Arranged Delirium

Last week I butchered my in-class demo of the matrix shadow technique. I’m still not entirely sure what went wrong. Part of the problem is the projection system which is so bad it won’t display gradients effectively - but I have to accept responsibility for myself too. I just couldn’t seem to get it right. Particularly frustrating is the fact that its an excruciatingly simple technique! Basically this is nothing more than a serif font, rasterized and duplicated, then blurred in different ways. It’s a good example for building a basic understanding of filters and directional blurs. Here’s my improved version:

A better approach is to stroke the text with one pixel of Classic CRT Green to give it that masterful effect from the films…

Adobe has finally released an update for the Mac version of Photoshop Elements. Version 8 is now shipping and provides a nicely affordable way to edit imagery. You can find a review of the software at Macworld.

Photoshop is simply too expensive - even with an educational discount it’s over $200. Elements has 90% of the features for less than $80 (even lower with the educational discount). Additionally, the auto adjusting toolset of Elements makes it a more easy-to-use product for folks that just want to re-touch their images quickly, and not compose new works of art. It’s supposed to be shipping now, but they’ve missed the date; nonetheless I’d expect it to ship this month. This is a great tool for image editing on Windows as well as Mac, so If you are looking for an inexpensive but good image editing tool regardless of platform: this is it.

I’ve been looking at Photoshop alternatives and there are several. All have problems. Gimp is a very nice piece of software, that runs on all platforms - but it requires X11 to run, and that creates problems of its own - especially for learners with limited technical skills. There’s also Pixelmator, which is a real alternative for the Mac. This is a nice piece of software that does a lot, but suffers form a few problematic bugs. That being said, it’s only $59 and that is a considerable savings. In the end though, I think I’d still have to recommend Photoshop Elements which should be coming out in a new version soon. It’s not terribly more expensive, and it does a lot for the money (likely $79 - $89).

I’m constantly harping on students to take personal responsibility for their data. When you’re working with central, networked, systems it’s just easy to get lazy:

“I’m not worried about my files - Someonesomewhere is backing them up.”

This never works out well. In any event, I’ve always encouraged students to use USB flash drives and just carry around their data so they’ll have access to it on any machine. They just need to remember to make their own backups at home : )

But in the last few years, several online storage services have popped up and are now reliable enough to recommend. Essentially these are services which store a limited amount of your data for free, and a significant amount if you are willing to fork out the cash. But for students - ever on a limited budget - the amount of free storage available is actually rather compelling. Thus if you can’t afford a flash drive, you can still have a free way to access your files. You must remember though that you have to have access to the internet to get to them - that’s another reason why the flash drive is still preferable.

Anyway, there are two primary models for these services: either you log into a web site and transfer files, or you download software to your machine and it attends to synching files for you. Services like Dropbox and Synchplicity take the route of installing software and handling the synch for you. I think both of these services work well. Of course, organization schemes vary, so you’d probably want to try these services out for yourself, but here is a mac-centric review of Dropbox which would probably be my choice. I’m sure you can find numerous reviews of Sychplicity as well. SugarSync is another similar tool if you’re really getting into comparisons. Comparing the features might lead you to the tool that works best for you and SugarSync’s web site has a convenient table...

But if you are working in a shared lab environment like my students, you’re not going to be able to install software. That’s what makes Box.net a nice alternative - with no software to install, it works via web browser. In fact, this is why I prefer it over the other services - I want to access my files anywhere, at any time. There’s a review of Box.net here, if you are looking for more information; and there is an iPhone app for added convenience.

All of this was just a long-winded way of saying: if you don’t want to buy a flash drive for my course, you can use a Box.net account instead. The free one give you 1 gig of storage. Just try it out before you need it - you don’t want to find out the night before the project is due that it’s not working.

...I guess that last paragraph alone could have made this a much shorter blog post. Oh well, studies indicate that you didn’t read it anyhow.