Today I was fed a series of updates for Karmic. At first things went wacko, but only because I'd installed a test version of the NVidia drivers on my system while trying to fix the problems myself. After I reinstalled the standard driver and logged back in things seem much better. My Compiz crashes appear gone.

More importantly, the flash click interactive bug is fixed - when Karmic first hit the streets, on 64 bit with Flash and advanced desktop effects you couldn't interact with most flash animations and videos with the mouse (without having to pull some tricks.) Thankfully that issue is gone.

Also, it appears they've fixed the flash performance issues - hulu.com works great in full screen now without having to increase my CPU speed to max manually.

Very nicely done, Canonical. Very nicely done indeed.

Ever since upgrading to Jaunty I've been hating the fact that I made the switch. Early on I had overall video performance problems but shortly after the initial release of Jaunty an update fixed those.

Yet still I had horrible full-screen video performance from Macromedia Flash - especially on sites like Hulu.

Well today I found the solution. It seems that the power-saving "ondemand" features in Jaunty was never coming out of power save mode to handle the increased CPU usage of full screen Flash video. Simply adding the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" to the taskbar and setting the CPU to "Performance" - or manually setting it at a higher speed - solved the issue.

In photography, when you're trying to add flash and want it 'off-camera' there's a few options. Off-camera flash is important, because let's be honest, on-camera flash looks harsh and just plain bad. So we have to move the flash away from the camera. Sometimes it's to the right, sometimes left, sometimes up. Other times you might add more than one flash to light the frame.

One way is to use a sync cable. This involves the possibility of adapters, and stretching a long cable between you and the flash. My camera doesn't have a sync socket, so I'd need an adapter.

Another way is to use an optical flash. This is a flash that is triggered any time it sees any other flash light up the scene. I have one of these, and it's great until there's other people in the same area with flash cameras. Then it gets flashed for them instead of me.