Thursday, March 29th, 2007
by William
Fitness test anyone?
Quote – Read more from http://consumerist.com/consumer/google/google-suggests-you-swim-across-the-atlantic-ocean-248199.php:
You can’t always rely on the advice of computers, especially when it comes to transoceanic driving directions. From Upgrade: Travel Better:
Google, either encouraging physical fitness or zero population growth, offers the above helpful suggestion when mapping the route from Chicago to London.
Click here for the full directions and map of the route.—MEGHANN MARCO
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
by William
Very nifty, waiting to get my hands on this.
Quote – Read more from http://www.zoom-in.com/blog/2007/03/first_impressions_top_5_stando.php:
Upon first digging into Adobe Photoshop CS3, a few features have really popped out at me as incredibly useful. I would like to offer a brief overview of some of these new ways of attacking your creative challenges using the latest version of Adobe’s flagship app. PsCS3 will run you about $649 to buy it outright if you do not own any previous versions. If you own Photoshop 7, CS, or CS2, you are eligible for upgrade pricing – looks like $199 for the upgrade. Check Adobe’s store on their website for more info. For more information about what comes in the different versions of CS3, and what your suite configuration options are, see my previous post.
My current favorite five new PsCS3 features in order are:
1. Nondestructive Smart Filters
2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge
3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
4. Automatic layer alignment and blending
5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle
Feature Overviews:
Nondestructive Smart Filters
Adobe has finally given us non-linear, nondestructive filters. Can I just say “HOORAY!” In the past, you applied filters and effects in a linear order: one filter would alter your image, and the second filter would alter your now altered image, and a third filter would alter the altered altered image. The problem with that workflow is that if you decide you want to slightly tweak the second filter, you’d have to either undo back to that point (losing your subsequent edits), or use the history palette to step directly “back in time” to the point before you added the second filter, add your “revised” second filter and then add your third manually. All too often, you don’t quite remember what exact parameters you had set on that third one – or worse, your real world project involved applying 20 filters instead of the 3 in my example and changing the second filter would mean redoing the 18 that follow it. What a drag. Because of this issue, people developed many work arounds (often involving saving off multiple “partially completed” versions of files all over your hard drive with iterative file names, hoping that if you needed to go back to a certain point in time you’d be able to figure out where you needed to be), and while these workarounds were clever and well-conceived in many cases, there was a perfect, real solution, waiting to happen.
The real solution to all this is what we have been given in CS3: Nondestructive Smart Filters. In this new version, each filter and effect that you apply to a layer, remains live and continually re-editable, in real time, and the parameters that you adjust will all cascade down through whatever subsequent filters or effects you might have added to your layer. These are savable, movable, copy and pastable, and most importantly scalable.
Quick Selection tool & Refine Edge
A design mentor of mine once told me “Photoshop is all about the selection. You select something, and then you do something with the selection. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that, and you’ll never go wrong using this app.” Almost 10 years later, I must say she was absolutely correct. Using Photoshop is all about “the selection.” There are more tools in Photoshop for selecting than for any other single task.
As in just about every version of Photoshop that has ever been released, CS3 has made even greater strides in the area of “making your selection” than comes to memory in recent years. The new Quick Selection Tool used in combination with the Refine Edge palette is about the most helpful and clean way of selecting the edges of an object in your image that I have ever seen. This new revised Quick Selection tool is so smooth. You basically set the parameters of your Quick Selection tool – as if it were a brush – and paint the general area of your image edges (like trying to select just a kid and his soccer ball out of the photo of the big game) and Photoshop is watching what you do, and interpreting what you consider to be the general edges of what you are wanting to select and it figures out what’s kid and ball and what’s grass and goal posts and sky and crowd and selects just what you want it to. It’s VERY fast and clean. Then, you can invoke the Refine Edge palette, and you have seemingly infinite control over exactly how the edges of that selection behave. Check out the palette to the right to get an idea of what you could do to “refine” that edge. With radius, feathering, smoothing, and various display settings, I believe this new combo will cut down on my masking and selecting time in a quantifiable way.
Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
Ever tried to stitch together a series of images that you took, that you intended to “put together” into a panorama? Even with some of the stand alone tools that have been available over the years—even those for doing quicktime VR’s—are clunky and difficult to use – with mixed results at times. I have always wanted something built into Photoshop to let me do these “photo merges” – I never expected that Photoshop would actually be able to automatically do it for me. This feature floored me. The technologies involved in my number four choice “Automatic layer alignment and blending” are at work here in this feature as well, and the new auto layer alignment features in CS3 are far-reaching and crop up again and again in different areas of the application. It’s really one of the revolutionary things about this new version.
All of the things that have made making panoramas a difficult task in the past are all done automatically. The primary among these being 1. those times when you have to actually distort, rotate, skew or transform one of your elements because the perspective is screwy, 2. those times when the sun or lighting or a window made the white balance, color space or over all wash of brightness and contrast different from one image to the next (especially when doing 360’s) and of course 3. actually finding and aligning those overlapping areas of consecutive elements. Photoshop CS3 does these all for you and with surprisingly amazing results. It’s not just about the typical “panorama” either… I saw a demo of someone standing “too close” to a building, and taking pictures zoomed all the way out, of the front door, windows and window-boxes, front brick walk way, tilting upward and taking a picture of the balcony and roof line of the second floor – in other words, many elements that were WAY out of whack in terms of perspective, lighting and color space, and these 4 or 5 images were distorted, tweaked, rotated, matched, blended, lighting and color density matched… and I was amazed in like 5 seconds, there was this “wide angle” almost “fisheye” photomerge of the front of the building, from brick walkway to roof-line, and it looked incredible.
Automatic layer alignment and blending
Another powerful application of this new alignment and blending technology is with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let’s say you wanted to take a picture of a statue in a park somewhere, or a huge fountain, or the front of a monument or building. There are always people walking through the frame – if you can’t close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it’s beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements – what are you to do? In the past, it was a painstaking process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the “closest” one to your vision of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your “randoms.” There are artists who are very good at this process, but I’m fairly certain they would agree that if there was a way to not have to spend all that time, they’d take it. Well, it’s here. Photoshop CS3 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, figure out which things are permanent (things that appear in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the image are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack and building an advanced composite of all the images and doing 90% or more of the work for you. There’s even a set of “fuzziness” sliders letting you say “eleminate things that are in X% of the images in the stack or less.” This is so impressive to see in action. You have to try it on some of your own images. It’s really hard to believe that it’s this easy to do this sort of process now. This is one of those new areas that I’m sure we’ll see artists finding incredibly creative ways to utilize this feature. Again, this one floored me when I first saw it.
Vanishing Point with adjustable angle
One of the most powerful new features of Adobe CS2 was the vanishing point feature. One limitation it had was that you only had one set of right angles to work with in the vanishing point interface. Adobe took it one exponential step further by adding multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes to this vanishing point feature. What this enables you to do is copy, paste and clone in far more complex image planes than just the “clone parts of a building in perspective” job that the first iteration of this feature offered (impressive and powerful, but not very flexible). One of the big examples Adobe is pushing with this feature is to simulate 3D packaging and work on multiple planes at various angles in the same image. Like an open box for a new product, or even for experimenting with your final package art by seeing it in its real-world context. Again I think this feature has so many far reaching implications for inventors, prototypers, 3D modelers, visual effects artists… and can give Photoshop artists the ability to render full blown mockups of product packaging art for clients in a whole new way – getting us to sign-off, green-light and on to the next project at hand much more quickly. I like that a lot.
There are numerous new features in the application, especially when you dig down deep into the Photoshop Extended editions (sounds like a Peter Jackson DVD…) and as the week progresses here, I’d like to look into some of what PsCS3 Extended has to offer. The versions of PsCS3 that are available are the Film & Video, Medical & Science, AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction), and Manufacturing editions.
Monday, March 26th, 2007
by William
You got that right!
Quote – From http://mingle2.com/blog/view/10-ways-being-a-geek-makes-you-more-attractive:
Being a geek in 2007 is nothing to be ashamed of, the stereotype that once existed is long gone and there are several characteristics of geek culture that could almost be considered chic. Consumating, Threadless, or even Apple are pretty good testaments to this fact.
The picture I’m about to paint is of the ideal, I’m not implying that every perl programmer or 15 year kid who plays WoW all day possesses all these qualities.
1. You’re probably very smart.
2. It’s hip to be geek. Everyone is familiar with the stereotype of thick glasses, a pocket protector, an obsession with star trek, and social skills akin to a sack of potatoes. Times have changed: geeks are often fashionable, hip individuals who are very aligned with the trends of their own generation
3. You geek out on more than just your computer. Ever seen the movie collection of a film geek? Ever had an automotive geek work on your car? Ever seen the body of a fitness geek? The tenacity of someone like us, when applied to hobbies outside computers and the like, can yield impressive results.
4. Geek humor is the best humor. This is perhaps a biased opinion, but I’ve never laughed as hard as I have while reading some of the random, funny things that came out of geek culture.
5. You listen to good music. Geeks have access to tools that allow us to hear music that extends well beyond top 40 radio. Want the entire discography of Aphex Twin by tomorrow afternoon? Ask a geek. Not only do they listen to good music, they can find just about anything you’re looking for in a heartbeat.
6. You make good money. If there’s one stereotype about geeks that usually rings true, it’s that they rarely have trouble earning a decent income.
7. You fix stuff. Everyone loves a handyman, especially one that can fix one of the most frustrating devices ever conceived: a personal computer.
8. You’ve got your own stuff going on. You’ll never meet a geek who runs out of things to do, they’ve got lots of hobbies and interests and are more than happy to dive head first into one of those when they’ve got some spare time. In other words: they won’t rely on you to give them a life.
9. You’re very articulate. Compulsively reading a few hundred RSS feeds a day yields a vocabulary that could put most college English majors to shame.
10. You’re passionate. When a geek becomes interested in something, they tend to immerse themselves in it entirely. They’ll strip a new gadget down to nuts and bolts and re-build it with an xhtml compliant grappling gun. This intense passion can extend to many areas of a geek’s life, not just computers and hobbies.
Any others you can think of?
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
by William
So what is Greasemonkey?
Answer:
Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to specific web pages. As the Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.
Quote – From http://beyond-innovation.org/shadowz/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=86:
The first step is to install Greasemonkey like any other extension. For the purpose of this tutorial, also install Stylish exactly the same way you installed Greasemonkey. I have directly linked to the 10 Greasemonkey scripts below, so after you install Greasemonkey, all you need to do is click the links and the script will be installed.
1. Gmail Conversation Preview
Gmail Conversation Preview lets you right click on your messages in Gmail and see a preview of the message. Furthermore, Gmail Conversation Preview allows you to mark your email message as unread, archive, or delete exactly as if you had the email message open. Using this script will reduce the amount of time it takes to get through your email tremendously.
2. Stylish + Adblocking per Gozer
This script was introduced two weeks ago in my list of Firefox extensions. Adblocker is extremely accurate and will block all Google Adsense and many other various advertisements on any site throughout the web. With the amount of distractions cut out, your can get some serious work done.
3. Google Reader + Gmail
If you use both the Gmail and the Google Reader suite of applications, you can integrate Google Reader into Gmail so that you can read your feeds right in your Gmail window. Google Reader + Gmail tucks your Google Reader feeds right into Gmail allowing you to read your favorite feeds without leaving your email.
4. Invisibility cloak
When you really need to hunker down and get some work done, the best alternative is to completely block those time wasting sites. To explain, you can create a list of the sites you find yourself sucked to, and schedule them to be blocked until after a certain time. For example if you keep getting sucked to Lifehack.org, or Digg.com, you can ban these sites until after 5pm. Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani wrote the Invisibility Cloak script and it blocks flickr.com and metafilter.com by default. If you want to add your own favorite time-sucking sites, right click the Greasemonkey logo in the bottom right corner of Firefox, choose “Manage User Scripts…” and add your Web sites to the list. The script is totally customizable and great for your productivity if you don’t mind going cold turkey on some of your favorite sites.
5. Gmail Macros
“This excellent script extends the built-in Gmail keyboard shortcuts to let you mark an email as read, star it, move it, send it to the trash and a host of other added functionality” all with a couple quick key strokes. In order to see a list of all the keyboard shortcuts added by this script, open up Gmail and type ‘?’ and you will get an expanded view of the window I have shown.
6. Google Image Relinker
The Google Image relinking script redirects your Google Image search results directly to the full sized image so that you no longer have to click through the originating site to get to the full-sized image.
7. Gmail Persistent Searches.
If you find that you are consistently searching Gmail for the same type of content, a persistent search would be for you. With this Greasemonkey script, you can create one-click searches of all of your email.
8. Add a second inbox to your Gmail account.
If you’re sick and tired of fighting with your significant other about whose Gmail account is signed in, or if you manage more than one email account, rather than forwarding all your email to one account, with this Greasemonkey script you can add a second button to your Gmail account and quickly flip between two accounts. In order to use this script, you have to edit the .js file to include your second email account.
9. RSS Quick Subscribe
If you use Google Reader, RSS Quick subscribe will show you links to the RSS feeds in the top right corner. Give the links a quick click and you will seamlessly be subcribed via Google Reader
10. Gmail Attachment Reminder
Ever use the line “I have attached so and so” and then forget to actually attach the document? Of course you have, everybody has! However, with the attachment reminder, you will never forget again. If you use the words “attach” or “attached” and there is no attachment, the script will ask if you forgot the attachment. This script has come in handy for me tons of times!
I know I must have missed tons of productivity-enhancing Greasemonkey scripts. Which of the above mentioned scripts can’t you live without? Please share your favorite Greasemonkey scripts in the comments.
Object orientation is much harder than you think
