When Morons Start A Bittorrent Site, You Get Devilwolfs

The first clue that these people are idiots with giant sticks up their asses — wolf plural is wolves, not wolfs.

The only thing these people are interested in, is scamming money from people who sign up. I wonder why the nitwits over at devilwolfs think anyone would give money to a website that looks like it was designed by Ted Kaczynski or a blind person. Their claim that it cost them $500 in utilities a month to keep the site going is ridiculous. Really devilwolfs? $500 a month just in utilities? What are you using power your site, dilithium crystals? Diamonds?

There are plenty of free and well designed bittorrent sites out there, so much so, that devilwolfs should be nearing extinction.

Last Shot Of The Day

This shot would have been useless if it had not been for Adobe Lightroom and that I switched to shooting in RAW format that day. As I was heading towards the subway, I thought I’d grab a quick shot across Daley Plaza. I metered for the sky, which left everything else black. My second shot, meant to expose for the architecture was ruined by a bus. I was without a tripod, so getting another shot in perfect registration wasn’t going to happen. Plus I was running late and needed to get home so I could get ready to see the new Star Trek movie, so I figured the shot was lost.

I couldn’t toss such a cool sky and imported it into Adobe Lightroom any way. Once it was in my library, I made a second virtual copy and brought out the mid-tones and highlights. I left the original copy with the exposed sky alone. I exported both copies to Photoshop, and opened them separately. It was easiest (laziest) to magic wand the black buildings silhouettes, saving the selection for use with both files. Then it was just a matter of pasting the sky into the second image.

It’s definitely not perfect, an image THAT underexposed, really has no business being corrected to that level in Lightroom, there is some color fringing on the edges that may have been correctable, or not. At least now I know that in a pinch, when I’m caught without my tripod, I can still sandwich “multiple” images, with just one (hopefully better exposed) RAW image and Adobe Lightroom. 

The original image on the left, extremely underexposed for the sky, and the adjusted virtual copy on the right-a real testament to Adobe Lightroom.

StartLogic and WordPress 2.5

I installed the new WordPress 2.5 today, at least I thought I did. Everything works, but:

Day One – No change, whatsoever. Emptied my Firefox cache, where is this upgraded and super new version, that I just gave a good hour of my life backing up the old version for? Something is terribly, terribly wrong. It still appears I’m in WordPress 2.0.3 …nifty!

More Cool Software, March 2008

Ventrilo – Surround Sound Voice Communication Software. It’s surround sound VOIP in a chatroom GUI. Now I asked my friend, we’ll call her Mmmmm, for the moment, just because I haven’t thought of a good alias for her yet, when she sent me the link to download Ventrilo. I said “Why in gawds name would I want this? This surround sound internet phone, when I already have Gizmo?” Do I really need to talk to my friends in surround sound?

“It’s free,” Mmmmm said. Nuf said?

Well it involves running a free server client, which thankfully I wasn’t responsible for. It’s cross-platform, Windows, Mac and Linux platforms; the sound is absolutely amazing, compared to Gizmo and it’s annoying cycling, which results in loss of sound every so many seconds. The sound is so true and clean that it’s a little creepy, especially if you are hooked up to surround sound speakers in your bedroom, as I am. It also supports voice chat for groups. Even though Gizmo is $0.01 per minute, Ventrilo is $0.00 a minute. The chat room GUI is downright dismal, do what I do, look at something else! Maybe the person who runs our particular server can post on the set-up. www.ventrilo.com

Adium – If you are on a Mac and don’t have Adium, either you do not IM ever, do not have internet access, have no friends, or have been living under a rock for the last several years. This is the best chat client EVER! I actually neglected to re-install it for over a year, after I replaced my PowerBook’s hard drive; I finally installed a new updated version, and baby, it’s tits! There are lot’s of add-ons, and many options for customization, visual and otherwise. Adium let’s you log into all your chat screennames, even myspace chat. It’s free, Mac users have no excuse, unless you really have no friends. www.adiumx.com

iClip – iClip is the best clipboard utility I’ve come across. It’s interface is elegant, and customizable. Every time you copy ANYTHING, be it a web link, text or an image, iClip stores it in the recorder. What’s really nice is that iClip gives the user the option of creating separate menus to permanently store everything. One click, and what you’ve copied is pasted into whatever application, web browser, etc, you are working with. It also comes in a free widget. inventive.us/iClip

Amnesty Singles – If your are like me, with way too many widgets running in your dashboard, then Amnesty Singles is for you. I love this tiny little app! AS, let’s you turn any widget into a separate desktop application. www.amnestywidgets.com

CSSEdit – A few years ago, MacRabbit’s CSSEdit was a nice little app for tweaking your CSS, in a nice simple interface. Imagine my surprise, when I got a load of the new CSSEdit! It’s like a whole new application. You can extract all the CSS from any site, view a site in X-Ray mode, and make changes live, for ANY site. I am still learning about all the new options, but at this point I can already see what a great app this is for the beginning CSS coder and the experienced, alike. macrabbit.com

DeskLickr – this is a nice little free app I like to run, when I’m sick of all my desktop images. DeskLickr accesses photos from the DeskLickr Group on flicker, which I am a member of. It allows you to view all photos from the group, or only new submissions, or ban photos from your desktop which you never want to see again, or mark them as favorites. DeskLickr is Mac only as far as I know, but I’m sure there is a Windoze app out there that does something similar.

DeskShade – If your desktop is a perpetual mess, don’t bother cleaning it up and organizing, just use DeskShade. Not only does DeskShade hide everything on your desktop, giving you a nice clean workspace, but it will gladly change your desktop picture, complete with animations, with a click of your trackpad. You can always put away your desktop toys later, just don’t tell Mom!

GoogleMail – Or gmail. OK, if you are still using Hotmail or Yahoo, you need to get yourself over to GoogleMail and grab a gmail address, (hey! grab two, they’re free) and pick up Google Talk, as well. It’s 2008, not 1995, drop those old free-mail addresses, paleeze! Yahoo and Hotmail are SO-O decrepit and useless these days, at least in comparison to gmail. Do you really enjoy traveling through 3 or 4 pages just to get to your Inbox? REALLY? Wouldn’t you like to send and receive attachments of over 20MB? How about using your 2GB of mail storage for file storage, using a simple Firefox add-on? Here’s the best reason of all, they actually give you their incoming and outgoing mail servers to use in your mail client, for free. Yahoo charges for that little convenience. Gmail is fully customizable for POP and IMAP, in fact it’s so customizable I’ve gotten lost in there. You can use it in conjunction with your existing server space and it’s loads better than the email that I pay for on this server. Get off your ass, and tell your friends you have a new, better free email address, and tell ‘em to write you there.

Next time, BitPim, for us Samsung cell phone users, who can’t Sync their phones to their Mac. I’m still trying it out on my A900, which is not supported yet. There is a generic profile to play with, hopefully I won’t completely screw up my phone.

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Now playing: Belle & Sebastian – Expectations
via FoxyTunes—————-
Now playing: The Dears – Find Our Way To Freedom
via FoxyTunes

Sugar Cookies! Visitered Little 1.6, Works Quite Little

I love this new theme “Visitered Little” 1.6 by Nik Iliakis, but damn it all to hell, the wallpapers do not change no matter what I do. I replaced the original wallpapers with my own photos, renaming them after the original file names for the theme, and waited for those nifty thumbnails to be generated. Waited. Waited. No thumbnails. The old thumbnails still manage to link to the wallpapers which I deleted, instead of my own personal, and re-named photos. Bleh!
What kinda bogus baloney have I gotten myself into?

Well, I’m still enjoying the theme, for now, but what makes it so great, isn’t working, and that is disappointing.

Update: Day 3, still waiting for the MAGIC to happen, where are those thumbnails that are supposed to generate themselves? Should I pray? Dance round a fire? This theme may be too mystical for me…
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Now playing: Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I
via FoxyTunes

This probably took 10 minutes to create in FotoMagico, which I mentioned in a previous post Cool New Software.

Some Cool Software I’ve Found

Xingtone – www.xingtone.com Make ringtones for your cellphone, hundreds of phones are supported. It costs $20, but you can download the demo version and get 10 free uploads. Mac & Windoze

FotoMagico – A slide show presentation creator. I like it better than iphoto. It gives you better control over the pan and zoom effects, incorporates iTunes, and is really quick and easy to use. Mac & Windoze

Nicecast – Let’s you broadcast what you’re listening to in iTunes using your own computer as a server. Once you are broadcasting, just copy the url and send it to your friends so they can listen too. The demo version degrades in sound quality after 20 minutes. I think it costs $15 which is pretty reasonable in my estimation. I think this is Mac only.

Gizmo Project – www.gizmoproject.com A free VOIP program that allows you to call other VOIP users (including Skype) for free. (You can use your computer as a phone to call others on their computer, as long as they have Gizmo Project or Skype, or some other VOIP software.) You can call landlines and cell phones as well, but it costs $0.01 per minute, pretty cheap. Your computer also gets it’s own phone number which others can call from landlines and cellphones…which doesn’t cost you a thing! You have no excuse, it’s free and available for Mac, Windoze and Linux!