New, tips, and more
From CNN:
It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.
There are lots of Internet speed tests around, but a good one I came across the other day is the MySpeed Broadband VoIP and Speed Test. As the title indicates, it tells you how a VoIP connection would be. But it also provides you with overall upload and download speed tests, and shows the results in a few formats.
From Reuters:
A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.
The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I am a big fan of “portable” programs. By this, I mean programs that you do not need to install. You can just run the executable from anywhere (including a USB drive), and it will run. I came across a defrag utility recently that doesn’t need to be installed. It is called JkDefrag:
JkDefrag is based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft, a system library that is included in Windows 2000, 2003, XP, and Vista. Most defragmenters are based on this API, including commercial defragmenters. JkDefrag is therefore very solid and there is no risk of losing data. You can stop the program at any time, it will finish the current file in the background.
I’ve tried it out. It isn’t very attractive looking, and there are no options within the program itself, but it does what it is supposed to do. You just run the program and it automatically defrags all of your hard disks. This would be perfect for a scheduled task. There are options that can be chosen from the command-line (or in a shortcut).
I came across an article in wikiHow called “How to Fix a Scratched CD“:
While compact discs (CDs) are remarkably durable, it’s nearly impossible to prevent scratches and scuffs from occurring from time to time. The resulting damage can be either a skip in your favorite Bob Marley track or, in the case of data CDs, the loss of that spreadsheet you worked on for two weeks. Don’t despair—repair! While commercial CD repair kits and CD refinishing machines are available, you may be able to repair the damage on your own with products you already have.
From eWeek:
The Great Firewall of China is no firewall after all.
The People’s Republic of China has no firewall perched on its routers to enable censors to block Internet sites.
Rather, the authoritarian regime relies on a far more sophisticated censorship system that uses a keyword blacklist and routers that reach deep into Internet traffic to find forbidden words or phrases.
From USA Today:
Social network Facebook will soon make the listings — the name and photo — of its 40 million active members available to anyone who searches the Internet on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. But in its pursuit of building a bigger audience, Facebook has set off privacy alarms among customers who don’t necessarily want their listings to be an open book.
Some Facebook users say they are perturbed because they joined the service so they could choose whom they communicate with — and not be exposed to the Internet at large.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements are both powerful photo editors. For the hobbyist, Photoshop Elements can be used to handle most, if not all of your photo editing needs. For serious photographers and professionals, the full version of Photoshop offers more tools for complete control over your photos. Both programs, and many other photo editing packages, feature the same, or similar tools and features. One such feature is the ability to control opacity. I have referred to opacity in previous tips: Feel the Burn, The Orton Effect, and Black and White from Colour Images, Part 4
Opacity refers to the intensity or transparency of a modification. You can modify opacity with brushes when painting effects in your images, but you can also use opacity on layers. When you are painting on a layer with a brush, modifying your opacity allows you to control how much paint you use. A low opacity results in a very light application of the brush while a higher opacity results in a heavy application. A lower opacity allows more of the original pixel data to show through while a higher opacity has a greater effect on your image. When using a brush, I prefer to use multiple strokes of a low opacity brush so that I can better control my adjustments rather than a single, heavy handed stroke.
With layers, opacity is a wonderful modifier. Like with the brushes, opacity control on a layer controls how transparent the layer is. I use this often to control how much or how little of an effect I want to use on an image. As I make use of a large number of adjustment layers, which in themselves may be altered again and again without pixel modification, I can also alter how strong the adjustment is. What I typically do is create my adjustment layer at 100% opacity and then dial the opacity down until I achieve the exact manipulation I am looking for. This is a great technique when touching up a portrait as I can hide or eliminate facial blemishes, whiten teeth, erase wrinkles and have precise and easily adjustable control over these changes. By lowering my opacity, I allow the underlying pixels to show through which helps to add texture to my changes and makes them completely lifelike.
With all the tools available in today’s digital editing packages, the process can become daunting. Fine control may be difficult for someone new to the area of digital editing but working in small amounts can make it much easier. Being able to control your entire image is the goal of many photographers and tools such as opacity help with that.
Until next time, happy shooting.
There are many utilities out there that will show you the space used in the various folders on your system. One of the better ones is WinDirStat.
WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows (all current variants).
WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:
* The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
* The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
* The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.
(image courtesy of Download Squad)
Michael Robertson, the founder of MP3, has been promoting open source software for a while now. He recently started working with a company, Ajax13, that is writing web-based office-suite applications. The latest venture is a Windows replacement called ajaxWindows:
Today I’m launching ajaxWindows - a complete virtual PC you can experience using only a browser from any web connected computer. If you would like to see it in action, check out the online demo or the video. Remember that everything you see is happening within a web browser. The web browser functions as both the operating system and engine for all of the ajaxWindows applications.
I first heard about this yesterday, and the site was available, but I guess word has gone around, and it is currently unavailable. Over the next few days check it out. This particular setup is in its first version, so there is work to do, but this sort of online virtual computer is the future.
Recent Comments