JamWheel

You can get ICC profiles from decent printers which will allow you to 'soft proof' for the type of paper and printing process on screen (the paper will make a huge difference to how certain colours come through and how strong blacks are etc) Monitor calibration and ICC profiles combined make for a much less trial and error printing experience. One thing to note on a laptop though, an important part of the calibration is the ambient light falling on the screen - something that will change frequently on a laptop

When I shoot birds I tend to do so in Manual mode, I meter off something relatively that the same light is falling on (grass seems to work reasonably well) and then make slight adjustments over or under depending on the bird. Just remember to re-meter reasonably often.

Well done, Paul

The windows start screen is just a full screen program files menu. Once you realise that you can hit the start button and immediately type the name of the application or menu (control panel for example) you want to open and hit enter, you realise that actually looking for the application to click on is not a productive way of doing it :-) You don't even have to take your hands off the keyboard to find the mouse, much much more efficient

Point 4 sounds terrifying, sd cards are not very resilient storage.

Having said that and reading the above I managed to dig out a copy of the manual. Looks ideal for what my friend needs.

Dropbox will save important files from a house fire though, this will not. It uses Western Digital Red Drives I believe which are designed specifically for NAS usage. I suspect the NAS keeps them spinning. Google did some work on this and their data centres keep the drives spinning all the time, this reduces failures as the bearings don't have to keep stopping and starting the platter. I was looking at the WeD Mycloud EX2 which allows two drives, for a chunkier solution the EX4 allows 4 drives so you could use RAID 1 + 0 I suspect and end up with 8TB striped and mirrored. RAID isn't a backup solution though, rather a resiliency thing. If your house blows up or the thing sets on fire it is still gone. 4TB is an awful lot of data. I am considering implementing one for a friend but how the external access works will be important and I can't see in any of the reviews online that anyone covers how this bit works.

​Magic, I suspect. No idea how good it is or what methods they use, Google are quite secretive about their normal search methodology so I suspect there won't be much published on this.

My serial favouritist comments on my work too, he seems nice enough and his photographic interests are similar to mine, so it is OK - I'm still leaning towards his wonderful taste. That said, if you ever read I have been horribly murdered, remember this thread and point the police at my Flickr page

​Korky, Can you try to access it from outside your network? I need to understand how this operates.

I have someone that does this. I'm leaning towards their good taste, it's the less worrying option to consider.

A lovely shot of a very engaged looking dog, a well deserved POTW :-)

​I believe the intention is that you can connect to the storage remotely via the internet, I think the device itself handles the security rather than the router.

​Korky, I would appreciate an idea of how this remote access works in practice if possible, if your friend has the time to describe how it is implemented that would be wonderful.