Animated GIF images are a great way to attract attention to certain parts of your site. You can create simple yet funny images or creating images from movies in GIF format would just be a riot.

GIF Maker Online lets you immediately create Animated GIFs for free. Upload pictures or import them from your Flickr, Picasa or Facebook Web. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to have fun.

Here are 4 easy steps on how to make your GIF animation:

1) Choose your images
To begin, you should upload more than one image to create an animated GIF. You can choose to import the images from your own computers or from popular online photo sharing website such as Flickr, Picasa or Facebook. You can add as many images as possible by clicking the “Add one more picture”.
 

2) Finishing touches
You can change the size of your GIF animation, but smaller-sized files are preferred to larger ones, since they are easier to manipulate and play around with. You can choose the speed for your animation as well.

3) Click the button
Once you have chosen what images to upload and have chosen the size and speed that you desire, click on the “Create Animation” button at the bottom of the site. You can choose to add your file to the gallery for others to see your creation. If not, you can just uncheck the box and your file will be stored in your account as you register.

Enjoy!

Once you have created the GIF animation, you can click on the gallery located at the top of the home page or log in to your account to see your animations. It may take a while to create, depending on the images' file size. The reason for this is because the smaller the image size, the easier it is for your computer and the software to process.

Note: You can directly save your animation to your computer simply by putting your mouse pointer over the image, right click and choose “save image as”. Choose a folder to save your file in your PC and your done.

My Raspberry Pi arrived a few days ago and I've been busy experimenting ever since. I initially tried Debian “squeeze” as recommended on the Raspberry Pi website. The distro was fairly easy to setup using the dd command in OS X Terminal to copy the Debian image file to the SD card (the instructions on the Raspberry Pi Wiki are fairly comprehensive).

The Raspberry Pi.

I was using a fairly cheap SD card that kept getting locked every time I slid it into my MacBook Pro so I ended up taping the lock into the off position (might help someone if they keep getting permission denied when trying to write via dd).

The device booted in sub 30 seconds and once logged in you can start the window manager by typing 'startx'. It was unable to detect the correct resolution of my HD TV but otherwise worked without a problem. I enabled SSH through the command line and played around with some of the pre-installed applications.

My aim for the Raspberry Pi was a media center with the overall goal of having one in the living room, kitchen and bedroom meaning that wherever I am in the house I can stream my media. I was led to Raspbmc, a Debian based OS running XBMC. 

The software is in early beta (as with a lot of software surrounding the Pi) but has a downloadable image and a similar setup process to Debian "squeeze". 

Raspbmc streaming Digitally Imported Trance Channel.

On booting for the first time Raspbmc downloads and installs all the necessary files for XBMC, a process taking about 15mins. I was then able to set the correct resolution for my TV and install plugins for Internet Radio and BBC iPlayer (I installed this from a flash drive). SMB didn't work for file sharing (and crashed the Pi) but I'm sure this will be fixed in a later version.

It's early days for the Pi but there is a growing community, from the Raspberry Pi website, to the Element 14 forums to our local Lug - all seem very interested in seeing the Pi being a success.

More to come on the Pi soon...

Here are my top iPad news apps:

Reuters News Pro

An overall great app for finding out today's news articles, pictures, videos and financial data. Homepage articles can be scrolled horizontally whilst vertical scrolling shows news categories. Images and text in articles can be enlarged.

Eurosport

Great for live sport, latest scores, breaking news and articles - no other sports app has content updated as often as the Eurosport app.

BBC News

Similar to the Reuters app in content, the BBC News app shows the recent articles on the left (in horizontal mode) and at the top (in vertical mode) allowing you to easily browse through articles.

Mashable

Best app for social media/technology news. I like how the articles appear over the headlines through i do find myself knocking the previous and next buttons by accident.

Bloomberg

Great for in depth financial news and data. The app also lets you keep a portfolio of the shares you own.

The Financial Times

The FT app is more article based than the Bloomberg app but has some nice features including being able to horizontal scroll between articles.

The Guardian Eyewitness

A great app for viewing current photos on the iPad, I like how with each picture it tells you a little about how the photographer got the shot.

Reuters Galleries

Again another nice photo based application, I like how photos can be displayed as a slide show.

Bonus App: AccuWeather

Not strictly a news app but a great app for finding out the weather.

Know any other great news apps? If so share them below!

A new website has launched called WeVee with the aim of opening up West Midlands based archive footage.

You can edit clips together through the sites interface to create your own "WeVee's", this one is a nice example showing the changes in transport over the region:

Pros: Great tool for school kids, nice simple editing tools.

Cons: No easy way to download clips to edit offline.

Full press release below:

"WeVee is a new unique, online tool.  It gives anyone the chance to view clips from the region’s fantastic archive collections of film and video, edit them to music tracks and make a short ‘mash-up’ (two and a half minutes max) as your personal take on the region’s history.  Try out different effects by mixing the original sound of your selected clips to music.

This approach deliberately uses the latest digital technology as an incentive for the next generation to explore their region’s history.  And that history will reflect the different communities, as well as the struggles and successes the region has experienced. The beauty of WeVee, thanks to our region’s archive holders, is the richness of the moving image archive.  There is footage from as early as 1901 and as recent as just five years ago, so you can put quite different clips together, add a music track and effects and create your own WeVee.  Initial trials have shown the process has a very personal appeal for children, students, parents and silver surfers, because you can use WeVee to say something about yourself, your home and locality and reference past events that mean something for you today. 

The ease with which you can WeVee means you can have fun as you create and save, create and change, create and delete while playing with moving images from the past. It’s fun to WeVee, and at the same time it gives you a truly unique opportunity to marvel at how the region has been captured on camera.  Cadbury’s have generously made some of their previously unseen archive available for the site. Other archive includes footage from the Staffordshire Film Archive collection accessing the heritage of the potteries and the Midlands Archive for Central England.

WeVee’s official launch is in January 2010.  At this stage you’ll be able to share your WeVees, not just on the WeVee Gallery but across social networking sites. 

In the meantime you can visit our website www.wevee.co.uk to register for updates and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/weveecreate

The project is supported through Screen West Midlands’ Digital Film Archive Fund with support from the National Lottery through the UK Film Council."

Twitter the micro blogging service finally hit the mainstream this week in the UK. It started last Friday with Jonathan Ross discussing the service with Twitter power user Stephen Fry. The discussion lasted about 40 seconds but launched a weeks worth of media attention. A lot of this came from BBC Radio 1 with some of the DJ's including Chris Moyles using and discussing the service on air.

Twitter was featured in national newspapers including the Daily Mail when Stephen Fry used the service to Tweet about being stuck in a lift (and to post picture of the experience).

UK based TweekDesk has also found itself in the news this week for the way it works with Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/imafish .

This is the pilot episode of our technology based ImAFish TV show. The show uses the same format as Revision 3's Diggnation and aims to give a British/European touch to a US show.

Let me know what you think as we are always looking for improvements. The show is 40minutes long and we discuss a range of this weeks top topics from the social new site www.digg.com.

Email us at tv@imafish.co.uk with your comments and suggestions

In general day time TV sucks, I don't get to see much of it now I work full time but at University there was always one show you could rely on for some entertainment - The Jeremy Kyle show.

There was shock and horror in the news today as a judge stated that The Jeremy Kyle show is "a human form of bear baiting which goes under the guise of entertainment".

This all comes after a man head butted someone on the show. It was not aired though Sky News fortunately provided a clip. The man was fined