Converting a colour photo to a single layered stencil with Photoshop
Archives for May 2006
Printable Maps of the U.S.
The National Atlas provides “reference and outline maps of the United States that you can print or use online. The reference maps display general reference features such as boundaries, cities, capitals, major highways, rivers and lakes, and terrain. Outline maps showing county boundaries, State boundaries, capitals, or other basic features are also available.” The maps are provided in color, as GIFs and PDFs, but will apparently print out nicely in grayscale.
Mmmm Code Snippets
Code Snippets is an online resource, providing a central user-writable repository for chunks of reusable code. A stroll through the language-agnostic site provides a plethora of tasty bits and bytes from many programming languages and frameworks. Each snippet can be tagged and each tag can be followed via RSS. Users can comment on snippets as well, which is invaluable for anyone deciding whether or not they want to try out a piece of code.
Floating books
Adding a small stack of books to the invisible bookshelf hides the hardware, creating the illusion that the books are floating in place. Look ma, no hands!
CSS 2.1 Properties reference
The CSS 2.1 Properties Reference from Cultured Code provides a compact package of CSS specs and their meanings.
Are you the GuideMaster?
Both Draftsman and GuideMaster from AV Bros. look to be very useful for users of Photoshop when the need to create horizontal and/or vertical grids arises, which is damn near every project. Draftsman creates selections within your document, while GuideMaster places guides. I just downloaded the demo versions of each to tinker with them and have been pleasantly surprised. There are a couple of features I would like to see, namely I think Draftsman should provide the option to output as vector objects instead of selections. Also, I think it should mimic Guidemaster’s functionality which allows the designer to use percentage-based values (one third, a quarter…) in addition to the currently supported fixed values (24px). I need to do a bit more testing, but one, if not both should prove to be a worthwhile investment.