The dangers of tunnel vision

Our own David Lei has a column in today's DP on the SEPTA strike. Check it out.

Outsource your photo scanning projects

If you're like me, you have a box (or ten) of old photographs sitting in the back of your closet. You probably forgot they were even there until I just reminded you. Sure, you could lug them out, bring them into the media lab, and spend the next 4 weeks scanning them. Or... you could pay someone else to do it for you, such as one of the vendors (ScanDigital.com, DigMyPics.com, and ScanCafe.com) that Macworld took the trouble to review.

Read the article at: http://www.macworld.com/article/143504/2009/10/outsourcescanning.html?lsrc=rss_main

Chrome Extensions

DownloadSquad has a list of 15 great extensions for Google's Chrome browser. I didn't even know there were ANY extensions available for Chrome, let alone 15 great ones. It's a really nice web browser, and I'd totally put it on the Macs in the lab if, you know, they'd MAKE a version for Macs. Anyhoo, here's the list for the PC-enabled among us if you're interested:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/02/15-great-google-chrome-extensions/

Book Spotlight: iMovie 09 and iDVD The Missing Manual

We've got David Pogue & Aaron Miller's popular iMovie and iDVD book here in the lab for you to use--just ask the lab consultant on duty if you don't see it on the shelf.

From Amazon.com's review of the book:

The first three chapters show how to prepare your video before using iMovie and include lots of professional filmmaking advice. The chapters on editing are the heart of the book. They systematically take you through each feature and menu--working with clips; adding transitions, titles, and sound; and saving and exporting your work. Since this isn't an official manual, Pogue is free to point out iMovie's shortcomings. In sidebars, he shows how to exploit features iMovie does have to mimic features you get only with more expensive software--for example, how to create multiple simultaneously superimposed titles (great for wild typographic experiments) or how to "pot down" the soundtrack music to allow a voiceover.

To make better choices while saving your movie, the book discusses each of the save options, as well as how QuickTime works--in detail. Also, the book doesn't just suggest what software to use to burn a QuickTime movie onto a CD-ROM, it also shows how to make a Video CD. It even includes the HTML necessary to embed your movie into a Web page. In fact, this book contains an impressive amount of info. It's easy to jump in at any point in the text and discover some idea so exciting that you just have to boot up iMovie right away and get creative.

We have iMovie 09 (the latest version) installed our workstations, but just in case you're using the previous version (iMovie 08), we've got an older edition of the book, too. So make sure you're reading the right one.

As always, we ask that you use our books here in the lab rather than taking them to other parts of the library.

The Last Guy

This has been my favorite Playstation 3 game for the last week or so, ever since I downloaded it from the Playstation Network--worth every penny of the $10 it cost. It's called "The Last Guy." Unlike most Zombie games, there is no shooting or killing of zombies involved. But there is heck of a lot of running away from zombies.

The game takes place in various zombie-affected cities around the globe (I'll let you know if there's a level in Philly), and part of what makes the game so compelling is that the cities are actual satellite photos like those you might find in Google Earth, so you can really see/visit real locations you may be familiar with. You run around the city and gather up other survivors, leading them in an ever-growing line behind you, all the while avoiding Zombies, and ultimately leading your followers back to the safety of the Escape Zone where they will be airlifted to freedom.

Of course there are different types of zombies, each with its own special attributes, and there are power-ups to aid you toward your goal of avoiding them, and there's thermal vision, which helps you locate hiding survivors.

Here's a video someone nicely posted to YouTube of the first level, Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Watch it in HD for a better view:



So what are YOU playing these days?

Flickr's new App Garden

Flickr just announced that they have a new spot on their site for the various and sundry Flickr-based applications that have popped up over the years. These are mostly applications developed by regular folks like you and me who have taken advantage of the API that Flickr generously made available to the world at large.

These includes apps like...

retrievr which let you sketch a quick drawing, and then it searches flickr for photographs that look familiar.

Spell with Flickr which lets you type in a word, and then it returns images of letters from flickr which spell out your word or phrase (see the title image for this post)

flump which lets you download all of the public photos for a specific Flickr account.

Often these apps are even open source, meaning you could download them and alter them to improve on them.

Check out the full App Garden at http://www.flickr.com/services/

Comic Life Magiq for ANTH 160

Here are a couple Comic Life Magiq links for those of you in Dr. Krasniewicz's "Mythology and the Movies" class:

http://digitalapplejuice.com/making-a-comic-in-comic-life-magiq/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeQFVTTK8xE&feature=player_embedded

Also, remember the Comic Life Magiq has a built-in help feature in case you get stuck trying to figure out how to do something.

Of course you know, this means war...

Oh i just love this. Adobe has apparently decided to let iPhone users where the real blame lies in the fact that they can't run Flash apps on their device:

My guess is that most disgruntled iPhone users (such as myself) were already aware that the fault lies with Apple, but Adobe is now clarifying for the masses. Adobe is clearly champing at the bit to make Flash available for iPhone users like you and me, so why won't Apple allow it?

(diatribe begins here.)

Easy: Money. SURPRISE! Flash opens up a whole new way for application developers to get their software onto your iPhone--without having to go through the iPhone App Store. Combine that with Apple's unwillingness to loosen its iron grip on control of everything that goes onto your phone, and you end up with the current situation.

To be fair, the iPhone wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is now without the app store, and the App Store wouldn't be as popular as it is now if Apple let every Tom, Dick, and Harry upload their crappy, bug-ridden software for you to download and crash your phone with.

Still, it all seems a little too parental to me. It's MY phone. Let me put what I want on it, and given the number of Flash-dependent websites out there (after all, 98 plus percent of desktops already have Flash installed. Apple actually had to stop airing an ad in the UK claiming “All the parts of the internet are on the iPhone=” because the lack of Flash and Java support were enough to get the ad yanked), it shouldn't be too surprising that I want Flash! So open up your email client and let Apple know they should get on the ball on this one. Or maybe better yet, write to Adobe and tell them you love their new error message!

Screen vs Print Resolution

Let's talk about resolution for a minute.

Every image on your computer is made of pixels--tiny little dots, each a different color, which, when viewed as a whole, make up an image. When you print that image out, the more pixels you can cram into the same amount of space (called resolution), the more detail your image has. Basically, the higher the resolution (measured in dots-per-inch or dpi), the more detail your image is capable of holding.

Here is a simulation of an image at 3 different resolutions, from highest on the left to lowest on the right:


Setting the resolution of an image in Photoshop (or other image editing program) has zero effect on the size the image appears on screen. Zip. Zilch. It's only the pixel dimensions that matter when you're looking at a picture on a monitor (unless, of course, you zoom in or out, but that's cheating). On the web, your computer will show the image at the full size--each and every pixel. So if you want to change the size of the image on the screen, you need to change the actual pixel dimensions. So the conventional wisdom that says to set your images at 72dpi for the web actually has no effect at all! (By all means, test it out if you don't believe me.)

On the other hand, when your image prints out, the printer isn't concerned with the overall number of pixels in the image. It's just concerned with how close together (ie. the resolution) it should print them. Of course, the more pixels you have to start with, the more you can raise the resolution and still have a high-quality print.


So keep this in mind when your sizing your images for output--screen or print.

Improve your photography with classical art

This is a nice little tutorial that uses Photoshop's "Match Color" command in a creative way to alter the color of your photographs to match the color scheme of another piece of art. It's almost certainly not what the programmers at Adobe intended for this command, but one of the things I like about this approach is that you can discover a whole new way of looking a photograph you had otherwise discounted entirely. Via Flickr's Photoshop Support group.

And now for something completely different...

You have Ivy to thank for this one. Yes, it's a little OT, but c'mon! How do you not love this?!

How to Browse without Leaving a Trace

Turns out there's more to it than clearing your cache and deleting your cookies. Lifehacker explains the details at:

http://lifehacker.com/5395267/how-to-really-browse-without-leaving-a-trace

E-Book Readers

Seems like E-book readers are becoming all the rage these days. I've been seeing them increasingly on the Amtrak train I take between Philly and DC, but not so many around campus. Given that Penn students seem fairly quick to jump on the hot-new-gadgets bandwagon (does anybody NOT have an iPhone around here?) it makes me wonder just how useful these devices will be to college students.

It seems like there are new models announced every day. In addition to the now-elderly-but-since-updated Sony e-book reader (we have one of the original model in the lab if you'd like to try it out), there's the various flavors of Amazon's kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, ASUS's recently announced reader to be released in March, and more.

Some libraries, both in the US and in the UK have been lending ebook readers to their patrons.

So my question is: Do you own one of these? Do you use or have you used one, and what for? And what were your impressions?

Ryuneo Designs - the process

I love process, seeing the way a project goes from start to end, and artist Ryan Forshaw has made much of his process viewable -- at least in large discrete chunks, if not every step in between. Click on one of his projects here and watch a short slideshow of the progression of his beautiful work:

http://www.ryuneo-clients.co.uk/steps.html


Lots of Photoshop posts lately? Yeah, I know. So sue me. I love Photoshop. If you've got some good links, let me know and I'll be glad to post them, too.

Happy Halloween

I did this Photoshop job of my friend for Halloween last year, and then used Photoshop to animate the process. It starts with a photo from what I think was an office Halloween party, complete with scary contact lenses, and then I took it from there. Enjoy.

Don's Halloween costume from David Toccafondi on Vimeo.

Dreamweaver Training from Lynda

Lynda.com has some good Dreamweaver CS4 training now available. It's called, "Creating a First Web Site with Dreamweaver CS4" and it's great for the beginning Dreamweaver user or web designer. I'm a little rusty on my webdesign skills, myself, so I'm going to use it re-learn dreamweaver (I think the last version I used was MX!) and make myself a new website.

Take a look at the contents here:

http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourseN.aspx?lpk2=52770

and if you're interested, just let the lab consultant on duty know you'd like to watch it, and we'll log you in on one of our workstations and you can watch 'til your heart's content.

Apple's new Magic Mouse

Is anybody else as eager as I am to get their hands on Apple's new "Magic Mouse?" They actually do have one on display over at the computer connection at one of the new iMacs they have on display (the 24", I think), but none on the shelves for folks like you and me yet. I called yesterday, and they said they expect them to ship out in about a week. A WEEK?! I have to wait a WEEK? (One of the lab consultants says it's a matter of Apple coming up with an OS update to take advantage of all the new features in the magic mouse) Anyhoo, the new mouse is very sleek, and they feel good in the hand (although they're a little thin), so go over to the CCX and give them a try. I promise I'll buy 2 or 3 of them as soon as they hit the shelves so you can come by and try them soon.

Educause Presentations at the Library

Penn has registered for EDUCAUSE 2009 Online, which will enable interested staff to view EDUCAUSE 2009 general, featured, and point/counterpoint sessions as well as a selection of track sessions streamed. Penn’s Educause 2009 Online event will be held next Wednesday through Friday (Nov. 4-6) in the Class of ’55 Room in the Van Pelt Library from 10:00 AM – 6:45 PM.

The full list of Educause 2009 sessions that will be streamed to Class of ‘55 can be read at http://www.upenn.edu/computing/isc/training/educause2009online.html

New Equipment Lending System

We've gone live with our new equipment lending system, WebCheckOut! You can get help and find more info at http://wic.library.upenn.edu/wicfacilities/lending.html

The web form you used to use to reserve equipment is gond, and it's been replaced with a snazzy new interface at http://checkout.sas.upenn.edu

We're eager to hear your feedback, so please let us know if you have any suggestions on how we can improve the system further.

(Oh, and we've lowered our late fines to $25 per day!)

Drawing the Line

Cartoonists Lynda Barry, Eric Drooker, and John Jennings will be joining cultural critics Jared Gardner, Jeet Heer, and Sharon Mizota and members of the Haverford College community for Drawing the Line: Comics and the Art of Social Transformation, a symposium focusing on comics as a medium for social commentary as well as means of political intervention.

Drawing the Line brings together groundbreaking artists who draw their influences from sources as varied as Frans Masereel's woodcut novels to Bil Keane's Family Circus with scholars and critics who are exploring how models of subjectivity and modes of political agency are created in relation to visual and textual forms of representation.

Members of the public are invited to take part in the workshops, master classes, lectures, and panel presentations on the role of comics in movements for social change that will be taking place on Haverford's campus from October 21-25, 2009.

http://www.haverford.edu/drawingtheline/