Category: Uncategorized

Photoshop CS3 Beta out now.

1. It flies on Intel Macs.
2. Refine Edges is great.
3. Smart Filters are great too, though I would have preferred them to work like Adjustment Layers so they could be applied to more than one layer at once.
4. Interface is much improved.
5. The new Curves dialog, with histograms, is fantastic.
6. Quick Selection is destined to be abused like the Magic Wand, but at least it’s an improvement.

Oh, and the CS2 -> CS3 serial number thingy isn’t working yet, but the trial works for 30 days. Note that Adobe have taken away the links to this for now, perhaps to change some serious bug, perhaps to reduce the free trial usage to 2 days as previously stated. So grab it now.

Last post, I mentioned Foghorn. Well, the shirt arrived yesterday, two or three days after ordering. Good quality (American Apparel) base shirt + well-applied artwork + looks good = a happy experience. An inventive way to escape the sea of pseudo-clever phrases on t-shirts.

The friendly people at Foghorn have had a good idea: provide people with a bank of free symbols and let them design their own t-shirts. As proof that not all spam is bad, they also sent me a certificate for a free shirt, just for having a blog. Good luck to them and to any other small Australian business who wants to send me free stuff!

Nice site too, with many of the AIGA symbols from Airport available for use. Now, I just need to get on with my long-standing plans for Flying Spaghetti Monster t-shirts (blank shirts and special paper downstairs) and I’m all wardrobed out.

More of interest to me than to you: if you can read this post, you’re reading the New, Improved™ funwithstuff.com. New host, new location, DNS propagation around the planet. Wheeeeee!

Alright, back to whatever you were doing.

If you have time to waste (and as you’re reading my blog, you probably do), then check out Ms Dewey, a video-fronted “search engine” from Microsoft. As a search engine, it’s not good. Search should be fast and efficient; this is neither. Flash is not fast or efficient, and I can’t copy and paste?

Search is not why you’d visit, though. As Ms Dewey responds differently to different search terms, you can get some pretty funny responses from some keywords. There are multiple responses to each keyword, so you might want to try them each a couple of times. Some discussion here and originally found here at herebenotions but you could try (in no particular order): police, halo, apple, google, weird, science, microsoft, soccer, tv, video, film, Janina Gavankar (the actress playing Ms Dewey), gun, colt 45, death, phone, police (very good), politics, xbox, pub, nerd, sex, love, girlfriend, marriage, porn, ipod, zune, second life, me, backwards, france (what?), australia, hotel, global warming, intern, funk, why, ebay, star trek, gremlins, lord of the rings, friend, paper, camera, live, everything, bondage, animals, matrix, money, monster, god, photo, los angeles, new york, seattle, san francisco, gambling, eyebrows, alcohol, read, jazz, comedy, coffee.

I do this for you, people. Oh, and don’t forget to start swearing.

Hey Kids! Become a game developer! Look like this!

A friend of mine hit the big time a little while ago, directing the console game Mercenaries and the upcoming Mercenaries 2. Here’s a video blog (#15 if it’s moved) featuring him.. (Go Cam!) The reason I’m talking about that here is the t-shirt he’s wearing. Full bonus points to anyone who can identify the full reference in comments. (Katakana will help you, innate geekdom will help you more.)

Haven’t seen Second Life yet? Check out these pics of Second Life in Stereo, i.e. 3D images you can see if you go cross-eyed, or stare at them for a while (wall-eyed). I do have a separate blog for this stuff, by the way, but with all the recent press I thought a kind nudge towards the future of human social interaction was probably in order.

I agree with most of the recommendations in Uncle Mark’s Gift Guide and Almanac, except I’d always recommend getting a higher resolution camera, with a zoom, and shooting on that higher resolution. I’m going to want the details in my digital memory substitutes when I’m old, or when I’m designing, or when making textures.