Watercone
"A Product that enables anyone, in a most simple fashion, an independent, cheap and mobile solar Potable Water generation from sea water or brackish water on the base of condensation by solar still."
- Pour salty / brackish Water into pan. Then float the Watercone® on top. The black pan absorbs the sunlight and heats up the water to support evaporation..
- The evaporated Water condensates in the form of droplets on the inner wall of the cone. These droplets trickle down the inner wall into a circular trough at the inner base of the cone.
- By unscrewing the cap at the tip of the cone and turning the cone upside down, one can empty the potable Water gathered in the trough directly into a drinking device.
You can make up to 1.5 litres of water with one Watercone.
Application: Launchy
After seeing someone using http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ on a Mac, I knew I needed to do one of two things:
- Buy a Mac
- Get an alternative for Windows
I actually decided on the first - but the latter option will suffice for the time being.
How does it work? Press ALT-SPACE and type what you want to launch, press enter, done.
I've configured it by making an "applications" folder of my own which has shortcuts that I know I will use frequently: Command prompt, dreamweaver, firefox, etc. Next, I got launchy to index only that folder (not the start-menu or firefox bookmarks) - things become easier to find that way.
Claude Lelouch video: Ferrari through Paris @ 140 mph
"On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.
No streets were closed, [because] Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets."
Photoshop tutorial: Creating detailed-masks from channels
What are you on about?
This tutorial will show you how to apply masks to very detailed areas in photos.
For example, if you wanted to modify the sky in the image below, without making the same changes to the foliage, you would have to use masks.
You could duplicate the layer, make changes to the sky on the new layer, apply a mask, and paint areas black or white depending on whether it should be visible or not. But you can imagine how time consuming this would be with the detail of the leaves and flowers. It really isn't a fun (or smart) process.
Here's another way.
Step 2: You have to make a choice here - it won't always be the blue channel. I chose the blue channel because resulted in the foliage becoming really dark, and the sky becoming pretty light. This made it perfect to apply a simple level-correction to get the sky white, and the foliage black.
Step 3: Duplicate the blue channel.
Step 4: Apply levels (as shown below). You can also apply an "S" shaped curve to the image (which would increase the contrast of the image). What you do to the image will differ from image to image, some will need a lot more work, others - not so much (like the one used here).
Step 5: Select the RGB channel again and go back to the layers-palette. Duplicate the layer and make the changes to the image - keeping in mind that only the sky in this case will retain the changes.
In my case, I simply changed the blending mode to multiply to darken the sky. You could also change the colours of the sky to a more reddish colour for example.
Step 6: Next, we need to select the channel. Do this by going back into the channels tab and CTRL-left click the new channel you made.
Step 7: Go back to the layers tab and click on the mask button. This will automatically make a mask based on your selected channel.
Black in the channel, will be black in the mask - and will reveal the layer below it.
Step 8: If you press the "\" key, you will see how the mask is being applied.
Step 9: Now grab a brush and pain the sky white. Note: You could also have done this when originally creating the channel - it's completely up to you.
Step 10: Press the "\" key again to see what it looks like.
Before and after in detail:
This shows how only the sky has been affected.
Before:
After:
Conclusion
This method can also be used when creating masks involving hair - which is a tricky thing to do otherwise.
The key is to get a decent channel to work with - after that, things become a breeze!
Death by Caffeine
How much of your favorite energy drink or soda would it take to kill you? Take this quick test and find out
Firefox extension: DragDropUpload
This extension lets fill an upload input of a form using the drag and drop service from the system. Just drop the file into the input box and then send it.