Ever been confronted, in Photoshop, with this (totally useless) crop tool icon? Or been using a large paintbrush, and seen this equally useless icon: Even though your preferences clearly designate the “brush size” cursor should be used?
In either case, press CAPS LOCK. You will get the latter icon, which is the only good way to crop, if cropping, and you will toggle back to the “brush size” icon if you are using the brush tool (and your brush size is big enough).
It was quite awhile before I discovered this, and I always thought I had a buggy copy of Photoshop in the “brush size” situation. It seems everyone else I’ve encountered has thought the same, so I hope this helps you.
Most of the pictures you see on this site will have been taken with my Minolta Dimage Xt (its no longer available new on Amazon, but the Minolta Dimage Xg is, and I struggle to see any difference).
I did a great deal of research to find this camera, because I was sick of seeing photo-ops like I was able to capture in CAUTION: Inverted Chairs and not having a camera handy, or going to social gatherings where having a bulky camera was too inconvenient to hassle with. The camera is smaller than my wallet, lightweight, has a flash, zooms up to 3X and with a 256 MB SecureDigital Card, I can take up to 12 minutes of video, with sound, at 320×240 (VHS quality), at 15 frames per second (not VHS quality).
I used this camera to film my ski videos (featuring the music of Criteria), which I edited with iMovie, created the graphic animation with Flash.
The camera is not free of problems, however. Its battery tends to die very rapidly in the cold of skiing conditions, I once had to send it back to the factory for repair (under warranty) because the sliding door that covers the lens wouldn’t operate, and the optics, understandably given the camera’s small size, are not stellar. I also had an issue on a ski trip during which every evening I would replay the day’s movies on the hotel’s television set. After all of that replaying, stopping, rewinding, and slow-mo-ing, some of the quicktime movies became irrevocably corrupted. I now try to avoid replaying my precious videos off of the camera.
I saw this odd scene on my way into the UNO Library today. Browsing through the design book section there, I happened to run into Design of Warning Labels and Instructions. If I get around to reading it, I’ll be sure to tell you about it.
Last night, I saw Super Size Me, a documentary in which the director eats nothing but McDonald’s three times a day for thirty days. Seeing the movie didn’t make me much more anti-McDonald’s than I already am, but I have to say watching it was an unpleasant experience. The shaky camera work added to the nauseating effect of watching this guy wolf down big macs and fries. I soon found myself covering my eyes every time he took a bite. I don’t think it’s a bad thing when a movie makes you feel something other than good, though.
Last night, I watched Swimming Pool (Amazon), a rather ambiguous movie a la Mulholland Drive (Amazon) or 8 1/2 (Amazon). I enjoy such movies because they make wonderful vehicles for discussion. Of the many interesting posts on this movie, I think the interpretation that the Julia we see for most of the movie is Sarah’s creation makes the most sense.
I have added a background pattern and framed the content with my parody of the ever-popular drop shadow. I’m tempted to resist the aqua-esque design trend and stick with pixel-by-pixel designs. I feel that it gives a good understanding to how all of the pixels work together, and while exaggerated, expresses the limitations of this medium.
Whenever I do work, or see work, that acknowledges the limitations of the pixel through exaggeration, it reminds me of the de Stijl movement, not only because the forms they derived from the principles of de Stijl are rectilinear, but because, in some cases, the form seems to derive from the limitations of the medium at hand. Granted, Mondrian’s paintings are counter-expressive of the inherent qualities of paint in contrast to the work of Van Gogh or Jackson Pollack, but seeing a piece such as Theo van Doesburg‘s logo for de Stijl Makes me suspect that maybe having a typecase full of only fonts and rectangular rules may have had a strong influence on its final form.
The Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts Table has (sort of) unlocked for me a way to browse almost entirely on my keyboard. I always loved how Firefox would highlight text links just by typing the first few letters of that link, and I always valued the ability to switch browser tabs on Safari using Cmd+Shift+arrow, but I could never get Firefox to switch tabs.
Funny though, that if you follow this table and press Ctrl+T in Firefox on a mac, it will NOT produce a new tab for you. This, I wouldn’t even notice, because I normally just register “Ctrl” to mean “Cmd” on a Mac, since that’s how it’s keyboard shortcuts usually translate from a PC, so as I would expect, one must press Cmd+T to produce a new tab on a Mac, however, Cmd+Tab does not switch tabs as one who uses this logic would expect. In this case, when they say “Ctrl,” they mean “Ctrl.” Press Ctrl+Tab and Firefox will switch tabs.
What do I have against using a mouse? Mice are primitive (mouse alternatives), and I find them especially uncomfortable given that I use a computer most of the day. To do the things I can’t accomplish on my keyboard, I rely on a Wacom Tablet.
Until this week, rdgusa.com, which I am the webmaster of, had been getting alot of annoying spambot traffic from one spambot in particular (for background on our method of determining what a spambot is, read up on the mod_rewrite method). Finally I got fed up with this spambot visiting the site every day, looked up the IP address and contacted the tech contact, simply telling them I was getting spambot behavior from this particular IP address. Later that day, I got an e-mail from the “offending” customer, who was oblivious as to what was going on. Oddly, the “offending” customer was the Catholic Diocese of a capital city (RDG is a leader in Catholic Church Architecture, so this was a potential client). I checked the log files, and noticed that the offending IP address had visited once, with human-like behavior, then a few days later started coming as a robot, accessing, but disobeying the robots.txt file at which point I started blocking it. I was fairly certain that this Catholic Diocese wasn’t running a spambot, so I concluded that there must have been some sort of Trojan Horse that had taken over one of their computers, going through it’s internet history and harvesting e-mail addresses from all of the sites in it. I informed the tech contact of this organization, and sure enough, he found a Trojan Horse on one of his user’s computers. I was unaware that spammers used this method, and I thought the world should know about it.
