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I recently recieved a copy of Gridlock Economy by Michael Heller. The premise of the book is that too much ownership hurts more than it helps. The core example given in the book is that of a possible cure for cancer or Alzheimers.

A drug company wants to make and test a drug, but the owners of the 50 components of the drug want insane amounts of money to allow the research to continue. The drug, if successful, would naturally be a tremendous public good and earn the drug company and the patent holders piles of cash.

Heller calls instances such as this “big inches” - named after a Quaker Oats promotion that granted 21 million deeds of one square inch of land in the Yukon to many, many boys, girls, and anyone else who bought a box of their cereal.

When I started reading it, I expected a very “dry” reading, “just the facts.” But Heller’s writing style was more fluid, I loved his anecdotes use of concepts everyone can relate to (such as airline delays).

He goes on to give examples of how some of the gridlock can be unlocked. I do not want to go too much into the brunt of the subject matter, but this book is excellent and you will learn something without realizing it.

I fully recommend this book even if you’re not into economics.

http://www.gridlockeconomy.com

Neat idea. When designing something, the search for a fitting color palette is always an obligatory important first step. Sites like Adobe kuler help you here insofar as they offer the ability to share beautiful color palettes between users.

Mondrianum goes one step further in that it allows to access the kuler palettes directly from the Mac OS X system-wide color-picker. Which means that the colors are available from (for example) iLife, iWork, Photoshop, Coda, CSSEdit, and more.

Mondrianum is 10.5 only and can be found over at Lthoglyph Software.

During one of the newer OS X software updates Apple extended the list of compatible RAW Cameras by the Sony Alpha a 200 and the a 350. The a 300 however was omitted. This is insofar weird, as the hardware differences between the a 200 and the a 300 have no effect neither on the ccd nor on the exposure / shutter options. The only difference is the tiltable LCD-Screen as well as the option to shoot using LiveView.
Thus the basic RAW picture from a a 300 should be similar to a picture from a a 200. I researched this a bit and found that that’s mostly the case. Thus I present a small script which will convert Alpha a 300 RAW Files to Alpha a 200 RAW Files. The process is rather simple.

You can download it either as a commandline script, or as a Automator Action. The commandline script can be used in the following way:
“python ./A300fix.py DSC0001.ARW” in order to convert the file DSC0001.ARW to A200 raw. Please note that the script doesn’t create copies but changes the original file. So you’re advised to create copies of your original RAW files in case anything doesn’t work out as expected - although this never happened to me so far.
Alternatively you can use “python ./A300fix.py all” to convert all scripts in the current directory.

The usage of the automator action should be rather clear.

Download the commandline script here

Download the Automator Action here

With the advent of Leopard CoverFlow has been integrated as a main part of the Mac OS X user interface. This elegant way off displaying graphical data is not only rather helpful but also very beautiful to watch. If you’d love to include CoverFlow like animations into your Motion or Final Cut projects without the hazzle of manually aligning / creating all the tweens, CoverFlux comes to your rescue. This free plugin from industrial revolution offers many a option to create stunning coverflow-esque animations in minutes. 

You need, however, to install the free FxFactory2 plugin, in order to use CoverFlux, as CoverFlux is a FxFactory Plugin itself.

I found this site a long time ago, bookmarked it, forgot about it, and just got remembered of it’s existance by a post on Daring Fireball. One can upload a picture, and they’ll analyze it in order to tell you which font is being used in the picture. Really Good.

There’re by now quite many sites offering ways to browse and create custom color palettes online. ColourLovers, Colorcombos or Kuler - just to name a few. Wear palettes is a service which I’ve been using for a rather long time now that offers similar results by means of a different approach: Instead of listing user-contributed palettes, the author examines pictures from the well-known style-blog “The Sartorialist” and identifies the main colours of the protagonists’ clothes.

What I like most about this idea is that I, in addition to finding a nice color palette, can just as well browse through interesting clothes or style combinations.

Wear Palettes.

The Blender Foundation just released the newest Version of the popular and very powerful open source 3d Modeller “Blender 3D”. The work on their second open source movie “Big Buck Bunny” has resulted in a new version with a greatly improved feature set. There’s a new “Hair and Fur” System, with astonishing capabilities, a completely rewritten Particle system, Cloth Simulation, improved Render Baking, Approximate Ambient Occlusion (awesome speed & quality), raytraced soft shaows, and much much more. So if you’re into 3D, or just want to experiment with it, you should definately try Blender, since it’s not only free but also very competetive. 

Drerek Yu wrote a usefull article that describes how to create pixelart. His tutorial consists out of 10 steps ranging from tools over shadnig to anti-aliasing. It’s quite interesting, Derek Writes:

Creating pixel art is a skill I picked up because I needed graphics for my games. After a lot of practice, I became rather handy with it, and started to see it more as “real” art rather than just a tool. These days, pixel art is quite popular for gaming and illustration. You can even find it in print magazines, like Wired and Electronic Gaming Monthly!

This pixel tutorial was created many years ago to teach people the basic concepts behind pixel art, but I’ve streamlined it a lot since its first incarnation. There are other pixel tutorials around, but I find them to be overly complicated and too wordy. Pixel art is not a science. You will never have to calculate a vector when doing pixel art.

Derek Yu - Pixelart Tutorial

Here are even more Photoshop tutorials and brushes for your pleasure; Happy layouting

Free Photoshop Brushes Resources

Tutorials are like cakes; as soon as you tried some you want to have more. So if you, once again, need your daily fix, but lack a page with fresh tutorials, add FOTOFECTS to your linklist. The more, the better eh :)

http://fotofects.com/