The technology has been around for centuries, and is still natural and beautiful and warm. Log cabins, log houses, log homes. Here’s a luxurious example, created by masters of the craft.
Beautiful log lodge, view from Lake Michigan
See the details for yourself, here: http://www.hilltoploglodge.com/index.html
If you’ve ever doubted the value of obsession, check out this website:
http://steampunkworkshop.com/keyboard.shtml
Steampunk computer keyboard mod by steampunkworkshop.com
This page features a detailed description of how to make a steampunk computer keyboard mod, with amazing results. If you care to delve deeper, there are links to steampunk guitar mods, etching, headphones, even a car and motorbike.
This is maybe one of the spookiest pictures ever taken, as a volcano in Chile erupts with lightning twining through its cloud of ash, dust, and gasses.
Chile Volcano Lightning from National Geographic
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/photogalleries/volcano-photos/
And to think, this may resemble the place where it all began.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37729/title/Primordial_soup_lives_again
This donation-ware allows you flexibility in where you store and how you subdivide your iPhoto library, as well as iMovie and iDVD.
With it you can break up your iPhoto library into smaller sections that will run faster, an important consideration on older machines, especially if you have thousands of images. You can store these photo libraries wherever you want, such as on external drives. Rock solid and great for archiving, and it works seamlessly with iPhoto.
Needs Mac OS X 10.2 and up, Photo 2.0 or higher
and integrates with iMovie 3.0 or higher, iDVD 3.0 or higher, iWeb 1.0 or higher
http://www.iphotobuddy.com/
Galerie is a web gallery creation freeware for web designers from the renowned French Guillion brothers, authors of the amazing music composition programs Harmony Assistant and Melody Assistant.
It allows you to use a variety of customizable templates to create web galleries from a folder of pictures or Quicktime files, or from iPhoto, GraphicConverter, iView and Extensis portfolio. It is fast, reliable, and runs on Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.4. Enjoy this software from designers who have been generous and steadfast for years.
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/galerie.htm
If you do anything related to computer graphics and design, one of the best print magazines is the monthly Computer Arts Magazine
The focus is British, but includes lots of rest of the world design. It’s great to see what people are doing in Brazil and Hong Kong and Russia and Singapore.
The range of tutorial projects is wide. Recent ones include designing a letterhead for your company, drawing in anime style, designing a logo, branding online, and creating an animated book.
The art and design they feature is unusually current. Perhaps British illustrators are on the leading edge right now. At any rate, trends you see first this magazine often appear within the year on album covers, other magazines, TV commercials, and print advertisements.
Perhaps the best parts of the magazine are the tutorials, simple, clear, richly visual descriptions of how to do a variety of design-related tasks, using a variety of software.
In addition, each issue comes with a CD containing goodies like free Illustrator brushes, fonts, tutorials, or stock photos.
And hey, you get to do on the fly currency calculations, and occasionally puzzle over British slang. The magazine is somewhat expensive— $15 or so an issue in the US. On the other hand, for great design and excellent tutorials, you get as much instruction and inspiration in two or three issues as you would in a how-to book, except these are lots prettier, and much more current.
Best of all, the publishers are generous— a trip to the website, http://www.computerarts.co.uk/ gives you the opportunity to look at an amazing variety of articles and tutorials from previous issues. Try some of them out, and if you find them useful, subscribe.
There is a very easy way to customize the look of your WordPress blog.
Generally, the standard WordPress blog works fine for most people. It’s a clean, simple design, and after all, your text content is so compelling that looks don’t matter!
But if you decide you want to change your look, here’s the easy way to do it.
1. It’s best to work in Firefox—for some unknown reason, certain aspects of WordPress do not always work in Safari.
2. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and click on “Presentation”
3. When the page comes up, scroll through it until you find a look, a “Theme” you like.
4. Click on the Theme to see what your new blog page would look like.
5. If it’s not quite what you want, hit the backspace button and keep looking. When you find just the right one, click “Activate,” and you will have new Theme!
And you can change it again whenever you want.
