just an asterisk

I can’t seem to get away from it – whenever I hear someone has a new camera, I’m programmed to respond with “How many megapixels?” Why would I want to break this habit? Because it doesn’t matter!!!! Seriously people, we need to work together here. Megapixels are like weight for cell phones. Most phones only weigh a few ounces these days, but people still seem interested in getting a “light” phone. A recent blackberry ad on the subway even screamed “LIGHT!” as one of the three most important things you had to know about the new Curve. Should that be a reason to buy that phone? Probably not – all phones are light. Should megapixels be a reason to buy a camera? Again, probably not. Read more »

Personally, I alternate between two states for my desktop background: 

Sometimes I keep only a solid color background – especially when I’m worried about my machine going slowly (this is, as I suspected and my research on the subject confirmed, completely a myth.  Your background doesn’t slow down your machine directly… It may however, make it harder to switch to the desktop, as your wallpaper may take a few extra seconds to load.) 

However, most of the time, I believe a good wallpaper to be the foundation of my productive workspace.  Changing my wallpaper frequently provides variation, inspiration and motivation (please don’t ruin this for me if it’s all in my head :) ).

However, finding safe wallpapers for download can be a bit tricky.  Many sites claim to provide free backgrounds but instead put all sorts of junk (some of which is very malicious) on your machine.  I prefer to avoid these, instead opting for sites like InterfaceLift.

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On Just an Asterisk, I try not to copy other site’s posts.  Normally, there is enough fun out there to write about and it simply doesn’t need to happen.  However, while reading a lifehacker this past week (a highly recommended site by the way), I noticed this article and had such a good time playing with it that I wanted to share.

TiltShift lets you fiddle with your images to make them look like models.  I decided to play with an photo that I shot in London a few weeks ago.

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Recently, I traded my brother for an old Dell laptop. For a while, I had dreamed of converting a laptop into a photoframe. I’d seen others do it, various blog posts on techniques, etc. However, my hope was to just “figure it out” rather than starting with the experience of someone else. Below is a picture of the result…
Why would you want to do this? Plenty of reasons! Read more »