Jonathan Cusick

Unfortunately photography is not allowed during the tours at the Old Bushmills Distillery, but this is for safety reasons and I was allowed to take some photos in the visitors centre.

Windows users utilise the famous ctrl + alt + del command to allow them to quickly lock their screen and leave background applications running. On the Mac using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, I will show you how this can be as easy as a single mouse click.

First enter the system preferences:

Next click on the security options icon:

Then under the general tab select ‘Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins’:

Once you have done this go back into the system preferences menu and click on the option for ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’:

From here select the button on the bottom left side of the screen called ‘Hot Corners…’:

Hot corners enables you to set the screen saver to activate by clicking on a corner of the screen, you can select any or multiple corners by picking the option ‘Start Screen Saver’ from the relevant drop down menu:

Now when you click on your selected corner(s) your screen saver will start, you will then be prompted for your password when you next use the machine and all your background applications will still be running.

Lookaly is a new service that has been developed in order to act as a gateway for people based in Belfast and Northern Ireland to share their experiences of goods and services provided by local businesses.

When you first visit Lookaly the first thing that will standout is the design, this has clearly been taken very seriously and a lot of thought placed on making the user experience as smooth as possible through a clean and well structured interface.

The businesses that are available for browsing have been placed into a range of categories which include:

Automotive
Eating, Drinking and Nightlife
Financial and Legal
Leisure and Sports
Public Services, Education and Careers
Travel and Transportation

Once you have located the business you are interested in you can simply view all the reviews, photos and contact details that are associated with it. If you own a business or have an experience you want to share I would highly recommend adding it to their directory, so far it has helped me several times on choosing where to go for lunch in Belfast.

Lookaly also provides a blog which covers topics such as local events, products and of course businesses.

Another nice feature from Lookaly comes from utilising the social networking platform Twitter, they will often tweet a summary of reviews that have been posted, so it is a good idea to follow @Lookaly if you are a Twitter user.

Overall I think Lookaly is an extremely useful service and I am looking forward to seeing it grow as more businesses are added to the directory.

The cause for this years Twestival Local in Belfast was Camphill NI and in an effort to raise as much money as possible, local Twitter users took over the Bunatee Bar in the Queen’s University Students Union. With quite possibly the best pub quiz ever thrown (well it was pretty good), pint glasses for donations and raffle tickets an enjoyable evening was had by all.

Everyone was very generous with all their donations and it was great to see some familiar faces in addition to meeting some new Tweeters. I am looking forward to catching up with everyone again soon.

For some excellent photos from the night be sure and check out the Lookaly blog.

This weekend was the annual N.I. International Airshow which took place in Portrush.

A wide range of aircrafts took to the skies including the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the Airbus A380.

The RAF Red Arrows, an RAF Eurofighter Typhoon, the Blades Display Team, an RAF Hawk, and a Royal Navy Mk4 Sea King all made an appearance along with many others.

Unfortunately I missed the Red Arrows display but the rest of the displays were a joy to watch and even the weather managed to hold out.

During the day I also bumped into local photographer Phil O’Kane, keep an eye on his blog for more photos from the day.

I didn’t manage to get many good photos but this one turned out not too bad:

I did take more photos which I will post on Flickr.