Written by reencoded

If you have to stare at something for 8 or more hours a day, why not make it something interesting? Sure there are tons of places to find wallpaper on the web … but a lot of them are hard to navigate and highly disorganized. pided into five helpful categories, with introductory descriptions and sample screenshots, here are over twenty of the best collections, communities and other resources on the web for finding excellent desktop wallpaper.
<
User-Submitted Wallpaper Communities:

InterFaceLift has a really useful system for cross-tagging wallpapers by size, category and type. You can browse their selection by most viewed, highest rated, date posted as well as by monitor size and aspect ratio as well as double and even triple-monitor. All in all this is one of the best and most user-friendly wallpaper databases out there.

SocWall is another community dedicated specifically to “social wallpapering” – users sharing wallpaper by category and voting on one another’s submissions. Because it is a free-for-all submission-wise there is a wide (and somewhat weird) variety of content. However, it is highly searchable and organized relatively well by fairly detailed categories.

Flickr has almost 25,000 wallpaper uploads by Flickr users. Of course any collection like this is bound to be hard to sort through and filled with good and bad but it’s still worth bookmarking. You can also search Flick using this handy wallpaper search engine.

Wikipedia is a place we all know to look for various kinds of information … but wallpaper? Indeed, there is an ever-changing collection of featured desktop wallpapers contributed to the Wikipedia Commons.

DeviantArt isn’t dedicated to wallpaper per say but many of the works of art featured on the site would make (and have made) amazing wallpaper depending upon the restrictions set upon a particular piece within the community.

WebShots is yet another user-submitted image site stocked mainly with photographs but also the occasional Photoshopped or otherwise digitally created image.

Photographic and Conventionally Pleasing Wallpapers:

SocksOff‘s collection of wallpapers is primarily photographic or at least pseudo-photorealistic, full of rich colors that are in many cases absolutely stunning. Looking at these one could imagine finding a wallpaper for virtually any kind or color of computer that would blend perfectly with other elements on your screen as well.

Mike Swanson has collected a lot of his close-up-photograph wallpapers into one convenient location on his blog. The typical subject matter is floral or otherwise natural with a smattering of found objects thrown into the mix, usual shot from a few feet away.

Gran-Angular has some nice but somewhat generic photographic wallpapers. These are certainly nicer than standard stock images and higher resolution though overall they aren’t too far off the beaten path. Worth taking a look at for less-adventurous wallpaper-seekers out for something simple and nice.

Wallpaper Stock has some fairly atypical categories including “sexy” and “Christian” though is overall fairly tame and largely limited to photographic wallpaper of a relatively normal variety. Still, it is an interestingly eclectic mix with unusual organization.

Fantastic and Creatively Abstract Wallpapers:

Fantasy Art Design has a collection of wallpaper that would make Salvador Dali proud. The subjects range considerably but are typically surrealistic landscapes that place with light, color and physics with crisp and compelling details all around.

Vlad Studios deals mainly in simple but abstract wallpapers with a clear and focused theme or set of cartoonish and playful elements. These range from hearts and rainbows to somewhat more serious subjects but are largely light-hearted in nature.

Veer puts a decidedly retro twist on the art of desktop wallpaper. A lot of them are abstract and/or text-based and more hip and crisp than other wallpapers. The designs are conveniently available in various sizes, including ones suitable to the iPhone.

Pixel Girl Presents has wallpaper of virtually all kinds, submitted by users then approved by administrators, but the overall tone of the content is whimsical, fantastic and alternative rather than photorealistic, hence its inclusion in this category.

Mixed Wallpaper Collections and Designs:

Riccardo Iaconelli‘s blog features last year’s fifteen winners of the Oxygen wallpaper design contest. Because the designers are all different the results are, of course, quite varied. Some are abstract while others are nature-themed and all are quite nice.

E-Wallpapers hasn’t been updated for some time but was once an active blog dedicated to interesting wallpaper. Still, even their older archives contain some wallpapers you may discover is still a beautiful and artistic today as when they were created.

Crestock has not one but two collections of nifty wallpapers, the first with 13 and the second with 17. These are a mixed back of photography and abstractia.

Specialty and Specific Niche Wallpapers:

Dual Screen Wallpapers features, as the name suggests, wallpaper specifically designed to be suited to wider and split screens. In some cases this means there is a natural break in the pattern somewhere toward the middle. These wallpapers are pided up into various categories including space, vehicles and abstract – something for everyone.

Zuneo has a great series of FireFox wallpapers. The theme is pretty limiting but if you love FireFox they are well worth checking out and range from simple to quite elegant and intricate. Want even more? DesktopNexus has another set.

Other Awesome Wallpaper Collections:

Smashing Magazine also composed a collection of wallpaper resources a while back and pided into five categories: typography, art, technology, photography and abstract themes. “Among other things we review calendar wallpapers, minimalistic wallpapers, wallpapers-illustrations and themes for Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and Google-fans.” But wait there’s more: here is another list from SmashingMagazine. Also, here’s an alphabetized list from Wallpaper Review to even more sites.

Written by Jenn Frank

An Only Slightly Less Stupid Way to Spend St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick’s Day has a lot going for it (funny hats, shamrocks, elves), but mostly it’s a holiday set aside so that people, Irish or not, can get hammered. And although we’d never disparage getting stupid on green-tinted beer and passing out in an alley, staying indoors with friends, liquor, and a Sixaxis seems a hell of a lot more responsible for once. Sure, there are those games that require a meticulous and steady hand, tremendous attention to detail, and the discipline of a surgeon. And then there are those games that — you swear! You swear up and down, on all that is holy — you are just a little better at when blitzed. No, we aren’t telling you to drink irresponsibly, least of all before undertaking a major task like driving or phoning someone you met the other night. But maybe science is telling you that downing a fifth could improve your final score.

5. Breakout – Atari 2600

For some, the average Atari 2600 game loses its luster within the first 15 seconds. And while 2600 graphics are, to the sober mind, dated and blocky, to the sloshing brain the graphics are alive, immediate, and contemporary. I know for a fact that you can play Breakout boozily, because I’ve witnessed it. Once, I walked out of my living room just as a friend hit the reset switch on my 2600. When I walked back in, there he was, sitting on the floor with his eyes kind of misty, the paddle control in front of him. He’d beaten Breakout. “I’m a genius!” he told me. Breakout is a very twitchy game that requires fine, precise movements and astute snap decision-making. In that regard it’s practically a sobriety test. Of course alcohol hadn’t improved my friend’s hand-eye coordination (but don’t tell him that). However, he was in the Zone, in that Zen mindset where patterns and trajectories begin to make a strange cosmic sense. Also, a PBR had temporarily turned my friend into a struttin’ cock of the walk, which surely helped his game. If you don’t have Breakout at hand (and if you aren’t yet in your 30s, I can’t fault you), challenge your friends to Arkanoid. If you’re feeling really competitive, do Pong.

4. Rez HD – 360

Perhaps games like Breakout benefit from alcohol consumption because they do rely on visual abstraction. Modern shoot-em-ups like Rez also seem to benefit from beer buzz: The half-awake, primal brain focuses on nothing in particular, and yet, as if automagically, you manage to rack up a phenomenal score. “Have you ever experienced shooter Zen?” Scott Sharkey once asked. “It’s that trancelike state you slip into, where your mind merges with the game and no matter what it throws at you, you’re going to survive because you’re freaking Superman.” Mike Bracken of GameCritics elaborates: “To become a true shmup master, one must enter a Zen-like state wherein the gamer becomes one with the controller and his onscreen avatar.” Now they call trance music “trance” for a reason, and Rez is one of the few games that inexplicably combines lightning-fast action with vegetativeness (which is a real word; I checked). We’re not telling you to booze yourself into Buddha — but if you’re of age, gellin’ like Magellan can make Rez even more engaging and rhythmic. Just ask Mizuguchi. If you hate electronica music, we recommend Geometry Wars.

3. Guitar Hero – PS2, 360, Wii, Mac

With “beatmatching” rhythm games and alcohol, there’s a dramatic bell curve. You’re invincible after a beer, but after one too many, you’re so kicked out of the band. The reason you can play games after a whiskey is actually the same reason you don’t drive after a whiskey: Slightly impaired judgment means you’re more confident, more daring. Your score in Guitar Hero may markedly improve after a drink if only because, for instance, you wouldn’t ordinarily attempt that really difficult solo. There’s a fine line between taking risks and getting stupid, though, and it generally coincides with getting your toy guitar taken away. Waning, boozy attention spans might tire of Guitar Hero’s music catalog; in that case, we recommend Audiosurf as a viable alternative.

2. WarioWare: Smooth Moves – Wii

With alcohol, it’s easy to coerce your friends into doing things they would never ordinarily do. Turn that negative into a positive! Nothing feels quite so right as finding four of the burliest, manliest dudes you can, moving the Hummel figurines out of arm’s reach, and bringing out the Wii Remotes. In an event like this, many partygoers prefer WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Your friends will look silly playing any movement game, irrespective of whether it stars Wario, but WarioWare includes a lot more hopping, ducking, and flapping than tennis does. And if booze is good for anything it’s making you unafraid to look like an ass. Don’t forget the camcorder! In a pinch, you could make your friends play Wii Sports, but if coordination becomes a problem, why not bring out SingStar or Karaoke Revolution instead?

1. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – DS

So, you’re drinking alone. No, no, don’t explain. I am loath to admit I completed Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney with, literally, one eye open. And while you might not think booze and detective work go together (although, come to think of it, there is a certain Sam Spade appeal there), the truth is, point-and-click adventure puzzles seem to go down a little easier with a glass of wine. Especially when they’re mysterious. But why is that? Alcohol doesn’t necessarily improve your acuity or powers of deduction — not by any stretch! — but it does make you more brash, more determined. With point-and-click adventures, in which the only real adversary is your own sense of frustration, brash tenacity is a virtue worth rewarding. If courtroom battles aren’t your thing, settle into your easy chair with a pipe and a decanter and check out Professor Layton and the Curious Village to see how the juice affects your holmesian intellect. Next week: Top Ten Games You’re Better at While on Coke. Or not.

Written by bad astronomy

So you’ve lived here all your life – in fact, everyone has – but what do you really know about the Milky Way galaxy? Sure, you know it’s a spiral, and it’s 100,000 light years across. And of course, BABloggees are smarter, more well-read, and better looking than the average population, but be honest: do you know all ten of these things? Really?

Liar.

So let’s see if these really are Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Milky Way Galaxy.

1) It’s a barred spiral.

You might know that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, perhaps the most beautiful galaxy type. You’ve seen ’em: majestic arms sweeping out from a central hub or bulge of glowing stars. That’s us. But a lot of spirals have a weird feature: a rectangular block of stars at the center instead of a sphere, and the arms radiate away from the ends of the block. Astronomers call this block a bar, and, you guessed it: we have one.

Is fact, ours is pretty big. At 27,000 light years end-to-end, it’s beefier than most bars. Of course, space is a rough neighborhood. Who wouldn’t want a huge bar located right downtown?

By the way, the image above is not a photograph, it’s a drawing- there’s no way to get outside the galaxy and take a picture like this looking back. It would be a loooong walk home! Click the picture to embiggen and get more details (which is true for all the pictures in this post).

2) There’s a supermassive black hole at its heart.

At the very center of the Galaxy, right at its very core, lies a monster: a supermassive black hole.

We know it’s there due to the effect of its gravity. Stars very near the center – some only a few dozen billion kilometers out – orbit the center at fantastic speeds. They scream around their orbits at thousands of kilometers per second, and their phenomenal speed betrays the mass of the object to which they’re enthralled. Applying some fairly basic math, it’s possible to determine that the mass needed to accelerate the stars to those speeds must tip the cosmic scales at four million times the mass of the Sun! Yet in the images, nothing can be seen. So what can be as massive as 4,000,000 Suns and yet not emit any light?

Right. A black hole.

Even though it’s huge, bear in mind that the Galaxy itself is something like 200 billion solar masses strong, so in reality the black hole at the center is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. And we’re in no danger of plunging into it: after all, it’s 250,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers away.

It’s thought now that a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy forms along with the galaxy itself, and in facts winds blown outward as material falls in affects the formation of stars in the galaxy. So black holes may be dangerous, but it’s entirely possible the Sun’s eventual birth – and the Earth’s along with it – may have been lent a hand by the four million solar mass killer so far away.

3) It’s a cannibal.

Galaxies are big, and have lots of mass. If another, smaller galaxy passes too close by, the bigger galaxy can rip it to shreds and ingest its stars and gas.

The Milky Way is pretty, but it’s savage, too. It’s currently eating several other galaxies. They’ve been ripped into long, curving arcs of stars that orbit the center of the Milky Way. Eventually they’ll merge completely with us, and we’ll be a slightly larger galaxy. Ironically though, the galaxies add their mass to ours, making it more likely we’ll feed again. Eating only makes galaxies hungrier.

4) We live in a nice neighborhood…

The Milky Way is not alone in space. We’re part of a small group of nearby galaxies called – get ready to be shocked – the Local Group. We’re the heaviest guy on the block, and the Andromeda galaxy is maybe a bit less massive, though it’s actually spread out more. The Triangulum galaxy is also a spiral, but not terribly big, and there are other assorted galaxies dotted here and there in the Group. All together, there are something like three dozen galaxies in the Local Group, with most being dinky dwarf galaxies that are incredibly faint and difficult to detect.

5) … and we’re in the suburbs.

The Local Group is small and cozy, and everyone makes sure their lawns are mowed and houses painted nicely. That’s because if you take the long view, we live in the suburbs. The big city in this picture is the Virgo Cluster, a huge collection of about 2000 galaxies, many of which are as large or larger than the Milky Way. It’s the nearest big cluster; the center of it is about 60 million light years away. We appear to be gravitationally bound to it; in other words, we’re a part of it, just far-flung. The total mass of the cluster may be as high as a quadrillion times the mass of the Sun.

6) You can only see 0.000003% percent of it.

When you got out on a dark night, you can see thousands of stars. But the Milky Way has two hundred billion stars in it. You’re only seeing a tiny tiny fraction of the number of stars tooling around the galaxy. In fact, with only a handful of exceptions, the most distant stars you can readily see are 1000 light years away. Worse, most stars are so faint that they are invisible much closer than that; the Sun is too dim to see from farther than about 60 light years away… and the Sun is pretty bright compared to most stars. So the little bubble of stars we can see around us is just a drop in the ocean of the Milky Way.

7) 90% of it is invisible.

When you look at the motions of the stars in our galaxy, you can apply some math and physics and determine how much mass the galaxy has (more mass means more gravity, which means stars will move faster under its influence). You can also count up the number of stars in the galaxy and figure out how much mass they have. Problem is, the two numbers don’t match: stars (and other visible things like gas and dust) make up only 10% of the mass of the galaxy. Where’s the other 90%?

Whatever it is, it has mass, but doesn’t glow. So we call it Dark Matter, for lack of a better term (and it’s actually pretty accurate). We know it’s not black holes, dead stars, ejected planets, cold gas – those have all been searched for, and marked off the list – and the candidates that remain get pretty weird (like WIMPs). But we know it’s real, and we know it’s out there. We just don’t know what it is. Smart people are trying to figure that out, and given the findings in recent years, I bet we’re less than a decade from their success.

8) Spiral arms are an illusion.

Well, they’re not an illusion per se, but the number of stars in the spiral arms of our galaxy isn’t really very different than the number between the arms! The arms are like cosmic traffic jams, regions where the local density is enhanced. Like a traffic jam on a highway, cars enter and leave the jam, but the jam itself stays. The arms have stars entering and leaving, but the arms themselves persist (that’s why they don’t wind up like twine on a spindle).

Just like on highways, too, there are fender benders. Giant gas clouds can collide in the arms, which makes them collapse and form stars. The vast majority of these stars are faint, low mass, and very long-lived, so they eventually wander out of the arms. But some rare stars are very massive, hot, and bright, and they illuminate the surrounding gas. These stars don’t live very long, and they die (bang!) before they can move out of the arms. Since the gas clouds in the arms light up this way, it makes the spiral arms more obvious.

We see the arms because the light is better there, not because that’s where all the stars are.

9) It’s seriously warped.

The Milky Way is a flat disk roughly 100,000 light years across and a few thousand light years thick (depending on how you measure it). It has the same proportion as a stack of four DVDs, if that helps.

Have you ever left a DVD out in the Sun? It can warp as it heats up, getting twisted (old vinyl LPs used to be very prone to this). The Milky Way has a similar warp!

The disk is bent, warped, probably due to the gravitational influence of a pair of orbiting satellite galaxies. One side of the disk is bent up, if you will, and the other down. In a sense, it’s like a ripple in the plane of the Milky Way. It’s not hard to spot in other galaxies; grab an image of the Andromeda galaxy and take a look. At first it’s hard to see, but if you cover the inner part you’ll suddenly notice the disk is flared up on the left and down on the right. Andromeda has satellite galaxies too, and they warp its disk just like our satellite galaxies warp ours.

As far as I can tell, the warp doesn’t really affect us at all. It’s just a cool thing you may not know about the Milky Way. Hey, that would make a good blog entry!

10) We’re going to get to know the Andromeda galaxy a lot better.

Speaking of Andromeda, have you ever seen it in the sky? It’s visible to the naked eye on a clear, dark, moonless night (check your local listings). It’s faint, but big; it’s four or more degrees across, eight times the apparent size of the Moon on the sky.

If that doesn’t seem too big, then give it, oh, say, two billion years. Then you’ll have a much better view.

The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching each other, two cosmic steam engines chugging down the tracks at each other at 200 kilometers per second. Remember when I said big galaxies eat small ones? Well, when two big galaxies smack into each other, you get real fireworks. Stars don’t physically collide; they’re way too small on this scale. But gas clouds can, and like I said before, when they do they form stars. So you get a burst of star formation, lighting up the two galaxies.

In the meantime, the mutual gravity of the two galaxies draw out long tendrils from the other, making weird, delicate arcs and filaments of stars and gas. It’s beautiful, really, but it indicates violence on an epic scale.

Eventually (it takes a few billion years), the two galaxies will merge, and will become, what, Milkomeda? Andromeway? Well, whatever, they form a giant elliptical galaxy when they finally settle down. In fact, the Sun will still be around when this happens; it won’t have yet become a red giant. Will our descendants witness the biggest collision in the history of the galaxy?

That’s cool to think about. Incidentally, I talk about this event a whole lot more, and in a lot more detail, in my upcoming book Death from the Skies! In case you forgot about that.

Until then, these Ten Things should keep you occupied. And of course, I only wanted to list ten things so I could give this post the cool title. But if there’s something you find surprising about the Milky Way, leave a comment! I don’t want to hog all the fun.

Written by Alternative Reel

#10 – TRAMPLED UPON

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.”

#09 – THOUGHT POLICE

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any inpidual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

#08 – THREE SLOGANS

“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

#07 – HOLLOW

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

#06 – PURE POWER

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

#05 – ERRONEOUS THOUGHT

“We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation . . . we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.”

#04 – PERFECT UNITY

“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.”

#03 – ECSTASY OF FEAR

“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

#02 – A PICTURE OF THE FUTURE

“We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always-do not forget this Winston-always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.”

#01 – VICTORY **Spoiler Alert!**

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Written by lifehacker

When Leopard was released, one of the most enticing new features was Back to My Mac, a tool that made it possible to access your home computer remotely-including remote control of your desktop and access to your files-no matter where you are. The catch: It requires a $100 yearly subscription to the lackluster .Mac service. Right now I’m working from my laptop in Austin, and I’ve got the same full access to my home PC in Los Angeles as Back to My Mac offers, but I didn’t spend a dime on .Mac to get it. That’s because all of the tools you need to roll your own Back to My Mac are already built into Leopard for free out of the box-you just need to know how to access them.

NOTE: This week I’m focusing on gaining full access remotely using a Mac, but the same tools, which I’ll highlight in another post, exist for Windows users.

The Results

Before I step you through all of the work involved, it seems prudent to give you a slightly better idea of the end result. Once you’ve completed the setup I’m detailing below, you’ll be able to remotely control your home computer like you’re sitting directly in front of it (if you’re familiar with VNC, that’s all it is), access any of the files on your computer’s hard drive just like you would if you were on the same network (or sitting at that computer), and pretty much anything else (provided it’s not too graphic-intensive). The main draw is this: When you’re done, you should be able to do virtually anything remotely that you could do sitting in front of that computer.

Set Up Faux Back to My Mac Features on Your Home Mac

To get started setting up your faux Back to My Mac, you need to fire up Leopard’s saucy new Sharing preference pane from the System Preferences. From here, we’ll enable remote screen sharing and set up an FTP server that will allow us to remotely access files on the computer.

Enable Screen Sharing: To enable Screen Sharing, which is probably the marquee feature of Back to My Mac for most users, just click the checkbox next to Screen Sharing in the Sharing prefpane. You could stop there, but I prefer to set up access for “Only these users,” and set it to my user account. This means that when you’re accessing your screen remotely, you’ll log in with the same username and password that you use to log in to your computer.

Set Up FTP Access: First, tick the checkbox next to File Sharing. By default this just enables simple file sharing on your home network, so you’ve got a few more steps to enable the FTP that we’ll be using in our faux Back to My Mac setup. Next, hit the Options button, tick the checkbox next to Share Files and Folders using FTP, and then hit Done. (As you can see, there’s a small warning under the FTP option alerting you that your FTP logins and file transfers are not secure. You still need a password to access the files, but the transfer of the files themselves is not encrypted.)

When you return to the Sharing pane, you’ll notice that you’re able to choose which folders are shared. You can set it to share the root of your hard drive if you want to share everything on your computer, or you can just go through and choose a few important folders you want to make sure you’ve got access to. Again, you can choose which users are able to access your files, as well as what kind of access each user-type has (read and write, read only, and write only). Choose whichever makes more sense for what you want.

With that, you’ve completed most of the setup on the computer you want to access. But before this faux Back to My Mac is ready for primetime, there are a few more steps you’ll probably want to take.

Enable Access from Outside Your Network

If you connect your computer to the internet through a router (which most likely you do), you need to do a couple of things to enable easy access to your setup from outside your home network. The VNC (screen sharing) and FTP (file sharing) portions of our setup both work by accessing certain ports on your home computer. This means you need to set up port forwarding on your router so that whenever you need to access your computer from outside your home network, your router knows which computer to send the requests to. If this sounds intimidating, don’t worry-it’s really not that difficult.

We’ve covered port forwarding several times before, so I won’t go into detail on how to tackle port forwarding. Instead, I’ll just focus on what ports you need to forward. For Screen Sharing, the default port if 5900, and for FTP, the port is 21.

NOTE: If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend setting up a static local IP address for the computer you want access to. Routers assign IP addresses to the computers on your local network, and when these addresses expire, there’s a chance your computer may be assigned a different IP address-which would break your port forwarding.

Finally, to really ease the access to your faux Back to My Mac setup, you should do yourself another huge favor and assign a domain name to your external IP address. Doing so will allow you to access your setup through an easy-to-remember domain of your choosing like backtomymac.selfip.com rather than remembering a series numbers like 76.123.456.789.

Using Your Faux Back to My Mac

So now that you’ve done all the legwork, how do you make use of it all? If you’ve followed all of the setup, screen sharing and file access is simple.

Access Screen Sharing: Let’s assume, in true Back to My Mac fashion, you’re working on your Mac laptop away from the desktop Mac you want to access. To connect to your Mac, you need to find the Screen Sharing app on your laptop (this is the very same Screen Sharing app that Back to my Mac uses when it does remote screen sharing). It’s not installed in the Applications directory, so you should head to /System/Library/CoreServices (where it’s located by default) and copy Screen Sharing.app into your Applications folder for easier access.

When it’s time to access your home PC, run the app, then enter the address of your home computer (either the external IP address or the domain you set up above). After a second, Screen Sharing should display an exact replication of your home desktop, and you can use programs or check an email on your home computer just like you would if you were sitting in front of it.

NOTE: If you want to add a bit more functionality to the Screen Sharing app, like an advanced toolbar that isn’t available by default, here’s how.

UPDATE: As on reader pointed out below, you can also launch the Screen Sharing app directly from Finder by opening Finder’s “Connect to Server” dialog (Go -> Connect to Server, or Cmd-K) and entering vnc://backtomymac.selfip.com [or whatever your domain is]).

Access Your Files: To access any of the files on your home computer, you’ve got a couple of options. If you’re really interested in using Finder so that you’re really rolling with true Back to My Mac style, you can; just open Finder, click on Go -> Connect to Server, enter in the address of the FTP server you set up above (for example, ftp://backtomymac.selfip.com:21), and then enter your login information. It even handles Quick Preview on those remote files.

In reality, Finder isn’t the best way to connect to and browse your filesystem over FTP. You’re better off using an FTP client like the very popular freeware Cyberduck. Just give it the address you set up, your username and password, and you’re there.

It’s all the accessibility of Back to My Mac with none of the cost. Plus, after you’ve put in the legwork setting it up, it’s super-simple to connect to remotely connect to your home computer.

UPDATE: Several readers have offered excellent alternatives and suggestions to significantly beef up this setup. Here’s the rundown:

• If you’d prefer to use AFP Iwhich is enabled by default) instead of FTP, you can do so. You just need to forward port 548, and then when you connect to your server, you’ll want to change your address to something like afp://backtomymac.selfip.com. Thanks waffffffle!
• If you plan on accessing your computer on a public network, you should seriously consider setting tunneling your traffic through SSH. Reader asmus.vierck gives a little insight on how.
• The much easier solution for securing your connections and setting up your faux Back to My Mac, as It_Figures points out, is to create a virtual private network with Hamachi. I (and at least one of my co-editors) have had trouble with Hamachi on Leopard, so I didn’t take this route, but if Hamachi is working for you, it’s an excellent option.

---

Keep in mind that this set up doesn’t do absolutely everything that Back to My Mac does (namely, this simple setup doesn’t have the advanced encryption options and clearly isn’t a zero configuration setup), but the idea here is that after taking a few simple steps, you can enable most of the best features of Back to My Mac. To one-up Back to My Mac, you may even want to set up Wake-on-LAN with your Mac so that your computer only turns on when you need to use it, saving money and energy.

If you roll your own version of Back to My Mac, let’s hear how you did it in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who refuses to pay for anything he can’t get for free. His special feature Hack Attack appears every

Written by six revisions

As a web developer, if you’re to be successful, you have to have a constant yearning for learning new things. In an industry that evolves rapidly, you’ve got to keep up or you risk being obsolete and outdated. Keeping up with trends, weeding out the fads, and adopting new techniques to your web-building arsenal is an essential part of being a web developer.

I spend (literally) most of the day in front of the computer and even in my spare time, I choose to read, learn, and keep up with web technology news. This leads to a massive collection of bookmarked links, but through the years, there are only a handful of websites that I frequent.

I’d like to share 20 websites that have broadened my knowledge, expanded my skill set, and improved the quality and efficiency of my web development projects. Most of these (hopefully) you’ve already encountered, but if you come out with just one or two links you’ve never heard of or you end up bookmarking a link or two, I would’ve accomplished my goal.

1) Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability

Alertbox is Jakob Nielsen’s bi-weekly column that discusses web usability. I’ve been a fan of his for almost as long as I’ve been professionally developing websites. Most of his recommendations makes sense and is backed by real-world studies and carefully-constructed surveys.

His columns cover topics such as the merits of breadcrumb navigation to Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes. A great link to provide people when you’re asked about optimal web page design is the column on Screen Resolution and Page Layout.

2) TheBestDesigns.com

On days when your creative juices don’t seem to be flowing as it should, it often helps to look at other people’s work to help inspire you. TheBestDesigns.com is a gallery site to visit on such days. TBD has a few things that distinguish them from other web design galleries – among them are: choosing quality over quantity, showcasing flash-based as well as CSS-based layouts, and tagging each design with relevant keywords so that users can conveniently find similar designs.

They showcase truly innovative and skillfully-crafted designs and they abstain from showcasing the “yet another recycled web 2.0 look” websites. It might not be updated with hundreds of websites everyday, but having a strict guideline on what gets displayed on TBD ensures that you don’t have to filter out the noise to get to the signal.

3) A List Apart

A List Apart inspired me to become a proponent of web-standards and semantic code. Starting out, most of us probably didn’t care about capitalized, unclosed html tags (… that won’t validate with a strict doctype) or understood the real value of accessibility in web pages.

One of the major influences in my views on web-standards, best practices, accessibility, and usability can be attributed to a significant part… to A List Apart. ALA articles are high-quality and they only come out with two articles a month, but they are worth the wait. Articles are written by some of the leading experts in the industry, and their staff include well-renowned pro’s such as Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman.

4) Getting Real by 37 Signals

“Getting Real” is a book that’s available online, written by 37 Signals. It’s about creating web-based applications in a productive and successful way. The book covers topics ranging from philosophies that help push out quality products to views on hiring the right people to do the job.

Favorite topics covered in the book are: asking users what they don’t want and dealing with problems only when there is one.

5) Digg / Technology

Digg is a site where people submit links and vote which content is worthy to be read by its users and which articles don’t deserve the light of day. A large part of my ability to keep up with emerging technologies, techniques, and new standards is because of frequenting Digg’s Technology section. The community is picky of what is good news and bad news, so it allows you to skip the junk and get to the good stuff right away.

Other social-bookmarking sites that will help you stay sharp and current, and that should be mentioned here are: StumbleUpon , del.iciou.us, reddit, and popurls.

6) Web Design from Scratch

Web Design from Scratch is a website run by Ben Hunt, that’s about (straight from the front page) “A complete guide to designing web sites that work“. It caters primarily to web builders just starting out, but it’s always good to “go back to the basics” and get a refresher on things that you’ve taken for granted.

The section on Copy Writing taught me that web developers shouldn’t be limited to the coding part or the design part of the project; writing effective copy comes naturally with the experience we’ve had with developing websites that succeed and fail.

7) mootools

mootools is a lightweight framework that simplifies the way you write JavaScript and provides you with powerful AJAX classes, effects, and fuctions. It’s helped with the development of complex web pages in a rapid and elegant way.

There are other JavaScript frameworks similar to mootools, and you can’t go wrong with any of the popular ones, but a developer’s got to choose his or her favorite – and for me, mootools is the one I’ve come to love and use.

8) ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb is a long-standing (five years and counting) weblog about web technology news. It caters to web professionals that have a need for knowing what’s up right now. It was founded by Richard MacManus, who also co-founded the Web 2.0 Workgroup – a network of blogs that cover the Web 2.0 generation.

It’s a website that allows you to keep your knowledge up-to-date, and is a source I consistently cite when talking about current web technologies with colleagues and fellow developers.

9) Zend Developer Zone

This is a website written by some of the PHP core developers and they provide news, articles, tutorials and other stuff related to PHP. If you’re looking for a reliable source of information about PHP, there’s no other place to look than the Zend Developer Zone.

Worth taking a look at is the five-part article series about the xdebug extension (here’s the link to Part One: Introducing xdebug), which is, as author Cal Evans puts it, “a free and open source swiss army knife tool for PHP developers”.

10) css Zen Garden

css Zen Garden is an eye-opener for newer CSS developers. css Zen Garden explores the power of external style sheets by showcasing a variety of designs contributed by developers throughout the industry.

If you haven’t seen the website before, the concept is: using the same html mark-up, CSS developers submit external stylesheets and images to style the web page into beautifully-looking designs.

It’s a great place to inspire you to push your limits and knowledge regarding CSS.

11) CSSplay: Experiments with Cascading Style Sheets

Another wonderful website about CSS. It features demos of CSS-based solutions such as image galleries, drop shadows, image maps, etc.

The website is authored by a married couple, Stuart (Stu) and Fran Nicholls, who have been in the computer industry since the 1980’s. Most of the demos are (or were) cutting edge; the examples are practical and easy to follow and the website’s easy to navigate.

It’s a commendable resource to check out when you want to gather information about CSS-based solutions.

12) W3Schools Online Web Tutorials

This is an amazing center of knowledge for all things web development, covering topics such as JavaScript, HTML, PHP, SQL, and more. At the bottom of their logo, they quote, “The best things in life are free” – this is indeed true in their case.

The website is a great starting point towards learning about web development and design topics and an effective online reference for those who know about the subject but need a quick refresher.

13) Books24×7.com – ITPro Collection

The ITPro Collection at Books24×7.com features digitalized versions of the top IT books. It’s a fee-based website, but if you’re able to afford it (or can convince the boss to get you a subscription), it’s the best way to access quality literature through the convenience of your computer.

It will also allow you to select the books worthy of buying and adding to your collection.

14) Drupal

Drupal restored my faith in open-source applications. Prior to Drupal, I worked on Oscommerce, Zen Cart and Moodle. All projects had bloated PHP and CSS, poor HTML mark-up (default layouts used tables, little care for semantic mark-up, amongst a few things) and were designed with little usability/accessibility in mind.

Drupal’s code – in contrast – was clean, modular (but not excessively so), had a robust API so that you don’t have to tinker with the core files, and most importantly, the community’s willingness to help out, share information, contribute, and commitment to quality is my vision of the “Utopian” open-source community. Since then, projects like WordPress, Magento, and Joomla! re-assures us that effective quality solutions don’t come from shelling out the cash, but rather promoting and contributing as much as you can to these remarkable communities.

15) Webmonkey: The Web Developer’s Resource

Here’s a throw-back to the past! This is here as a reminder to the (slightly) older/more experienced developers that the site is still up and running. It was, during their time, a place to visit and learn about web development, covering topics such as web programming, E-business, and page design. It also has a “Quick Reference” section on the sidebar.

I remember being amazed at how their “folder navigation” on the sidebar worked – ever since then, the functionality can now be achieved quite easily using the DOM and/or a JavaScript framework like mootools.

16) Meyerweb.com: Eric’s Writing

This is a collection of Eric Meyer’s writings, an accomplished author on the topic of CSS. Not only is he a CSS expert, but also an advocate of semantic code. His work was, and is, truly revolutionary. I attribute my appreciation and understanding of “resetting CSS” to him.

Eric Meyer is one of the key influential people that I truly find to be talented and knowledgeable in the field of web building. His current and previous works are worth the time to read.

17) 456 Berea Street

456 Berea Street is the creation of Roger Johansson, a web professional from Sweden. His writing is a primary inspiration for starting up of Six Revisions. Topics include book reviews, written work about CSS and XHTML, and web development news and events.

Some pages worth bookmarking are Efficient CSS with shorthand properties (which can be used as a reference to writing “shorthand” CSS – reducing file size and page length) The CSS and XHTML Lab (which features some demonstrations as well as a list of works translated into other languages) and Accessibility myths and misconceptions (a helpful resource to link to when asked about the value of accessibility in web pages).

18) The Web Standards Project

The Web Standards Project “fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web”.

Whether it’s suggesting correct mark-up or rallying web browser developers to render styles/html a certain way, The Web Standards Project aims to help web developers reduce the amount of time committed to troubleshooting browser-display issues. The website features articles, tutorials, and the Acid3 Browser Test (visual rendering tests of your browser).

19) Fiftyfoureleven.com

A marvelous website for the modern web developer. The website “is intended to be a resource for web developers: people who design, code and program websites and applications for the web“. The website is part of the 9rules network and is written primarily by Mike Papageorge who chooses to blog about topics such as “Marketing on the Internet” and more specific subjects such as “Olympic Logos“.

Aside from the Web Development Resources sidebar, there’s also a list of the author’s most recent Web Development resources that’s worth a bookmark.

20) SitePoint

SitePoint is one of the older websites that has survived the constantly-changing tastes of web developers and designers. A co-founder of the website, Matt Mickiewicz, first had a website called Webmaster-Resources.com Community Forums launched in 1999.

SitePoint had a bit of a lull for a period of time in terms of popularity; the site’s prominence was replaced by newer, more “forward-thinking” web development sites.

The site has found its “second wind” with it’s young and modern web developer audience with an updated design/user interface, frequent updates, and a new and notable” CSS Reference” section.

So there they are, some websites that’s worth checking out and subscribing to if you’re interested in bettering your web development knowledge and skills. Do you have your own favorites? Did you find websites on this list that shouldn’t be here? Share it in the comments section!

Written by Christian

Image by vynsia

A great many people are criminally squandering their hard earned money on a daily basis – myself included. We all know that scrimping and saving is a pain and too dull for words but the fact is that making a few tiny changes to the way we shop, save and invest could mean the difference between ending our days in a mansion or an old peoples home.

Luckily, you don’t need a financial advisor to patronize you or guilt you into doing something about it; we’ll be running a series of articles on money-saving ideas, investment tips, mortgage advice and all the economic advice you need to get your money matters in order. Subscribe now and we’ll teach you the lingo, give you some tips on haggling for a cheaper price and, today, we’ll give you 10 quick and easy ways to make annual savings that will add up to quite a substantial chunk of change. Enjoy.

1. Make your lunchIt’s so easy I’m surprised more people don’t do it. If an average sandwich is $5 a pop and you buy one each day you’re at work, then over a year it’s going to cost you about $1,200 (assuming you have 28 days holiday which is more than most people will get). Get into the habit of rustling up your own food and you can easily pocket half of that cash, using the other half to bulk buy your groceries at the supermarket.
2. Downgrade your brand purchasesGoing for the cheapest beans in the store is a bit over the top (especially since they probably taste horrible). Drop a brand level on everything you can and the overall price drops by roughly 30%. Often you’re only paying for the branded packaging anyway.
3. Align your eyes to belly ratioAmericans actually waste about 40% of food produced for consumption. According to Wasted Food, that amounts to an annual cost of over $100 billion. Buy only what you need for the week and avoid stocking up with food which could spoil quickly. If you run out of food mid-week it’s no big deal to make a second trip to the supermarket.
4. Reduce your heating billBy turning the temperature down in your house by just one degree you can save almost 10% on your heating bill. Also, you’ll prevent about 240kg of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. Cheaper, and greener too.
5. Enjoy happy hourIf you like a beer with your buddies in the evening, consider going at less popular times of the day. Many bars offer happy hour deals when it’s quiet which can often see you save up to 50% of the cost. You can’t complain at getting more beer for less.
6. Be a late adopterI know it’s tough to wait until the buzz surrounding the new mobile phone or games console has died down – especially if you’re a techno-geek – but if you can hold back from buying until at least six months after the new technology is launched you could save up to 50%. Let other obsessed geeks drive the price down for you.
7. Give alternative giftsPeople always say “it’s the thought that counts” when you’re giving and receiving gifts. You can put this to the test by offering alternative gifts. You could offer your dad a weekend of gardening to save him mowing the lawn and cleaning out the fish pond or give your girlfriend a booklet of massage vouchers to redeem whenever she likes. They’ll love your thoughtfulness and you get to pocket the cash you would have otherwise spent.
8. Have a house-swap holidayInstead of shelling out on an all-inclusive deal to Jamaica this year, you could have a house swap holiday instead. Who knows, maybe you’ll bump into Cameron Diaz and she’ll take a shine to you. Give it a go at HomeLink.
9. Drive betterThe Energy Saving Trust reckon you can save almost $200 a year by ‘eco-driving’. Obviously this is applicable to manual cars and it involves changing gear before your engine hits 2,500 rpm, driving smoothly and eliminating the use of your air-con while driving at an efficient speed of around 45-50mph.
10. Shop smarterYou can save up to 60% on clothes prices by visiting designer outlet stores, as they sell nothing but excess stock, special buys and end of season merchandise from some of the biggest names in fashion. I got some Diesel jeans for $30. Bargain!

If you’ve got any other simple and easy ways to save money then please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments. We could all use as many tips and as much advice as possible. Also, if you’re a financial blogger, professional, or just someone who is financially savvy, contact us now to discuss writing some money related guest articles for Just A Guy Thing.

Written by PhotoshopTalent Blog

Eyes

Enhancing Iris Color

It is said that the eyes are windows into the soul. In that case some of us must have really boring souls, but help is at hand if you want to your eyes to really stand out in photographs and creative photo manipulations. This tutorial details a simple yet powerful technique for altering eye color using basic Photoshop tools and a decent image of an eye.

 

Eye Shadow / Eyeliner

Adding make-up to a person’s photograph is a great way to get an idea of how they would look with that make-up in real life. This is a great tool for make-up artists, as well as photoshop artists in general. In this tutorial, we’ll take a step-by-step look into the process of adding eye shadow and eyeliner to a person’s photograph using Photoshop. Then we’ll learn to adjust the coloring of the make-up to get different looks.

 

Make eyelashes thicker

 

Shadowy, Sultry Eyes

When it comes to grabbing our attention, nothing seems to have the power to captivate us more than a person’s eyes, and in this Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn a fashion retouching technique to see how easy it is to give someone’s eyes a shadowy, sultry look to them. We’re also going to be bringing out their colors, adding some highlights, and generally making them look sharper. Keep in mind that this is an “icing on the cake” type of effect, to be done only after an image has already been corrected for tone and color.

 

Apply Eye Make-up

This photoshop tutorial will show you how you can add eyeshadow, eyeliner and mascara to any model easily with Photoshop CS.

 

Add an Eyebrow Piercing to a Photo

In this tutorial, we are going to add some eyebrow jewelry to this lovely lady.

 

Using The Red Eye Tool Non-Destructively

This photoshop tutorial will show you how to use Photoshop CS2’s Red Eye tool Red Eye tool in a non-destructive way. The technique that I will explain is unique because as far as I know it hasn’t been discussed in any book/magazine or on any web site.

 

Replace Eye Color

Recolor eyes with ease using the Color Replacement Tool in Photoshop CS/CS2.

 

Hair

 

Changing Hair Color

This is the final output.As you can see, there are two different colors on the hair-Green and Red.

 

Phoenix hair effect

With some simple brushing techniques, and a bit of color tweaking, you can spice up your photos with this flaming hair tutorial.

 

Shining hair

Creating shining hair like shown in shampoo ads.

 

Removing Hair Roots

Here is a fairly straight-forward method for removing hair roots that takes mere seconds to accomplish.

 

Color hair locks

Are you getting bored by your hair colour or do you want a dramatic makeover in your photographs in just few minutes.

 

Teeth

 

Whiten and Brighten Teeth

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to see how to make teeth whiter and brighter in Photoshop using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, a brush and a layer mask.

 

You are a Good Dentist

You remember when your parents or girlfriend see your photo and said to you “your teeth are very yellowish”. Because in real life we are animated, and minor imperfections or yellowish teeth’s less noticeable. When you freeze a moment in time and give the eye a chance to concentrate on these minor imperfections then everybody knows the truth. Now its time to say, go to the doctor and check your eyes because my teeth’s are perfect.

 

Whitening Teeth the Professional Way

Everyone (Well, just about) gets their picture taken and they see the final picture and they are shocked by how yellow their teeth are. Of course, thanks to the genius’ who created Photoshop, we can easily make those teeth white. Now a lot of people make the mistake of wanting to make the teeth white and that’s what they do. They take a white color and start coloring those teeth. What you really want to do is actually remove the color from the teeth. Removing the color gets rid of that yellow color and makes them look white and clean.

 

Whitening Teeth and Eyes

Whenever the need arises to make a natural element white or whiter, it’s tempting to set the foreground color to white and reach for the airbrush. This works if applied with care, but it’s easier to achieve a more realistic effect using other Photoshop tools. Here, a small amount of whitening applied to the model’s teeth and eyes will lift the whole image.

 

Skin

 

How to get perfect skin

Have you ever wished you could have perfect skin? Have you ever wished you could get rid of all the acne and pimples and blemishes and scars on your face? Now you can!

 

Retouch Yellow Skin

Professional Skin Smoothing

Learn the ultimate technique industry professionals use to retouch skin. This skin smoothing technique makes skin appear smooth without losing the texture. You’ll find this technique used in many magazines, ads, and other publications.

 

How to smooth a skin

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to make a skin like the the ones you see in magazines like Playboy.

 

Makeup makeover

In this tutorial I will show you how to remove hair in front of someone’s face, retouch skin and apply makeup using Photoshop (any version). Any skill level (tutorial includes some basic informations and descriptions for beginners).

 

Airbrushing – Natural Smooth Skin

Since the pre-digital era, glamour photos have been airbrushed by skilled photographers to remove imperfections on the skin. Now, with advance image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, airbrushing can easily be mimiced with realistic results. However, many airbrushing techniques removes too many details causing the skin to look plastic and unrealistic. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you an effective Photoshop technique to simulate airbrushing without losing the texture.

 

Removing Freckles

In this tutorial we’re going to show you how you can remove freckles easily and quikcly using gaussian blur and history brush.

 

Remove Freckles

Reduce slight freckles naturally without using the Healing Brush. In this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn how to subtract freckles using a layer. This process provides the most natural results for light-brown freckles (ephelides) but will not work for dark freckles (lentigines).

 

Body

 

Eliminate Cellulite

Trimming weight off with the Liquify tool

 

Removing Love Handles

In this tutorial we will see how to remove love handles (or the extra fat around the waist).

 

Nails

 

Manipulating nails by increasing length & changing shade

 

Longer Nails

You might come across the scenerio that you are working on a photograph for a project where the woman’s nails are short, but you would like them to be longer. This tutorial shows how to do that. It’s also useful if you want to see how your own nails would look if they were longer.

 

Nose

 

Easy Digital Nose Job

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial on digital photo editing, we’re going to learn how incredibly easy it is to give someone a digital nose job (not that anyone we know would need it, of course!). This photo editing technique is so simple and easy, you’ll be tempted to use it on photos of people who honestly don’t need it. Or at least, that’s what you can tell them when they ask you why you made their nose smaller. You simply had to because it was so much fun and so easy to do!

 

Smaller Nose

Ever wondered what your nose would look like if it were smaller. This tutorial will walk you through the steps for reducing the size of a nose in a photograph using Photoshop.

 

Digital Nip Tuck

Photoshop is probably the cheapest alternative to plastic surgery possible. Unfortunately, Photoshop is only helpful in computer land. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to do your own plastic surgery with a nose job to up and coming MTV starlet, Ashlee Simpson.

 

 
That’s it, this post was brought to you by:
 
PhotoshopTalent.com – Photoshop Contests, Prizes, Tutorials, Art, Forums, … FUN!

Written by Grammar Girl

March 4 is National Grammar Day. So I’ve created a special grammar-related top 10 show to celebrate the occasion.

Organizer Martha Brockenbrough, who writes about grammar and language for Encarta, has fun suggestions for National Grammar Day, including holding a good-grammar potluck at your office or school and mixing drinks she calls grammartinis. She also suggests correcting other people’s grammar, but I hope that instead of marching into grocery stores and scratching out misplaced apostrophes, people will spread the word about the language myths that well-meaning people argue about every day in offices around the world.

To help you along that path, here is my list:

Grammar Girl’s Top 10 Language Myths:

10. A run-on sentence is a really long sentence. Wrong! They can actually be quite short. In a run-on sentence, independent clauses are squished together without the help of punctuation or a conjunction. If you write I am happy I am glad as one sentence without a semicolon, colon, or dash between the two independent clauses, it’s a run-on sentence even though it only has six words. (See episode 49 for more details.)

9. You shouldn’t start a sentence with the word however. Wrong! It’s fine to start a sentence with however so long as you use a comma after it when it means “nevertheless.” (See episode 58 for more details.)

8. Irregardless is not a word. Wrong! Irregardless is a word in the same way ain’t is a word. They’re informal. They’re nonstandard. You shouldn’t use them if you want to be taken seriously, but they have gained wide enough use to qualify as words. (See episode 94 for more details.)

7. There is only one way to write the possessive form of a word that ends in s. Wrong! It’s a style issue. For example, in the phrase Kansas’s statute, you can put just an apostrophe at the end of Kansas or you can put an apostrophe s at the end of Kansas. Both ways are acceptable. (See episode 35 for more details.)

6. Passive voice is always wrong. Wrong! Passive voice is when you don’t name the person who’s responsible for the action. An example is the sentence “Mistakes were made,” because it doesn’t say who made the mistakes. If you don’t know who is responsible for an action, passive voice can be the best choice. (See episode 46 for more details.)

5. I.e. and e.g. mean the same thing. Wrong! E.g. means “for example,” and i.e. means roughly “in other words.” You use e.g. to provide a list of incomplete examples, and you use i.e. to provide a complete clarifying list or statement. (See episode 53 for more details.)

4. You use a before words that start with consonants and an before words that start with vowels. Wrong! You use a before words that start with consonant sounds and an before words that start with vowel sounds. So, you’d write that someone has an MBA instead of a MBA, because even though MBA starts with m, which is a consonant, it starts with the sound of the vowel e–MBA. (See episode 47 for more details.)

3. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.” Wrong! Am is a linking verb and linking verbs should be modified by adjectives such as good. Because well can also act as an adjective, it’s also fine to answer “I’m well,” but some grammarians believe “I’m well” should be used to talk about your health and not your general disposition. (See episode 51 for more details.)

2. You shouldn’t split infinitives. Wrong! Nearly all grammarians want to boldly tell you it’s OK to split infinitives. An infinitive is a two-word form of a verb. An example is “to tell.” In a split infinitive, another word separates the two parts of the verb. “To boldly tell” is a split infinitive because boldly separates to from tell. (See episode 9 for more details.)

And now, the number one grammar myth, which my Twitter friends chose over splitting infinitives [fanfare music]

1. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Wrong! You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition when the sentence would mean the same thing if you left off the preposition. That means “Where are you at?” is wrong because “Where are you?” means the same thing. But there are many sentences where the final preposition is part of a phrasal verb or is necessary to keep from making stuffy, stilted sentences: I’m going to throw up, let’s kiss and make up, and what are you waiting for are just a few examples. (See episode 69 for more details.)

You can find more information about each of these myths in the Grammar Girl archives at quickanddirtytips.com, where you can also find my contact information and all the other great Quick and Dirty Tips podcasts such as Money Girl and Legal Lad.

Grammar Girl Summer Tour

Thanks to everyone who has voted on the cities I’ll be visiting this summer. I’ll probably announce the results the week after next. The tour is to promote my print book, which is coming out in July, and I just found out that you can preorder the book online. Right now it’s available at Amazon.com, BooksAMillion.com, and you can also preorder it from your local bookseller by searching Booksense.com. I imagine it will also be available soon online through Powells and Barnes & Noble. So preorder it now to get an extra 5% off and you’ll also be one of the first people to get it when it comes out in July.

That’s all. Thanks for listening and happy National Grammar Day.