Posted by Scott on March 27, 2008, 11:57 am
Big news in the digital photography and photo processing world today with the announcement from Adobe regarding Photoshop Express. This is a free online utility for working with your photos (cropping, resizing, red eye reduction, and other enhancements) using the established quality behind Photoshop. You don’t get some of the more advanced features like layers or text, but it’s still pretty nice for a free utility. I’ll need to play around with it a bit more.
While I’m at it, I also highly recommend Google’s Picasa, another great free piece of software for photo editing. I’ve been using it for a while and it has most of the same features as Photoshop Express, including intuitive online photo albums with good privacy controls.
Posted by Scott on March 25, 2008, 3:06 pm
We’re back from a mini vacation/spring break in Atlanta! We spent the past few days there visiting friends, ogling tornado damage, and hitting some of the big tourist spots including the World of Coca-Cola, the Georgia Aquarium, and the High Museum. Sadly, Coke was an overpriced letdown and the Aquarium was an overpriced madhouse. The High was decent enough, but after we’ve spent so much time in the Smithsonian, it just didn’t compare. We had fun overall, though – now it’s back to the post-vacation grind!
Posted by Scott on March 5, 2008, 4:20 pm
Take a moment and count up the remote controls that you actively use when you sit down in front of the TV. How about when you switch to a DVD on that great home theater setup? Three, maybe four remotes? I know I’m late to the party with this, but those days are gone. The A’Hearns where generous enough to get me a Harmony Remote for my birthday, and it is nice. Control everything at once from just one swanky remote, and seamlessly switch among different components. Worth every penny, even with the lower-priced models.
Posted by Scott on March 4, 2008, 5:02 pm
Pardon my “geek post” here, but after suffering through ridiculous amounts of confusion and mess, I have finally replaced the code that generates the weather information along the right pane of the website. Years ago I was simply scraping data from Weather Underground, but that was becoming unreliable. Then I switched to Yahoo! Weather, but found that their interpretation of “well-formed XML” is somewhat different from mine. Nerd attitude, I know.
I’ve now settled with a free affiliate subscription service with The Weather Channel’s XML Data Feed. It provides an enormous amount of detail and is not overly strict, giving me the ability to pick and choose which data I’d like to use. I have yet to work out all the bugs, but for now I’m happy. Please let me know if you see anything unusual.
