Flickr is a fantastic repository of photos. I have a pro account with them, and it’s one of the very few software services that I actually pay for.

Lockheed Martin Littoral Combat Ship Image is © Lockheed Martin

Other neighbors of mine with interesting pictures include:

• Lockheed Martin, who have great shots of ships and aircraft (including the photo above)
• The Library of Congress, which is hoping you will help a small part of their massive photo collection.

There are dozens of great groups to join, including the photogamer group for those of you who need inspiration.

So, I have found a few answers over the last few days to some of my queries. I found out, by coming in early to the office one morning, that the F5/F6 keys on the MBP are responsible for setting the Keyboard Backlight Brightness. Apparently you can only adjust that when the backlight is on, which is confusing.

A more important discovery that I have made is that there is a free way to sync ical with google calendar bi-directionally. This is really important to me because I have a load of different calendars which I use for work and I really need to be able to add and track events on different calendars.

The google web client is nice, but iCal integrates really well with the rest of the OS and feels right for usability. There are commercial clients such as Spanning Sync and Busy Sync, but as I am a cheap bas believer in freedom, I prefer not to pay for software.

It turns out that there is an application for both OSX and Windows called ‘Calgoo’ that will do the syncing for you. Their website is at calgoo.com.

One really nice feature is that it will let you create iCal calendars as you set up connectors.

I recently took the plunge and went form an all-linux environment to adding a Macbook Pro to my collection of computers. I thought I would record a few of the apps and tips I have found useful in setting up the machine.

Java

Java can be a bit of a bugbear for linux users, because of the choices between Icedtea, openjdk and the Sun hotspot. Since I do a lot of Java development, I really want the real thing.

On the Mac, the official JVM seems to come from