The Gray Haired One & The Fossil

The Gray Haired One & The Fossil
Originally uploaded by docksidepress.

I thought I'd take a moment to dust off the old blog here and point out that all of our two (or three) readers are excellent photogs!

The spotlight today is on Docksidepress who gave us a completely unsolicited and very much unexpected nod today in the caption of this here photo (click the photo to read it). Thanks, Dockside!!

In related news, reports of our deaths (if any) have been greatly exaggerated and positively contrived! We are both alive, well, and even busier than we were back in the days when we used to post regularly with complaints about how busy we were.

Jim is now very famous and I have rediscovered cooking with a geek twist -- I've tested at least 8 recipe apps now and have settled on MacGourmet Deluxe and an excellent Epicurious recipe for basic chicken soup. More on that later.

For now I'll just say HAPPY NEW YEAR to you and yours! Hey, it can't be any worse than 2008... can it? :)

~Kate

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Good Advice

good advice
Originally uploaded by tashland

What, and ruin all the fun? :-)

Seriously, I saw this and thought it just might need to be shared.

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Old chrome

New chrome

Less charm, but a whole lot more functionality...

Okay, so it's early days, but I like it.

I'm fortunate (in this case at least) to be running on a platform for which Chrome is available, and I'm geeky enough to want to find out what this thing can do, as fast as I can.

It's fast!

I have no numbers, but it feels damn fast.

It's capable

The short report is that I didn't have any trouble doing all the things that I usually do with Firefox. I didn't try to do some of the things that I need to use IE for... but then those things are all unpleasant in any case. :-)

It's funky

Some of the new drag and drop options for tabs are so obvious that I can't believe we weren't screaming for them already.

The new default home page is funky, but whether it's useful remains to be seen.

It's invisible

This is the most important thing to me. I just want the thing to work. I don't want to be surprised. I just want to get on.

At the same time though, Google make a big deal of just how invisible Chrome can be, when used as a wrapper for web apps. Again, time will tell.

It's stable

So far at least...

It's annoying

You know I said I don't like surprises? Well I got two of them.

By default, the thing has no Home Button. Puhleeze! You can easily turn it on, though.

New tabs are created next to the existing tab. A quick count through the office indicated that about half the people are completely happy about that. The other half range from oh well to deal breaker.

It's not finished...

I know. Nothing Google does is finished. But in this case they make a special point of mentioning it.

I want a way to use Greasemonkey, or a big enough shift in the way the universe operates that I don't need to any more.

I want it to work on a Mac. I don't want to use it, but if this thing takes off, then I want all my friends to be able to use it. Alright then, Linux too.

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All-New Web Browsing - Now With CHROME!

So there I was, at work, on break, watching the clock go so slow that to this moment I still swear I saw the minute hand go backwards one minute just to tease me, when I found an article on the NY Times about Chrome. No, not the chrome that accents your car design, or covers your bagel toaster. No, I'm talking about the Google kind of Chrome. Specifically, the new browser.

New browser? Yep.

(It should be noted that at this point the minute hand on the clock started motoring clockwise so fast that I was having Speed Racer flashbacks for a moment there.)

Oh, but it's not available for Mac yet.

Grr.

You know, this happens all the time, and as a life-long Mac user I've learned to deal with it quite well. (Hush, you!) I mean, resources and money are finite. I get that. But this is GOOGLE for crying out loud! Their stock closed at $465 per share today for Pete's sake! You'd think they could put two guys in a corner cubicle and let them have at it. They probably spend more corporate-wide on toilet paper in one month than they would spend on these two über-programmers.

*sigh*

Fine. So, I get home a while ago and I decide to check out the official site. The product and features are actually announced in a cartoon format that almost feels dorky, but not quite. And it's actually very good at explaining what and why Chrome is. There's a little link over to one side that gives Mac users the ability to sign up for an email announcement that will come out when the Mac version is done.

Cool.

So I type my information into the email field and click SUBMIT. The Firefox progress wheel spins for a moment and Voila! I get this:

That's just COLD, man! Just cold.

If only I could find a Windows user to review Chrome for the blog... :)

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Age is a state of mind

There are a zillion ways to do this, I know, but I really like the result this way. Bear with me...

Have you ever wanted to age a photo? No, not of your ex. Just a normal photo. Just for fun.

Like this?





You can do this sort of thing with various tools you probably already have, but they never seem to quite look right to me. Short of many hours with Photoshop the best option might be to start with one of these:



Then visit here.

Whilst there is some advantage to being able to read Japanese, you can get by. Hell, I did...

You can either upload a file - the default option on the opening page, or you can send them a link to a picture on the web - it says URL.

Then hit the blue button beneath, and await your masterpiece.

One wrinkle I found. The result page shows your original picture and the aged version, but if you want a higher resolution result, click on the aged image to go to a new page with full-blown scratchy monochrome goodness.

Enjoy. Note that I stumbled over this link at Lifehacker.

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