This has been making the rounds, so I’m hardly the first to post it. It’s still pretty amazing though.
(Click here to watch a larger version on Youtube. It’s worth watching full-screen.)
I’m never quite sure what to think of these whiz-bang features in new versions of Photoshop. They’re great tools for artists, to be sure, but our culture already has a real problem with photography and how it reflects reality, and I’m not sure this kind of thing really helps. What do you think?
In case you missed it over the last couple of days, this announcement is huge news. They’ve addressed both of the major reasons that I don’t buy songs from the iTunes store, albeit at a slightly higher price. Hopefully the rest of the major labels will follow along, and we’ll finally see an end to this whole DRM thing. I’m also hoping this means EMI tracks will start showing up on eMusic soon…
Wow. Adobe has done the unthinkable and released a beta for the next release of Photoshop. If you’ve got a CS2 license I’d highly recommend going over to the Adobe Labs and signing up for an account and downloading the beta. You’ll have to enter your CS2 serial number on the site to enable the beta to work past two days, but it’s worth it.
I’m hardly a Photoshop guru, but I’ve never let that stop me from commenting on this stuff before… The new palette docks are a nice improvement in the interface, or at least they would be if I could figure out how to move them over to my second monitor. The real killer feature for photographers (at least that I’ve seen) is the smart objects/smart filters stuff though. Coupled with adjustment layers this means that most photographic manipulations can be done non-destructively, i.e. you can go back and make changes to the filters even after you’ve applied them, which is pretty cool. Bridge has seen some nice improvements too; it’s actually a program I can see using to manage my photos now.
Any rate, go download it and check it out. Even if you’re not a CS2 user it’s probably worth playing around with for the couple of days before it expires.
As a dyed-in-the-wool computer geek, I can definitely understand the desire to archive and restore old computers; especially since the computer world isn’t nearly as interesting these days as it used to be. I’ve even got a couple of ancient machines kicking around my place in various stages of disuse and disrepair (sadly enough). But I’m thinking maybe this guy has taken the whole thing a bit too far. Impressive, certainly, but a little unnerving. The all-white, all-Ikea “you just stepped onto a Kubrick movie set” aesthetic doesn’t really help things any…
While I’m on the topic of nifty software add-ons, I thought I’d plug the Google Browser Sync Firefox extension. Personally, I use four different computers on a regular basis (laptop and desktop at both home and work) and so I have four different Firefox installations with four different sets of bookmarks, et cetera. I always found myself bookmarking something at home that I thought I might need at work, and then of course having to search for it when I did need it at work.
Browser sync simply allows you to keep your bookmarks, cookies, and/or other settings synchronized between two or more different Firefox installations. It pretty much works as advertised; I had to go through and clean out some duplicate entries when I was first setting it up, but that’s not too surprising and I’ve had no issues since then. It does sync things by storing copies on Google’s servers, so if you’re paranoid about privacy (like I am) there’s an option to encrypt them. It uses a pretty weak PIN to protect them, but hey, they’re only bookmarks. I did turn off the cookie and history syncing myself.
I figured out the other day that it even keeps Sage feeds in sync, as well as what you have and haven’t viewed. Which is of course completely awesome. Highly recommended.
If you a) are crazy like me and use a Mac, b) use Apple Mail to manage your mail, and c) especially if you have a widescreen monitor, you owe it to yourself to give this plugin a try. It’s not quite as good as Outlook’s take on the same idea, but still pretty good, and improving rapidly. And on top of that, it’s free.
Or you could just wait until the next rev of OSX and pay $129 so that Apple can make it one of their “200 new features”…
A while back, I tried to log into my Gmail account to check my mail, and I got the above message informing me that my account had been locked out due to “unusual usage”. No other explanation was offered, and no method to get the account unlocked was provided other than to send an email to the address shown above, which was almost certain to result in a canned response.
Despite the futility of doing so, I sent an email, and sure enough, got the following response:
Hello,
Thanks for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have
experienced. For your security, we have temporarily disabled access to
your account because our system detected abnormal usage.Abnormal usage includes, but is not limited to:
- Receiving, deleting, or popping out large amounts of mail in a short
period of time
- Sending mail to a large number of recipients in a short period of time
- Using 3rd party file-sharing or storing software in your account
- Logging in from multiple locations in a short period of time
- Using your account for purposes other than emailPlease note that it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and
cookies.To clear your cache and cookies in Internet Explorer, please follow these
steps:[---instructions snipped---]
We appreciate your patience while we work to protect the security of Gmail
users.Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Which, of course, gave me no real explanation of what I’d done wrong so I could avoid doing it in the future. Some digging turned up that other people have had this problem, and it seems that it may be related to viewing long threads of messages at once. Said digging also seemed to indicate that getting any info from Google about what went wrong is next to impossible, and that in some cases they seemed to take an offended tone (how dare you challenge us! We’re Google!) if people actually managed to get through to somebody with a pulse.
I meant to make a post about this when it happened, but my service had been unlocked by the next morning, I moved on to other things, and it kind of dropped off the radar. A couple things have happened since then. First off, another friend of mine had some trouble with her account (I guess she was unable to send email) and of course got no real response from Google until it just started working again a few days later. Second, it’s come to light that your email may not be going just to you.
Now this is not a panicky “Google is Evil” post, or anything like that. Google provides some great services, and I use them all the time, even though I’m pretty sure it’s going to eventually turn into Skynet and send Austrian bodybuilder/governor/cyborgs to kill us all. But I think we should probably realize that Google is no longer the amiable, slightly nerdy company that they started out as, and have headed pretty far down the road to faceless corporation-dom. It’s probably wise to view their service with a bit of skepticism, and to question their motives a bit.
Mostly, though, this is just a reminder not to put too much stock into free services, even on the internet. You really do get what you pay for sometimes, and it’s important to remember that free services, whether they be from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or whoever, are not beholden to you in any fashion. If they lose your email, lock you out of your account, or decide to send all of your personal correspondence to Nigerian spammers, you’re pretty much SOL.
For myself, I’ve since pulled all of my mail archives out of Gmail (using their POP server) and stored them on my local machine. I’m still using Gmail, but for the most part everything really important goes through another account, hosted on this domain. I have to pay a monthly fee for it, but sometimes that’s worth it.
…and just like that, my Power Mac was rendered completely obsolete. Such is life with Apple Computer, I guess. *sigh*