Magnatune

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Jun 082005
 

Thanks Tim Sneath, for pointing to Magnatune. Magnatune is a record-label, that applies the shareware principle to music. You can listen to all tracks from the albums (almost 400) they have in store, in MP3 format. If you decide you like it, you can buy an entire album for as little as US$5 or €4. You can always pay more, but you don’t have to. Half of what you pay goes directly to the artist.
After you have paid, you will be pointed to specific download locations, where you can download the music in lossless (WAV, FLAC, etc) format, so when you burn it on CD for normal audio-playback, you have the same quality as when buying the “normal” album in a recordstore. Very cool stuff.

If you want to broadcast the music they have, you can also buy a commercial license.

 Posted by at 13:17

Brilliant debugging solution

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Jun 062005
 

Of course you all experienced a debugging session, where you saw the error flashing by, but you weren’t fast enough to read it, or to press PrtScr for that matter. Dan has a brilliant, albeit it simple, solution: he’s using Camtasia to record the session, so he can replay his errormessage in Slow Motion. Of course you can use any other product that records the screen changes to a movie, but the idea is ab-so-lute-ly brilliant. Thanks Dan!

 Posted by at 12:03

Summer madness

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Jun 062005
 

The weather is bad
I think I’m going mad
Almost summer
What a bummer
Is that rain on my head?

 Posted by at 09:15

The end of online photogalleries?

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Jun 042005
 

In the US a far stretching patent has been granted. Uploading digital content or “Web-based Media Submission” was patented by AdMission, the company behind techniques used by eBay and The Washington Post, amongst others. So I guess companies like PBase will have a hard time surviving, since they have similar software in use. How can a company patent such a thing, when there is enough “prior art”? Uploading pictures, resizing or creating thumbnails can’t be their “invention”?!

 Posted by at 17:18

Give people a tan

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Jun 012005
 

Today, I retouched a digital picture to give a girls legs a little more tan, since she has a rather fair skintone, especially on her legs. This is how to do it.
Open Photoshop, or some other picture editor supporting layers. Select the region you want to give more color. With the magic wand, or with the magnetic lasso. Now create a new layer, and set layer mode to “soft light”. Fill (Shift-F5) the layer with [R,G,B] = [122,59,34]. Now set both layers to visible. Nice tan! You can adjust the layer fill from 100% to say 75% to give less tan, or you could fill the layer with another (less brown) color.

 Posted by at 22:57
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