Osiblog

I started to convert some of my old 35mm negatives into digital images. Just as a test I stuck a negative on the window and made a picture of it using my 5D. Then the trouble started, Lightroom does not have a “invert colours” option. Lucky for me I found a website with a handy preset which does the trick. Keep in mind that all your sliders invert as well. This means that if you want to make your picture brighter you should lower the aperture slider.

Photography Adobe Lightroom

Today I added a new Mac section on http://www.basvandijk.eu/mac/. This section might be helpful for people who just started using a Mac and do not yet know which software can be useful.

Software apple, mac, OSX

Angry IP scanner is a free network scanner which supports Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. It has an intuitive GUI which makes it easy to use. You can download Angry IP scanner here, more screenshots are available here.

Software Linux, OSX, Software, Ubuntu, windows

If for example Pages crashes telling you and error occurred with the SFWordProcessing plugin. The steps below might be a solution:

1. Make sure all applications are closed!
2. Open Font book.
3. Scroll down to the Hoefler font and ctrl + click on it.
4. Choose “Remove Hoefler Text Family”
5. Download the new Hoefler font.
6. Extract the Hoefler.zip file and place it in: Macintosh HD/Library/Fonts
7. Launch Pages or iWeb and the everything should work as usual.

Hoefler

Software apple, font, iweb, OSX, pages

According to themselves Colourlovers.com is “a resource that monitors and influences color trends”. This website looks a bit like Adobe’s Kuler, but Colourlovers supports patterns and palettes. See the colourlovers website for yourself at the website.

Colourlover.com screenshot

Graphic design, web colours

When I started to use my HP Color LaserJet CM1312 MFP it turned out that manual duplex printing was not exactly working. Page 1 had page 7 on the back etc. The problem was that the printer prints its pages in opposite direction, starting with the last page. I spend lots of time seaching for a solution. I found this website, which descibes how to change your printer driver in order to print from 1 to n. Here are the steps you need to do…

Read more…

general Color LaserJet CM1312, duplex, hp, OSX, printing, tutorial

Quite some time I am playing the guitar. I have an acoustic and electric one (a black Ibanez EXR-170 for those interested). A friend of mine recommended practicing pentatonic scales. I looked up some link and started practising, this improved my guitar solo skills for sure. Here are the links I found:

Overview of the pentatonic scales:

• all five positions used in pentatonic scales
• some more theory about pentatonic scales
• chord finder which does support looking up pentatonic scales
• list with full penatonic scales in tab

Backing music which can be used to practise solos

• Blues backing track in E
• Blues backing track in E (fast)
• Blues backing track in C

Video Tutorial

• Playing blues solos over the whole neck in C

Ibanez EXR-170

general, guitar guitar, music, pentatonic scales

Synthesia is a very cool game for beginner, novice and expert piano players. At first sight it looks a little bit like Guitar Hero, but now it is used for piano. Here are some more screenshots. Nice about synthesia is that it is free. The free version can load all the midi files you want, but does not show any sheet music. If you want to see the sheet music you have to buy Synthesia for $18.

Synthesia screenshot

Software free, music, piano, Software

I have a Wacom tablet which a very nice pointing device when drawing vector images, but did you know you could paint with it as well? MyPaint and ArtRage are both great tools to paint virtually. Unfortunately MyPaint is not available for the OSX platform. Interested? Check out the examples made in MyPaint and ArtRage.

MyPaint screenshot

Artrage screenshot

Graphic design, Software artrage, mypaint, paint, wacom

You might know Aptana, which is a free, on Eclipse based Javascript IDE. Aptana has several nice features like autocompletion and code formatting. You might know Lint as well. Lint is a tool which checks your code from well known coding errors which do not necessarily cause weird program behaviour. It turned out there is JSLint as well, which is Lint for Javascript. The nice thing is that Aptana natively supports JSLint code verification. Out of the box Aptana uses the Mozilla Javascript Validator.

In order to change your validator launch Aptana and click Window -> Preferences. Then goto Aptana -> Editors -> Javascript -> Validation. Now check the JSLint checkbox. Click [Apply] and you are good to go. You might want to uncheck the Mozilla Javascript checkbox.

Aptana preferences window

general aptana, javascript