just an asterisk

My dear wife,

You were right.  It took me nearly a year, I swore up and down that my Flickr account was the bees knees, I wrote articles and explanations of how to use Flickr’s advanced tool set, and I ruined perfectly good cocktail party conversations, berating all services that did not stack up to my personal choice.

A year has gone by and now, like a dope, I have to reverse my position.  Why?  Because Picasa just changed the game, and I can no longer ignore the beautiful integration between Picasa and all my other apps.  Before I start into the details, this isn’t to say that Flickr is a bad service – it’s just no longer for me (yes I’m trying to save face – but let’s not write off Flickr entirely… there are too many devotees).

Without any more ado, here are the top 4 reasons I’ve decided to change over.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

You may be wondering about the rather inconsistent timing on my blog posts… I’ve spent the last couple of months going back and forth from Turkey.  This is not exactly the ideal blog writing scenario, but at the very least, I have something interesting to share – even if it’s not mine.  Theo, an amateur professional photographer friend, has taken some fantastic shots of Istanbul and given me permission to share:  

Theo’s Istanbul Album

Enjoy,

~ab