We take a lot of photographs with our digital cameras these days. It’s just so easy. We’re also seeing an emerging interest in 3D technology, whether it be through the upcoming Nintendo 3DS gaming handheld, 3D televisions in our living rooms, or 3D movies at the theatre. Why not capture that 3D experience with your own pictures?

That’s precisely the idea behind ArBa3d, which just so happens to be our BlueFur customer of the week. Using this software, you can combine several photographs that you have taken of a single object, punching out a 3D rendering in the process. The process is relatively simple to understand and can be performed on just about any object that you can photograph.

You can check out some of the samples as animated GIFs to get an idea of what this software can do. You can download the demo to get you started and then compare the different versions to see which you prefer. The standard version is $39, whereas the full version is $59.

Do you use BlueFur as your preferred web host? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

Need a nifty new theme for your WordPress or Blogger blog? For a totally snazzy new look, check out the recently released Diabolique Lagoon from Diabolique Design. This is a three-column theme with a darker color scheme, offering some very fluid lines and chic graphical elements that will surely separate you from the rest of the crowd.

You’ll also notice a series of rendered icons toward the center of the header, providing quick access to your different social media presences online. It’s up to you how you want to use the two sidebars, but they’ll likely be taken up by some core navigation, latest comments, archives, blogroll, and other related information. The curvy font for many of these header sections looks pretty great too.

The theme is completely widget-ready, so it’s quite easy to customize the sidebars to your tastes and preferences. You can also choose from the ten different background types that are preloaded with the theme. Other highlights include threaded comments, font replacement, and WordPress 3.0 compatibility. It has also been tested on a variety of different web browsers to ensure that it displays properly.

Check out the live demo and then download the theme for free from Diabolique Design.

Ready for another quick spin around the blogosphere? Here we go!

Tyler Ingram has discovered a very interesting new feature that will surely help with his photography exploits. After watching Hell’s Kitchen, he learned that he can tether with Lightroom and his Canon 7D digital SLR. This way, the photos show up immediately on his laptop, rather than waiting to be transferred the old fashioned way.

Thursday Bram asks a poignant question for both the online professionals and the more casual users in the audience: Are you backing up your computer? Considering the amount of data we use these days, from documents to pictures, it’s easy to forget that your computer’s primary hard drive can fail and that data could be lost forever.

Damien Riley isn’t in it for the fame. He isn’t in it for the fortune. In fact, he’s well aware that you’ll likely keep your head down as a teacher and receive very little in terms of pure recognition for what you do. And he’s okay with that, because the small victories that he achieves each day make it all worth it.

John Biehler is pretty stoked. After all kinds of rumors and hullabaloo, Netflix is coming to Canada. The exact details of the video streaming service have yet to be announced, but Netflix has indicated that it will not be doing its DVD/Blu-ray rental by mail service north of the 49th parallel. It’s all about streaming movies and television shows into our living rooms. Expect to see it this fall.

Jeremy Lim introduces us to a childhood chum who is still pursuing his dream. While Jeremy moved into the photography realm, Scopez is actively engaging in his career in music as a hip hop artist. They went on a photoshoot and the resulting pictures are pretty amazing. They gravitated toward dumpsters, but the images turned out great.

It’s probably easiest to take the high road. It’s probably simpler to be diplomatic and politically correct. It also happens to be more boring and you’re much more likely to fall into the background, not getting noticed by anyone. That’s not really the way to increase your brand presence in the marketplace.

Taking a much more aggressive approach is Wind Mobile, one of the newest entrants into the Canadian telecommunications industry. Many of their advertisements are direct shots at their competitors. In fact, Rogers Wireless is set to launch a new sub-brand called Chatr, so Wind immediately responded with an ad campaign of its own:

“They chatter. We listen. That’s why we’re giving you more reasons to switch.”

That’s rather bold and brash, but it certainly grabs the attention of both the competitor (Rogers) and the potential consumer. In the advertisement, Wind Mobile is promoting is $150 offer to switch. This gives Wind a definite personality, better identifying with the consumers as people rather than simply as customers.

What do you think? Is it inappropriate for Wind to take such an approach? Is it too cheeky? Perhaps even immature?

You’ve surely encountered more than one blog out there that highlights a series of “related posts” at the end of each entry. This is a great feature to have on your blog, because it can direct interested visitors toward additional reading on your site that is relevant to what they just read. That much makes sense.

This kind of functionality is largely attained through the use of WordPress plugins, but the majority of the plugins are algorithm-based. In this way, the selection of the so-called “related” posts is done automatically by the plugin and these kinds of associations aren’t always completely accurate. You might be writing about the produce you found at the supermarket and it pulls up a “related post” on your new Apple iPod.

Offering a different take on the “related post” function is the Custom Post Relationships WordPress plugin. This allows for the manual selection of related posts, ensuring that you are indeed getting reading for your visitors that is relevant to the current post.

The integrated system lets you filter through based on category and you can type in a few words to narrow the search even further. From there, you can click to add posts to the “related posts” section and even organize their order. For more information, check out webtoolkit4.me.

You may have heard about a new restaurant that opened in Richmond, BC recently. It took over a cafe in the same location previously, going through some minor remodeling but largely maintaining the same concept. Magnetic Cafe is a little different than the other bubble tea places in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, because the servers are dressed up in costumes.

In fact, it appears that this is the only “cosplay” cafe in Metro Vancouver. Taking a page out of the “maid” cafes that have been popular in Japan for years, Magnetic Cafe has its young, female servers dress up in a variety of costumes. They may have French maid outfits one week, cute schoolgirl uniforms the next, and skimpy nurses uniforms the week after that. It’s quite clear what kind of clientele they’re trying to attract… but they say it’s not about being sexy; it’s about being cute.

This has stirred up some controversy, to be sure, but the relatively novel concept will certainly attract some new customers in the short run. These customers will want to see what all the hoopla is about and they may pay Magnetic Cafe a visit to find out. However, is this kind of gimmick sustainable in the long run?

Thinking about how you choose to run your own business, there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of a rising trend or trying your hand at a gimmick for some short-term success. At the same time, the long term success of your company must have strong fundamentals, because interest in the gimmick will surely diminish over time.