A Dog's Life

Ninotchka's been living it up at the bucolic Daisy Hill Kennel and Rifle Range north of Fredrick MD while her master's been off flying hither and yon in an overloaded T-41C USAF trainer aircraft. There being no internet connection at Daisy Hill, hence the lack of recent postings.

Discover Your Inner Pollock

Discover your inner Pollock. For $0.99 (plus tax) your iPod Touch now allows you to splash and drip with abandon. The resulting 480 by 320 pixel paintings will look nice on your wall in their little 3 by 2 inch frames, don't you think?

BlackBerry App Store Open for Business

The BlackBerry App Store is open for business. First, what you won't find there: apps like iFart Mobile, which is one of the best selling apps for the iPhone. But you will find all the Google apps, Pandora, Shazam, Facebook, Twitter, reQall, Superpages, Pageonce, etc. All available OAT (over the air).

Klaatu Barada Nikto

Having put Netflix on hold with 100+ unviewed movies accumulated, but always a big fan of both Meryl Streep and Seymour Hoffman, went over to get newly released Doubt from ye nearby REDBOX. Also out on DVD the same day was The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Had lousy reviews but a nice trailer, how bad could it be? Answer: amazingly so. On any level of analysis, this "re-imagining" of the 1951 sci-fi classic starring Michael Rennie has got to be one of the worst movies ever made. Believe it.

Flashcards on the Fly

Remember flashcards? About the size of business cards, they came in a box and cost a lot. Now with novel GFLASH, you can have flashcards on your iPhone, iPod or BlackBerry. Download cardsets from online libraries or create custom flashcards yourself using Excel via Google Docs.

Obama Breaks Teleprompter Dependency

Perhaps stung by criticism he was using a teleprompter at just about every opportunity, President Obama dispensed with the rather obvious prompter "paddles" at his recent news conference. Wait, hold on, what's that large monitor screen at the back of the East Room? Let's watch the VIDEO.

Professional Print Results at Costco Prices

All one-hour photo operations are set up to do a pretty good job printing jpeg images straight from consumer point-and shoot cameras, and this they do by autocorrecting the color and, for borderless prints, bumping up the size a bit, the equivalent of video overscan. This may be fine for Liz and her vacation snapshots, but if you've color corrected and otherwise teeked your pictures in Photoshop, you may find yourself fighting the process. The solution lies in using your Costco's custom printer profile.

Step (1), go to DRYCREEK PHOTO and download the printer profiles (glossy and lustre) for your particular Costco, these are .icc files and go in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles. Might not hurt to read the instructions.

Step (2), play around in Photoshop as usual, leaving the color space as sRGB. But change the resolution from 300 to 320 pixels, that's what Costco's Noritsu printers work at. Then make a copy of the image file.

Step (4) has to do with soft proofing your image file copy using the printer profile, something best left to those who actually know what they're doing. Instead, go immediately to step (5), convert the profile from sRGB to the printer profile, which in Photoshop CS4 is Edit > Convert to Profile.

Step (6), save the PSD file and then save as a high quality jpeg without checking the Embed Color Profile checkbox. At Costco, order your prints as usual, including these special instructions: "No auto correct. No resize. No back print. Use printer (insert the one specified for the profile, assuming they have more than one)."

As a check, you might want to include this on some of your prints:


The 640 pixel line should, of course, measure exactly 2 inches.

Honey, I Shrank the Queen

Alltop, from Guy Kawasaki

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about RSS but nobody does anything with it. Guy Kawasaki — yes, THE Guy Kawasaki — considered this situation and came up with ALLTOP. So watch the VIDEO.

New for Your pet: iFeast

New from the makers of USB Toaster. Finally, a portable feeding/watering system for your pet that incorporates an iPod docking station. Let's face it, you and your pet don't share the same "taste" in music. But now with iFeast, mealtime for your dog or cat will never be the same. Available at PetsMart and Amazon.

Redmond Says Macs Too Pricey

Why spend 2799.00 on a MacBook Pro, Microsoft asks, when for the same money you can buy a perfectly good Lenovo laptop running Vista and have enough left over to buy an 8 GB Zune iPod wannabe and 365 tall lattes at Starbucks. Why indeed?

Dot Tel Domain Names Available

Following a "sunrise" release period for trademark holders and a subsequent "landrush" release period for premium buyers, .tel domain names are now available for regular purchase. Prices range from 34.99 at NETWORK SOLUTIONS (no surprise) down to 8.95 at el cheapo NAME.COM. Being called a "phone book for the internet" by its promoters, these .tel domains store company or personal contact details as DNS lookup info rather than web content, as described HERE.

Did You Know?

Did you know? You can click on small embedded images and see the full-size original image in another window.

New USB Toaster

New for the fully-equipped road warrior on the go, USB Toaster makes perfect toast every time, thanks to its included BreadBrowner 2.0 software. System requirements: Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS 10.4 or higher. Available from Best Buy, Amazon. Important: USB Toaster must be connected to a full-power USB port, not a keyboard port. Or use a powered USB hub.

How's That Again?

Obama on 60 Minutes

Runtime 0:28:05

The Incredible magicJack

If you've seen the commercial, you possibly waited for Ron Popeil to appear. But MAGICJACK is conceptually brilliant and it works. The USB device self-installs into a PC, installs with just a little work into an Intel Mac. Then you plug any landline phone (including cordless) into the RJ11 jack and get, amazingly, a dial tone! Outgoing calls to anywhere in the 50 states and Canada are free, and incoming calls to your assigned magicJack number ring thru to you. Voice quality of the VOIP is excellent, far better than Skype. When installed, you use your phone conventionally, no need to be anywhere near your computer. If you wanted to kiss your local telco completely goodbye, you could unplug from your POTS network interface and put your whole house on magicJack (assuming your ISP is cable).

But wait, there's more, it gets more interesting if you travel. When outside the US, calls to any stateside number are free. And people calling your stateside number reach you wherever you may be, free again. MagicJack sells for 39.99 including first year of service, thereafter 19.95/year (compare to Vonage), which includes caller ID, voicemail, call waiting, 3-way calling and enhanced 911. Available at RADIO SHACK with 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

Full Faith and Credit

Over the past 50 years regardless of which party was in power, federal tax receipts have generally provided 80 to 90 percent of the money needed for the budget. Thus, the government has borrowed only the remaining fraction. But this year, it will need to borrow 45 percent, virtually half, of what it is projected to spend. Just think.

All Your Eggs in One Basket

Would you like to see all your various account information — bank balances, credit cards, cell phone usage, etc — all online together, accessible by computer, BlackBerry or iPhone? Maybe not. But if you do, the answer is PAGEONCE. It really works. Of course, in order to fetch all this info for you, Pageonce needs your, ahem, login details for all these accounts. Worried? Pageonce is vouched for by VeriSign Secured, TRUSTe, McAfee Secure and BBB Online. Still worried? Then perhaps Pageonce is not for you.

Google Invents Unsend

If you've ever hit SEND and then immediately said oh [expletive deleted], this new Google labs feature is for you. Now you get five seconds to hit UNDO. To install this potentially career-saving feature, go to Settings > Labs and enable UNDO SEND. Needless to say, this only works when you're sending Gmail from the browser interface, not your email client, BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.