(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?

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.

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.

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 email

Please 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.

A few weeks back, I found out that SendStation was giving away Firewire PocketDocks for the cost of shipping. The PocketDock is a little widget that restores functionality that Apple removed from the 3rd gen and later iPods, allowing you to use any old Firewire or USB cable (depending on which dock you get) to attach the iPod to your computer without messing with Apple’s special dock connector. Not something I really wanted to pay 20+ bucks for, but a pretty good deal at ~$6. So I went ahead and ordered one.

It’s a nice little product, but that’s not really what this post is about. When I went to check out on SendStation’s web store, they have an option to use an “ecologically friendly cardboard package” for shipping. It was no extra cost, so I checked the box, and kind of forgot about it. When the thing arrived in the mail a few days ago, I was pleased to see that the only packaging it came in was what you see above. A lightweight cardboard sleeve and a small shipping envelope. In this day and age of oversized, hard to open plastic blister packaging designed to make items hard to shoplift and stand out in the sea of product on store shelves, I just found this really refreshing. Kudos to SendStation for putting a bit of thought into the simple things!

• CNET-type “reviews”, which aren’t more than a couple of pages and are geared towards grandma or a corporate buyer. They spend most of their time on ease of use, and if they mention quality it’s “text quality was good, and photos looked like lab prints”. They don’t give any indication as to whether they’re qualified to evaluate the photo quality or not. I’m guessing not.
• “Comprehensive” reviews where they spend 10-20 pages with picture after picture of the printer and every single tab of the driver software, and reduce quality evaluations to a couple of paragraphs on the last page or so. Thanks, but I don’t need a recap of the manual. (this type of review is also very common for digital cameras)
• Reviews where they actually make an attempt to evaluate quality with a color-calibrated system and seem to have some clue what prints are supposed to look like. I found this site which seems to fall into this category and is going in my bookmarks. Their reviews are still pretty long and have too many “unpacking the printer” and “here’s what the drivers look like” shots, though.
• The best reviews are ones by pro photographers who wrap the whole thing up in a couple pages, hitting the high points and the low points of setup and usage, and giving a good qualitative evaluation of the print quality. My needs are nowhere near what these guys need, so I figure if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me.

The problem is that the pro photographers only seem to review the $500+ wide-carriage high end photo printers, which is far more than I need or want eating up my desk space at home. So while they’re good for figuring out whether Canon, HP or Epson are capable of manufacturing a quality printer, they’re not really useful for me to figure out what would be a good $150-$200 printer to sit on my desk.

The problem with the other categories of printer reviews is that nobody seems to review everything, not even CNET. Printer manufacturers don’t make this any easier by having product cycles shorter than the average fruit fly’s lifespan. Epson and Canon seem to be generally on top, but they also seem to trade places every six months or less, and it’s tough to figure out who to buy at the moment.

I had it narrowed down to two specific printers (for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment) and found that nowhere was there a site that had reviewed both models. Sites had reviews of one, or the other, but not both. Not even CNET. This sucks because when comparing opinions it’s hard to tell how qualifications compare between sites, and it ends up being a lot of reading to try to get a feel for the site and reviewer.

In the end, I read tons of reviews, and then just… picked one. Seriously, it was barely more informed than flipping a coin.

Why have you failed me, Internet?