Well you've gone and bought yourself a licensed copy of Photoshop CS4 (retail $699, $199 for the upgrade), and the box feels pretty light. That's 'cause Adobe no longer gives you a !#*&%@%!!! manual, the cheapskates. Good thing there's the Pogue Press book (written by Lesa Snider King, forward by David Pogue), at $30 from both Barnes & Noble and Amazon it's well worth acquiring. To peek inside the book, click HERE, to read the book free online for 45 days, click HERE and enter code JPKUJGA. The missing CD for the missing manual, it's HERE.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Photoshop CS4 Missing Manual
Well you've gone and bought yourself a licensed copy of Photoshop CS4 (retail $699, $199 for the upgrade), and the box feels pretty light. That's 'cause Adobe no longer gives you a !#*&%@%!!! manual, the cheapskates. Good thing there's the Pogue Press book (written by Lesa Snider King, forward by David Pogue), at $30 from both Barnes & Noble and Amazon it's well worth acquiring. To peek inside the book, click HERE, to read the book free online for 45 days, click HERE and enter code JPKUJGA. The missing CD for the missing manual, it's HERE.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Obama Suffering from Acute Pronounitis
When President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics: grammar junkies.Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.” The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use “I” as a subject and “me” as an object, whether the pronoun appears by itself or in a twosome. Thus every “I” in those quotes ought to be a “me.” So should the president go stand in a corner of the Oval Office (if he can find one) and contemplate the error of his ways?
Read MORE.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?
Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? Using principles for predicting the distribution of wildlife, geographers at UCLA have identified what they say is the most logical hiding place for Osama bin Laden, to wit: PARACHINAR, a town in the mountains of Pakistan south of the Khyber Pass. And they’ve even identified the most likely buildings in town.
VIEW LARGER MAP
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Say Hello to Xee
Xee (p
ronounced xee) is a lightweight, fast and convenient Mac image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface. Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. It is very fast, and uses less memory than most other image viewing tools. It also uses OpenGL to display and scroll images much more smoothly than other viewers. Its interface is highly streamlined and has easily configurable keyboard shortcuts.
ronounced xee) is a lightweight, fast and convenient Mac image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface. Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. It is very fast, and uses less memory than most other image viewing tools. It also uses OpenGL to display and scroll images much more smoothly than other viewers. Its interface is highly streamlined and has easily configurable keyboard shortcuts. 
- Display a large number of image formats — any format QuickTime or Preview can open, plus several more, including PCX, Maya IFF and Amiga IFF-ILBM.
- Easy browse through folders of images — open any file in a folder and use the toolbar, keyboard shortcuts or mouse wheel to view the other images in the same folder.
- Losslessy rotate and crop JPEG images. This lets you edit your digital photographs without losing quality by recompressing them like most other editors do.
- Effortlessly copy, move, rename and delete of images while viewing.
- View more EXIF data for JPEG files than Preview.
- View images in full-screen.
Xee is freeware, donations appreciated. Download it HERE.
Yerba Mate
Yerba mate is the an
glicized name for hierba mate, a shrub-like plant of the holly family which grows in northern Argentina and surrounding areas of Brazil and Paraguay. Yerba mate is also the name given to the beverage made from the dried leaves (and sometimes twigs) of this plant, much enjoyed by the Gauchos, who drink it socially out of a weird-looking gourd contraption with a metal straw, which confusingly is also called a mate.
Forgetting about the gourd contraption, yerba mate is quite delicious and can be prepared the same way as with loose tea leaves, by using an infuser or even a French coffee press. Just be sure the water is hot but below boiling temperature, else you'll get a bitter brew. Two level teaspoons of yerba mate per 8 oz water is about right. Add milk and sugar to taste.
You'll find yerba mate on the shelf in your neighborhood latino grocery or many supermarkets carrying hispanic foods. A 2 kilo box of Nobleza Gaucha brand or simililar should be less than $3.00, unless you buy it online where the price is double (plus shipping). Yerba mate also comes packaged in tea bags, plain or flavored.
Note to me, images moved down to here 2009-02-28 00:27
glicized name for hierba mate, a shrub-like plant of the holly family which grows in northern Argentina and surrounding areas of Brazil and Paraguay. Yerba mate is also the name given to the beverage made from the dried leaves (and sometimes twigs) of this plant, much enjoyed by the Gauchos, who drink it socially out of a weird-looking gourd contraption with a metal straw, which confusingly is also called a mate.
Forgetting about the gourd contraption, yerba mate is quite delicious and can be prepared the same way as with loose tea leaves, by using an infuser or even a French coffee press. Just be sure the water is hot but below boiling temperature, else you'll get a bitter brew. Two level teaspoons of yerba mate per 8 oz water is about right. Add milk and sugar to taste.
You'll find yerba mate on the shelf in your neighborhood latino grocery or many supermarkets carrying hispanic foods. A 2 kilo box of Nobleza Gaucha brand or simililar should be less than $3.00, unless you buy it online where the price is double (plus shipping). Yerba mate also comes packaged in tea bags, plain or flavored.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Flying in the Dark
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Blog Now Open to Comments
Ninotchka's Occasional Blog is now open to comments, if any. To leave a comment, click the comments link below each po
st. When commenting, enter your google account or choose one of the other options. For the "name/URL" option you can just enter your name, the URL you can leave blank should you wish. Anonymous comments will most likely not be displayed, you can at least have the initiative to make up a plausible pseudonym.
st. When commenting, enter your google account or choose one of the other options. For the "name/URL" option you can just enter your name, the URL you can leave blank should you wish. Anonymous comments will most likely not be displayed, you can at least have the initiative to make up a plausible pseudonym.
Seven Low Tech Solutions to Everyday Problems
(1) Cellphone Losing Charge
If your cellphone loses its battery charge too quickly while idle in your pocket, part of the problem may be that your pocket is too warm. “Cellphone batteries do indeed last a bit longer if kept cool,” says Isidor Buchanan, editor of the Battery University Web site. The 98.6-degree body heat of a human, transmitted through a cloth pocket to a cellphone inside, is enough to speed up chemical processes inside the phone’s battery. That makes it run down faster.
To keep the phone cooler, carry it in your purse or on your belt. This same method can be used to preserve your battery should you find yourself away from home without your charger. Turn off the phone and put it in the hotel refrigerator overnight to slow the battery’s natural tendency to lose its charge.
(2) Dry Ink Cartridge
If your printer’s ink cartridge runs dry near the end of an important print job, remove the cartridge and run a hair dr
yer on it for two to three minutes. Then place the cartridge back into the printer and try again while it is still warm. “The heat from the hair dryer heats the thick ink, and helps it to flow through the tiny nozzles in the cartridge,” says Alex Cox, a software engineer in Seattle. “When the cartridge is almost dead, those nozzles are often nearly clogged with dried ink, so helping the ink to flow will let more ink out of the nozzles.” The hair dryer trick can squeeze a few more pages out of a cartridge after the printer declares it is empty.(3) Remote Car Key Range
Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.
Mr Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.” Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths.
(4) Cellphone in the Toilet
It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet. Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your pho
ne’s fragile internals. Then, wipe the phone gently with a towel, and shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice. It works for the same reason you may keep few grains of rice in your salt shaker to keep the salt dry. Rice has a high chemical affinity for water — that means the molecules in the rice have a nearly magnetic attraction for water molecules, which will be soaked up into the rice rather than beading up inside the phone. It is a low-tech version of the “Do Not Eat” desiccant packets that may have been packed in the box the phone came in, to keep moisture away from the circuitry during shipping and storage.(5) Longer Wi-Fi Reach
If your home Wi-Fi router doesn’t reach the other end of the house, don’t rush out to buy more wireless gear to stretch your network. Instead, build a six-inch-high passive radio wave reflector from kitchen items, like an aluminum cookie sheet.
Follow the instructions at freeantennas.com/projects/template. Place the completed reflector — a small, curved piece of metal that reflects radio waves just like a satellite TV dish — behind your Wi-Fi router. It focuses the router’s energy in one direction — toward the other end of the house — rather than letting it dissipate its strength in a full circle. No cables, no batteries, no technical knowledge required. Yet it can easily double the range of your network.
(6) Dirty Discs
You need to clean a skipping DVD or CD, but as a bachelor you don’t have any sissy cleaning fluids? Soak a wash
cloth with vodka or mouthwash. Alcohol is a powerful solvent, perfectly capable of dissolving fingerprints and grime on the surface of a disc. A $5 bottle of Listerine in your medicine cabinet may do the job as effectively as a $20 bottle of DVD cleaning fluid. Also, swabbing your copy of “Lost Weekend” with Stoli instead of fussing with a Discwasher kit is a lot more manly.(7) Crashed Hard Drive
If — no, make that when — your PC’s hard drive crashes and can’t be read, don’t be too quick to throw it out. Stick it in the freezer overnight.
“The trick is a real and proven, albeit last resort, recovery technique for some kinds of otherwise-fatal hard-drive problems,” writes Fred Langa on his Windows Secrets Web site. Many hard drive failures are caused by worn parts that no longer align properly, making it impossible to read data from the drive. Lowering the drive’s temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room temperature can cause those parts to expand again.
That may help free up binding parts, Mr Langa explains, or at least let a failing electrical component remain within specs long enough for you to recover your essential data.
[Cribbed from the NYT tech section]
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Obama's Stimulus Plan Working
Just signed yesterday, President Obama's stimulus plan is already working at street level in New York City, thanks to collaboration between panhandlers and noted writer Gay Talese (on the right). Read the STORY.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
FinderPop Returns
Long a Mac user favorite under OS9, FinderPop has actually been available for OSX as a system preferance pane for some time now, although oblivious to us. In a nut
shell, FinderPop creates a folder, ~/Library/FinderPop, into which you put nested folders of aliases, which can point to apps, documents, folders, volumes, you name it. And all this pops up, hence the name, when you left-click on any blank area of the menu bar or right-click just about anywhere (except in an open file window).
On its own, FinderPop also shows open apps and the desktop. Here you see how FinderPop appears as a contextual menu when you right-click. FinderPop is "pintware," meaning that if you like it you're expected to send its creator, Turly O'Connor, a PayPal contribution of five Euros (or more) to spend down at the pub. You can download it HERE.
shell, FinderPop creates a folder, ~/Library/FinderPop, into which you put nested folders of aliases, which can point to apps, documents, folders, volumes, you name it. And all this pops up, hence the name, when you left-click on any blank area of the menu bar or right-click just about anywhere (except in an open file window).On its own, FinderPop also shows open apps and the desktop. Here you see how FinderPop appears as a contextual menu when you right-click. FinderPop is "pintware," meaning that if you like it you're expected to send its creator, Turly O'Connor, a PayPal contribution of five Euros (or more) to spend down at the pub. You can download it HERE.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Two More Languages Added
Due to complaints that other Scandinavian countries were being slighted, we've added Finnish and Norwegian — ja, det er så — translations.
A man and a woman are making love in Hyde Park, a constable comes by and asks them, "Are you finished?" The woman replies, "No, we're Norwegian."
A man and a woman are making love in Hyde Park, a constable comes by and asks them, "Are you finished?" The woman replies, "No, we're Norwegian."
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Now Available in 12 Additional Languages
In addition to English, Ninotchka's Occasional Blog is now available in the following languages:
Arabic
Chinese
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
To switch to another language, scroll down in the sidebar.
Arabic
Chinese
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
To switch to another language, scroll down in the sidebar.
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