madbadcat | DigitalAppleJuice

What is Growl and why is it installed on my mac?

February 15, 2011 By madbadcat 1 Comment

I bought the family pack of Snow Leopard prior to launch. And yet, for someone who has packed up and moved across the country as well as out of the country at a moment's notice, I am resistant to change. At least where my computer is concerned. David Allison and Dr. Roach both upgraded immediately upon receipt and detail their process in separate posts: UPGRADING TO SNOW LEOPARD by David Allison Snow Leopard: One More Installation by Dr. Roach In both cases, the upgrade didn't seem … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Photoshop, Software Tagged With: Adobe, CS5, growl, mac OS X, photoshop, snow leopard

2010 Speed Racer™ International Art Competition

September 7, 2010 By madbadcat 1 Comment

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I watch cartoons. When I was younger I watched Looney Tunes in the afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons late into my college years. Later, weekdays 4:30pm was "time for Animaniacs" and my zeal for Yakko, Wakko and Dot infected the whole office causing the daily afternoon work stoppage. Now its Family Guy, South Park, Wallace & Grommett, and ,yes, Shaun The Sheep. So I was immeditely drawn (***groan**) to the recent(ly found) … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Commerce, Digital Lifestyles, Sequential Art Tagged With: art competition, art competition prizes, art contest, cartoon art competition, cartoon art contest, cartoon competition, cartoon contest, competition for artists, contest for artists, drawing competition, drawing contest, enter art competition, illustration competition, illustration contest, Maximillian Gallery 2010 Speed Racer international art competition, painting competition, painting contest, photography competition, photography contest, Speed Racer art, Speed Racer art competition, video competition, video contest

Is it a question of free speech?

August 3, 2010 By madbadcat 1 Comment

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has threatened Wikipedia with legal action if the online encyclopedia doesn't remove the FBI's seal from its site. The seal is featured in an encyclopedia entry about the FBI. "In a letter dated July 22, and also posted online by the Times, the FBI told Wikipedia it must remove the bureau's seal because the FBI had not approved use of the image. "The FBI has not authorized use of the FBI seal on Wikipedia," the letter says. "The inclusion of a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Headline Tagged With: fbi, seal, wikipedia

A Quick Look at EPS Quicklook

May 10, 2010 By madbadcat 2 Comments

Right now, all I want is to be able to quickly scan my folder of EPS files to find what I need. I know it's in there. I just can't remember the filename. I have Leap. It's a great app- a musthave for anyone who works with images and graphics. (read Wendy's review called Getting Organized: Deep. Yep. and Leap. by Ironic) But right now, I just want to scan some EPS files in this #$@%^& folder! I know the thing I want is in that folder. It is and I don't want to launch another app … [Read more...]

Filed Under: MacOsX, Software Tagged With: eps, folder, images, mac, MacOsX, preview, quicklook, slideshow, thumbnail

Preview: WordPress 3.0

April 28, 2010 By madbadcat 1 Comment

I was very excited when I read of Wordpress 3.0 multi-site network capabilities, so much that I had to install it to find out how it worked. How could I not? Wordpress 3.0 even has its own meme. Don't blame the kitteh. Wordpress Beta Plugin I first installed the Wordpress Beta Plugin on one of madbadcat.org's test sites and upgraded to the latest build of 3.0. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Wordpress, Workflow Tagged With: apple, beta, beta-testing plugin, magazine theme, wordpress, wordpressMU, wp3.0

Why I got rid of my HP b9180

April 19, 2010 By madbadcat 5 Comments

It's a lovely printer, the HP b9180 is. When I finally understood the printer's need for control and set the color management to "Printer controls color", the blacks came out smooth and velvety, the print always true to what I saw on the screen. Since that fateful discovery, I have yet to see a single horizontal track streaking across large fields of color in a print. Image quality is superb. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Gadgets, Graphics, Hardware, Workflow Tagged With: b9180, epson, Photography, printer, r2400, Ultrachrome K3, Vivera

Keeping Up With Google: Speed a Factor in Page Rank

April 13, 2010 By madbadcat 3 Comments

I was reading my morning news website yesterday when I ran across a link to an article entitled "It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor" posted at SearchEngineland.com . It seems that Google has responded to results of numerous studies over the years that concluded that even a half second delay in delivering content will result in shorter. For instance, as part of their own internal experiment, Google slowed down their own search results by 100 to 400 MILLISECONDS, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Resources, SEO, Wordpress, Workflow Tagged With: caching, cpanel, firefox, firefox plugin, google, gzip, page rank, plugin, search engine, SEO, Techpp.com, wibiya, Yslow

Ask the Photographers #2 : Flashlight Graffiti

March 5, 2010 By madbadcat 2 Comments

I was doing my level best to get nothing done yesterday. As I was gleefully stumbling away I came across A.Pic.Co.Tv's Art blog's post Picasso's Light Graffiti published by Life Magazine. So I had to ask, seeing as I am definitely photographically challenged, how was this done? I emailed my esteemed colleagues... Britt Stokes, boy genius, responded in a split second. He opened the lens in a relatively dark room, drew with a flashlight, then a flash was fired at the end of the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Photography Tagged With: Britt Stokes, Dr. Michael N. Roach, Flashlight, Graffiti, Life Magazine, Pablo Picasso, Photographers

Slidepress- A Fully Customizable, Dynamic Media Player for WordPress

March 2, 2010 By madbadcat 6 Comments

Slidepress is just the latest offering from Dominey Design, a web development company in Atlanta. Their main focus- AKA obsession- is Slideshowpro- a quick and easy and versatile Flash-based slideshow application available as a Flash Component and a standalone xml-driven swf. Plus they offer an web application called Slideshow Director- a database-driven image and video management application for installation on your won web server. Dominey's vision is vast- when you purchase any of their … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: Dominey, error 1054, Flash, mysql, navThumbLinkBackgroundColor, plugin, Slidepress, slideshow, slideshow plugin, slideshowpro, slideshowpro director, slideshowpro.net, swf

For Flash Users: crossdomain.xml maker, finally!

February 3, 2010 By madbadcat Leave a Comment

It's so simple, so brilliant, why didn't anyone think of this before? A while back and few version ago, new preacutions were added to Flash player 7: a flash movie playing inside a browser would not be allowed to access data outside the exact domain in which .swf resides. By default, .swf files can't even read from subdomains, or even parent domains if the swf is located in a subdomain. With this new security measure, Macromedia (now Adobe) added the use of the cross domain policy file, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Software, Workflow Tagged With: adobe flash, crossdomain xml, Flash, slideshowpro, swf

Review: Crossbrowsertesting.com

February 1, 2010 By madbadcat 1 Comment

Since I have already sang their praises, this is more of an introduction to Crossbrowsertesting.com than a review. Best described as a Browser Compatibility Lab, this online service offers a place to test a website on just about every browser- operating system combination. It offers two types of testing: interactive (to test ajax, javascript, and flash) and screenshots (which verifies layouts across all browsers). The site offers three (3) pricing plans which all include access to their … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews, Wordpress, Workflow Tagged With: apple, browser check, Screenshot, Web browser, Web design, Web Design and Development

WordPress Plugins for the Media Library

January 19, 2010 By madbadcat 1 Comment

Getting The Most of Wordpress' Media Library After a couple of years of faithfully using Dean's FCK Editor, we changed over to Tiny MCE Advanced Plugin- mostly because we wanted to take advantage of the new timthumb auto-thumbnailer coding of our new Arthemis Premium theme. (Though if I had read this post by Justin Tadlock, Boy Genius, I would have probably stuck with my Studiopress theme...) Tiny MCE Advanced Plugin This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ wysiwyg … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Wordpress Tagged With: media library, plugins, pullquotes, tinymce, upload folder