Reading Klingon is Hard!

Few months ago I read an article about a new product named FreeWrite designed for distraction-free writing. That product intrigued me because I have a college-bound son who could benefit from such a product. The only trouble was the $549 price tag that seemed excessive considering its limited features. Granted, that is the whole point of the product yet I felt confident that I could build something equivalent for far lower cost. I am pleased to report that after investing only about $75 and some of my spare time, the finished product turned out quite nicely and became a very nice parting gift to my son for his journey into creative writing.

Read the rest here: LinkedIn, Medium.

On Careers and Aerobatics

I have a confession: I have a lifelong seemingly irrational fascination with all things flying. I have flown in many kinds of aircraft: commercial airliners, of course, but also in smaller prop planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, a Zeppelin and even a WW II bomber. I've also intentionally jumped out of planes couple of dozen times. After all, who wouldn't? I mean sure they're pretty to look at but noisy and smelly, and the door was open.

Read the rest here: LinkedIn, Medium.

Photoshop Express Launches!

My team and I played a major part in making this new online service launch a reality. Go check it out at http://www.photoshop.com/express.

RoboCopy and Buffalo TeraStation

Recently I set up a new recurring backup scheme from my PC’s main data drive to a 1TB Buffalo TeraStation II Pro NAS device but ran into a strange problem. I was planning to use RoboCopy as an easy and cheap (read: free) solution to a recurring backup. However, I was baffled by RoboCopy’s insistence on copying some files despite options instructing it to only copy changed files. No matter what I did, RoboCopy would always re-copy some files.

Photoshop Elements 6 shipped

My team and I played a part in making this software release a reality. It’s great to see it hitting the stores and getting rave reviews.

Generating Histograms from Photo Tags

Occasionally I like to visualize how many photos are assigned to a given set of tags in my photo collection. One common example of this is the Ratings tag which has 5 sub-tags ranging from 1-Bad to 5-Stellar. Another example is the When tag which has sub-tags for each year (and within each year, the months). This simple IMatch script automates the process of visualizing the histogram plot of the number of photos assigned to each sub-tag under a parent tag.

The script performs 3 simple steps:

1. Launches Excel
2. Generates a table of data that holds the name of the tag in the first column, and the count of photos assigned to that tag in the second column
3. Creates a new bar chart from the data table

Download the script.

Clearing Haze from Photos

These two Photoshop actions can be used to clear haze from digital photographs. Try each to see which one produces better results.