5 Great Background Masking Techniques in Photoshop – “In this article, we’ll explore five different methods to isolate objects in Photoshop. As you follow this tutorial, you’ll gain a how-to explanation for each technique. You’ll also get the stats on how long each method takes, and my opinions as to when each method is most appropriate.”
Archives for December 2004
CollyLogic: Smart CSS multi-element rollovers
Henry's Film Corner
The Independent Film Channel presents Henry’s Film Corner, a new show hosted by Henry Rollins, who is joined by a “swarm of special guests for no-holds-barred discussions of movies, celebrities and relevant issues in America”. I’m psyched.
Color Scheme Generator 2
Color Scheme Generator 2 improves upon the older color palette generator that had lived on pixy.cz. This is an extremely useful tool for all designers, and it is great to see that it has a new home at Wellstyled.com.
Gl-o Interiors
Gl-o Interiors – “Stylish ambient light for cool interiors”
Clearing Empty Directories
I just deleted a ton of old Music files in OS X via the search interface, which proved to be nice and simple, but, I ran into a small problem; the directories containing those files were left on the drive. As they were empty, it was rather pointless to leave them there, cluttering up the view. So, I did some poking around on the Web and found some solutions that I tweaked to quickly eliminate the empty directories. The length of this post makes the process look more complicated than it really is.
Important Note: These commands, while safe in their current form, could very easily cause havoc on your system should they be used in the wrong spot and/or mistyped, or modified. I take absolutely no responsibility if you use these on your system and something goes wrong. I strongly recommend you research each part of the command online or via the man pages before executing any of them.
The first thing I did, was use the find command to locate all of the empty directories and subdirectories within my current directory, and print them on the screen:
find . -depth -type d -empty -exec echo {} ';'
I noticed that many directories that I thought were empty were not returned by this command. Some quick research via the command line showed that these supposedly empty directories had a hidden file in them. The file, .DS_Store is used by the finder to store the last view settings (view as columns/icons/list) so you see the same thing the next time you go to the folder. So, in order to ensure I could easily delete all of the “empty” directories, I had to eliminate these .DS_Store files. So, I ran the following command to get a list of every file that I was going to eliminate (I like to see them first):
find . -name .DS_Store -exec echo {} ;
Upon seeing the returned items, I noticed that this will delete every single .DS_Store within the current directory and its subdirectories, even in the ones that are not empty. But, that isn’t a concern, as the finder will create a new .DS_Storefile the next time a folder is viewed. So, satisfied with the list, I used this command to eliminate all of them:
find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm {} ;
Once all of the .DS_Store files were eliminated, I re-ran the empty directory search:
find . -depth -type d -empty -exec echo {} ';'
It returned all of the directories that I expected, so I ran this final bit of code to get rid of all of the now, truly-empty directories (be very careful that you type this properly):
find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} ';'
I now have a clean Music directory. It’s the little things in life that often bring happiness.