to voice commands need to be listening all the time ? Let’s talk about that. If you think about how a smart speaker or smart display works, logic would tell you that they need to be constantly listening. After all, how can your device hear your “Alexa” or “Hey Google” command if it’s not listening? Well, you’re right. These devices are always listening, but it’s not as scary as it sounds. Listening vs. Recording When people hear that smart speakers are always listening, what they’re really afraid of is the possibility that the smart speaker is always recording them. That’s how humans listen, but that’s not what’s happening with smart speakers. This is an important distinction to make. When you listen to someone talk, you are essentially making a recording of the information in your brain. You remember what the … [Read more...] about Is My Smart Speaker Always Listening to Me?

DB Browser for SQLite lets you view and edit SQLite databases on Linux. You can design, create, and edit these database files, and peek inside the inner workings of other applications. Here’s how to use this SQLite GUI. The SQLite Database Project The SQLite database library and tools are a phenomenally successful open-source Structured Query Language (SQL) database project. So successful, in fact, it can justifiably call itself the most widely deployed database engine in the world. Since its initial release in 2000, SQLite has seen an absolutely staggering uptake. It’s inside every iPhone and Android phone, and Windows 10 or Mac computer. It’s also in every internet browser, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, as well as countless other applications. The incredible reach of the SQLite database is due to its architecture. It’s a fast, lightweight library that’s incorporated (or linked , in developer-speak) in other applications. The database engine becomes an … [Read more...] about How to Use DB Browser for SQLite on Linux

It’s pretty easy to read the contents of a Linux text file line by line in a shell script—as long as you deal with some subtle gotchas. Here’s how to do it the safe way. Files, Text, and Idioms Each programming language has a set of idioms. These are the standard, no-frills ways to accomplish a set of common tasks. They’re the elementary or default way to use one of the features of the language the programmer is working with. They become part of a programmer’s toolkit of mental blueprints. Actions like reading data from files, working with loops, and swapping the values of two variables are good examples. The programmer will know at least one way to achieve their ends in a generic or vanilla fashion. Perhaps that will suffice for the requirement at hand. Or maybe they’ll embellish the code to make it more efficient or applicable to the specific solution they are developing. But having the building-block idiom at their fingertips is a great starting point. Knowing and … [Read more...] about How to Process a File Line by Line in a Linux Bash Script