Category: ifttt

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – March 30, 2010 at 11:30AM

Stoves are magnets for all manner of grease, splashes, and burnt on food. Before you power through the crust with a scouring pad, soften up gunk with this simple trick.

Photo by Attempts at Photography.

Over at Re-Nest, the home-centric blog, they highlight a great way to get your stove top sparkling without using potent chemical cleaners or wearing your elbow out scrubbing:

This is what I do when my stove gets a little crusty and thick with burnt-on stuff (hey, sometimes in the thick of things I just don’t wipe it all up!). I boil water in the kettle, then dribble a very shallow layer of water over the entire stovetop. I let it sit for about five minutes to do its work and to cool off a bit. Then I go at the stove with a soft scrub pad or steel wool if necessary. The crusty stuff comes right off, and I finish up with just a bit of soap and a final rinse. Result: Sparkling clean stovetop!

You’ll need to modify your approach for different kinds of stove tops. If you have a glass induction stove top, for example, you could place a rag on top of the burnt on crust and then pour a little boiling water on the rag to keep the moisture and heat on the grime.

Have a cleaning tip to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

By Guest Contributor, Digital Photography School – March 30, 2010 at 10:11AM

In this post Amar Ramesh introduces us to the mystical world of smoke photography.

After I got hooked to smoke photography, the one question that has been constantly running through my mind these past few months has been ‘What else can I do with smoke?’. Smoke, otherwise an unwanted by-product of combustion, is actually a great subject for photography.

The fact that the subject is not totally under your control is what makes smoke photography such a challenging job but at the same time, the challenges posed have only fueled my creativity. Finding subjects that fit the smoke pattern or trying to come up with a smoke pattern that matches the subject that you already have is a fascinating challenge.

This limitation to create a combination improves the creativity to a larger extent. You can almost call it ‘the art of seeing hidden images’. 

On a very high level the idea behind these pictures is very simple. It is made of two pictures.

First, a picture of the smoke. Depending on the shape and form of the smoke, find an object that would fit the shape and form of the smoke.

Now merge these two pictures in photoshop. I’ll not go in detail on how to shoot the objects here as there are hundreds of tutorials out there online. From a small box setup to a studio setup there are so many ways to do that. You can select what fits your style.

Below I’m going to concentrate on the taking of smoke pictures. 

Smoke Photography: Setup

The setup for smoke photography is relatively simple. Here’s what you need:

• a power controllable flash (in my case, it was an 580 EX II)
• a DSLR with any good lens, though a macro lens would make things a lot easier.
• Although you can get smoke from various sources, I feel incense sticks fit our needs best because they not only give out smoke with a good form and texture, they are also harmless.
• A tripod is required if you are not comfortable at setting the focus and changing the composition. I always focus on the edge of the incense stick and recompose my frame for the smoke.
• A table lamp pointed on the smoke helps in focussing.
• A black cloth for the backdrop. Two small black sheets that can form a rectangular snoot and last but not least, a wireless trigger. 

Smoke Photography: Procedure

Start by fixing the black back drop to the wall. Place the incense stick a foot away from the back drop. Do not light it yet.

Now position the table lamp such that it points at the tip of the incense stick. It can be placed either to the left or right side (at either the 3′o clock or the 9′o clock angle) of the incense stick.

Now place the strobe on the opposite side (of the table lamp) at half a foot distance from the incense stick. Adjust the flash to 1/16th of the power and depending on the output image, you can reduce or increase it.

Now you can place the black cards on either side of the strobe so that light from the strobe does not spill out to the back drop.

Now light the incense stick and start the smoke. If possible place the entire setup in a place where you have good ventilation so that your room is not smoked out.

Switch on the table lamp.

Set your camera to manual focus and start the aperture at f8.0 and shutter speed at 1/200th of a second (below your sync speed).

Shoot in RAW format. Start clicking and get some great smoke pictures.

Gently blow the smoke to get different forms and shapes. Once you are done with this, you can let your imagination run wild by placing 2 or 3 incense sticks that in turn should produce smoke of completely different shapes.

Once you are done with shooting the smoke pictures, it is time to proceed to the post-processing part of this fun exercise.

Smoke Photography: Post Processing

Open the picture in adobe RAW. You increase the black a little bit if you feel there is some spill light in the picture. Adjust contrast and exposure until you are satisfied.

Open the image in photoshop and make a duplicate layer. Select paintbrush and set your foreground to black and paint out the unwanted smoke in the picture.

That’s it. You have a smoke picture. If you want to color it try Hue & Saturation adjustment layer.

Also try to play with colorize option under the same adjustment layer.

If you want to make the background white, Go to Image > Adjustments > Inverse. This will make the background white.

Again like any other photography, you can always break the rules and still come up with extraordinary pictures. Play around until you are satisfied.

I hope this post has been helpful and good luck with your smoke photography.

Amar Ramesh is an emerging photographer from Redmond WA, USA. Photography, to him is a passion with infinite opportunities and he loves to share the lessons and tips that he learned with others. Portfolio | Twitter | Facebook Fan Page | Flickr

Post from: Digital Photography School – Photography Tips.

An Introduction to Smoke Photography

By (author unknown), MAKE – February 19, 2006 at 11:11AM

Make music as you walk, dance, run around – “…a unique performance instrument for motion-capture midi control, featuring extensive customization to enable a wide range of musical and visual applications. Setup and operation is simple, intuitive and quick. The suit is modeled on the human skeletal form using rotational sensors placed on the joints. The GypsyMIDI simply plugs into a MIDI interface and arm movements are converted into a real-time stream of MIDI data.” Link.
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By (author unknown), Gizmodo – January 31, 2006 at 11:28AM

Wild and just a little unsettling, this GypsyMIDI from Sonalog is a motion capture MIDI controller—giving you hours and hours of really weird fun. Actually, it’s made mainly for animation companies for high-end motion capture, but if you go to the website and check out these videos, you may want to drop the cash for one yourself. One arm’ll cost you about $850 and both will gut you a whopping $2200. So maybe watching those videos should be as far as you go with this project.

MIDI-control rave exoskeletons for all! [Musicthing]

 
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By Ryan Block, Engadget RSS Feed – January 27, 2006 at 04:48AM

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By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – July 06, 2010 at 04:30PM

DiggersList catalogs local hardware, construction materials, and construction site and demolition remnants for sale. You can find everything from overage lumber sold on the cheap to cabinet sets on their way out for a new kitchen.

Whether you need some crushed concrete as fill for a project, cabinets for your garage, or a a full-size rooftop ventilator for your workshop, you can find all sorts of new, used, and cast-off goodies on DiggersList. Designed for the contractor and DIYer alike, DiggersList catalogs local building materials, tools and hardware, home and garden materials—everything from refrigerators to sprinkler systems—and professional services for when you want to hire out the work.

DiggersList is currently available in metropolitan areas in 20 states. Visit the link below to see if your state and city are currently available. Have a favorite place—Craigslist aside!—for finding materials for your favorite projects? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

By The How-To Geek, Lifehacker – April 15, 2010 at 12:00PM

You’re planning on upgrading your hard drive, but there’s one small problem: How do you get your data from the old hard drive to the new one, without reinstalling everything? Here’s a step-by-step guide to seamlessly transition to a new drive.

Photo by Jeff Kubina.

If you’ve bumped up against the limits of your small, old hard drive over and over, it may be time to upgrade. In some instances, all the desktop user may need to do is install a second (or third) hard drive for a little more space. But that’s not always an option, especially for laptop users. The solution: Clone your old drive—complete with your operating system and all your data—to a new, bigger drive.

For the purpose of this article, we’re going to start after the point at which you’ve physically installed the hard drive—there’s just a couple of screws and a cable, after all, but if you still need some help you can check out our guide to installing a hard drive for a primer on the basic technique.

Below, we’ll highlight a few tools that can help you clone your old hard drive to a new one (and choose a favorite we’ll use), detail a few of the finer points for getting started on a laptop or desktop computer, then guide you through the cloning and upgrading process.

Options for Cloning Your Drive

To upgrade your hard drive without reinstalling everything, you’ll need to use a utility to make an exact copy, or clone, from the old hard drive to the new one. A number of commercial tools will do this for you, and even some free Windows utilities can make a copy of your drive while your PC is running. For example, see our guide to using DriveImageXML to hot image your PC’s hard drive, which is an excellent tool for making a backup. The problem, however, is that it doesn’t create a true clone of the drive, since you’d still have to reinstall the Windows bootloader using a repair CD if you wanted to boot into your cloned drive.

The bigger problem, particularly if you’re upgrading a laptop, is that you need to have a copy of Windows already running for most of the free utilities to work; most laptops can only have one drive hooked up at a time. In this case, your best free option is the Linux-based Clonezilla Live CD, which streamlines the process of imaging your drive to an external drive or even a shared folder on another PC.

Upgrading a Desktop Hard Drive

When it comes to upgrades, desktops are always going to be easier to deal with since you can easily get in there and move cables around, and in this case, because you can hook both drives up at the same time, greatly simplifying the whole process.

What you’ll want to do is hook the new drive up—since we’ll be using a boot CD, you can save a step by plugging the new hard drive into the primary slot, and move the old one to the secondary—so once the cloning is done you won’t have to do anything else.

Upgrading a Laptop Hard Drive

Method One: While some laptops have the capability to swap out the optical drive and add another hard drive, it’s not common, so you’ll need to use an external USB hard drive, or potentially another PC with a shared folder, to save an image of the current drive. Once you’ve created the image, you can install the new drive, and then restore the image onto the new hard drive.

Method Two: Your other option is to install the new hard drive, use an external USB to SATA adapter to hook the old drive to the laptop, and then clone the drives that way. This eliminates the extra step of copying to a secondary device, but requires spending a little extra money for something you might not use very often—so you might want to borrow one from a geek friend that does PC repair (or just use the first method above).

How to Clone Your Drive with Clonezilla

Now we’re ready to clone our old drive to our new one. The first thing you’ll need to do is download a copy of the Clonezilla ISO image, and then use a software like ImgBurn to burn it to a CD. For best results, you should grab the Alternative Ubuntu-based version, which has better compatibility with modern hardware.

Once you’ve got the live CD burnt to a disc, restart your computer, boot off the CD, and accept all the default settings until you get to the screen where you can choose to create an image of the drive, or sync one drive directly to another drive. If you have both drives connected, you can simply use the device to device option, otherwise choose to create an image.

Assuming you chose to create an image, you will need to choose where the image will be stored, whether on an external drive, SSH server, or you can use the SAMBA option, which will allow you to connect to a Windows shared folder to store the image. Either of the latter two options will step you through a set of wizard screens to help you get hooked up to the server.

If you chose the local device option, you’ll be prompted to select the drive that you want to save the image on. Make sure that this drive is formatted with NTFS or a Linux filesystem—you should not use a drive with FAT32 since the 4GB maximum file size will probably cause the cloning to fail.

At this point you’ll be prompted to either save or restore a disk or partition—you should always use the disk image option here, and not single partitions, as you need the bootloader to stay intact on the new drive to make sure Windows is bootable. Since we’re making an image file here, choose the first option, and follow through the wizard to select the drive and give it a name.

Creating the cloned drive image will take a while, but at the end you should see the option to shutdown or restart your PC. Laptop users, it’s time to swap out the old hard drive with the new one, so we can restore the cloned image. If you did a direct disk to disk copy (which you probably did if you’re on a desktop), you can skip the next step (“Finishing Up”).

Restoring the Cloned Image

Now that you have the new hard drive installed in the PC, boot off Clonezilla again, follow through all of the same prompts until you get to the screen where you have to choose to save or restore the image. Choose the restoredisk option, choose the image to restore from (it’s the one we just created above), and then choose the new disk that you want to overwrite.

You’ll be prompted twice to make sure that you really want to overwrite the drive (make sure you’ve got the right drive installed—that is, the new, big, empty one), and the restore process will take a while. Once it’s all done, you can remove the CD and reboot the PC from your new drive, directly into Windows.

Bonus: The Expert Linux Method

If you’re a little more comfortable with Linux, there’s any number of command-line tools like partimage or dd that can get the job done easily from an Linux Live CD. For instance, to copy one drive to another using dd, simply use the following command, substituting sda and sdb for your source and destination device names.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

To create an image file instead, you can use a command similar to the following one suggested by reader @zarekthenerd, substituting sda for your source drive name, and modifying the path to your external hard drive:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img bs=4096

Once you’ve created the image, you can swap out your hard drive, boot from the live CD again, and then reverse the command:

dd if=/media/EXTERNAL/backup.img of=/dev/sda bs=4096

Finishing Up: Boot Up and Expand the Partition

Now that we’re all done cloning the drive, all you need to do is boot up your PC, wait for Windows to finish figuring out that you have a new drive and installing the device drivers, and then we’re ready to fix the one remaining problem—the current drive partition is the same size as the old drive.

If you’re using Windows 7 or Vista, open up Windows Disk Management through the Start menu search box, or by right-clicking on Computer and choosing the Manage option. Once there, right-click the partition and choose Extend Volume to make the partition fill the entire disk.

At this point you should be able to head into Computer and see that your new hard drive is now nice and spacious.

If you’re using Windows XP, you’re going to have to take another route (it doesn’t have a robust, built-in partition manager); you could choose to create another partition, or if you want to resize your primary partition, you can boot from the GParted Live CD and make the changes in there by clicking on the partition and using the Resize/Move button.

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So have you ever upgraded from one hard drive to another one? Did you do the full reinstall, or use a cloning software? Share your experience in the comments.

The How-To Geek uses the SystemRescueCD and partimage to clone drives from the command-line . His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

By Jason Clarke, Download Squad – April 14, 2010 at 02:01PM

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware

Last month, I wrote about the Synergy+ project, which is an update to the original Synergy project. Synergy is a cross-platform tool that allows multiple computers to be controlled with a single keyboard and mouse. While Synergy+ has a lot going for it, one area where it is still lacking is configuration tools for non-Windows machines.

Luckily, there’s a new Synergy configuration tool in town, and it’s called QSynergy. The big selling point of QSynergy is ease of use. It offers a graphical interface for configuring the server machine on any of the three OSes that Synergy supports: Windows, Mac, and Linux.

QSynergy is not a complete Synergy distribution — you still need to download Synergy itself from Sourceforge and install it, but once you’ve done that, you can do all the configuration tasks in QSynergy. As a Mac user this is a huge plus, since otherwise I’m stuck manually editing text-based configuration files. In contrast to previous attempts to use Synergy, I was up and running using my Mac as the server and my Windows PC as a client within about three minutes.

If you’ve ever wondered how to easily reduce the number of keyboards and mice you need to switch between in order to control multiple computers, particularly if your computers run different operating systems, Synergy with QSynergy is your ticket to a tidier desk.

[via Lifehacker]

QSynergy makes cross-platform Synergy configuration a snap originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Linux – Operating system – Windows – Synergy+ – Microsoft Windows

By Dennis Yang, Techdirt. – April 13, 2010 at 11:29PM

If you haven’t seen Red Letter Media’s excellent reviews of the Star Wars films, The Phantom Menace and The Attack of the Clones, then you might want to carve out three hours out of your day and watch them (the reviews are 70-minutes and 90-minutes long, respectively) — they’re incredible. (Warning: he does use some NSFW language occasionally.)

So, it’s very sad to hear that Mike Stoklasa, the writer & director of the Red Letter Media reviews, is considering not producing any more reviews, out of fear of being slapped with a copyright lawsuit. Stoklasa says:

“The thing is, I’m no lawyer. But I had someone actually talk to a copyright lawyer, and they didn’t know what to make of the reviews. It’s a new thing, You can get away with using a clip from a movie for the purpose of review or commentary, but can you dissect an entire film like that? There’s commentary and it’s part satire [because of the character, Mr. Plinkett] and part review and part educational as well because there’s elements of filmmaking insights.”

Stoklasa’s reviews are innovative and entertaining and take movie reviewing to a whole new level by remixing movie clips into the review itself. In doing so, they are emerging as a whole new art form. While more traditional movie reviews and satire can use clips of movies as a result of fair use, Stoklasa could be treading on new ground with his works. That said, this could be an interesting case if he were to get sued, because he would likely win, which would then redraw the boundaries for fair use, which would be a great thing. So, Mike Stoklasa, please don’t let the threat of copyright lawsuits stop you from continuing to produce your excellent reviews — to do so would be a travesty.

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By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – April 13, 2010 at 06:00PM

Mac only: We recently featured a multiple file type converter for Windows, but now Mac users can share in that same drag-and-drop joy with Dragoman, a free app that can batch convert images, photos, music, documents, and archives with minimal effort.

Dragoman could not be more simple to use: All you do is drag one or more files into its window, choose a compatible file type for the output, and wait for it to pop out your shiny new files. It can convert tons of different file types, too, like images (including many RAW formats), music, documents, and even archives—useful if you start using a different camera or program that can’t open a certain type of file (like Apple’s TIFF or Webarchive formats). It can also convert multiple files at once—even if your original batch contains files of more than one type, you can convert them all at once to one. In addition, if applicable, you can edit image preferences like JPEG quality and DPI for your converted files. If you’re still not convinced, be sure to check out the full list of supported file types—it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Dragoman is a free download, Mac only.