Down By Design

I just published my first instructable to Instructables.com - “The World’s Biggest Show & Tell”.

My post details how to make a speaker for your iPod with a Hallmark Music card and a variety pack cereal box.

Find out how to make your own.

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5! Of course the WordPress peeps made it super easy. Not to mention the admin interface is just gorgeous - it feels powerful, but out of your way at the same time.

The fact that my old theme isn’t being shown is not a byproduct of the upgrade, but rather a deliberate omission on my part in an attempt to wipe the slate in preparation of my own WP theme. Wish me luck.

Last post, I talked about my paranoia with getting on-line away from home and how I needed to take some steps to secure my browsing. I found some sites that did a really nice job of explaining all of this, but I found that I was jumping around a lot to get the configuration I thought was best. So, I put together these steps with security and ease of installation in mind.  …  Read the rest of this entry »

With my latest Eee PC purchase, I’ll definitely find myself jumping online at all sorts of different hot spots across town. Subsequently, I’ve decided that I need to up my security efforts. Over the next few posts I’m going to put together the pieces for safely accessing the internet while on the road. None of us want sidejacked, do we? In this four, to maybe five, part series I’ll cover:

• Creating an SSH server using an old PC
• Configuring the laptop to use a SOCKS proxy
• Tunneling DNS traffic
• Setting up dynamic DNS with a custom domain
• How to look tough while using a pearl-white 7″ laptop (be warned, this might require sleeveless t-shirts and possibly a gunslinger mustache)

Is this a lot of work to prevent the soccer mom sipping a double foam, extra hot latte from capturing packets? Perhaps yes, but the peace of mind will certainly be worth it.

Nintendo is cleaning up in sales, no questions asked. In fact, the DS just broke it’s own single week sales record. Greenpeace, on the other hand, would like to see Nintendo clean up their products (did you like how I did that there with the “clean up” transition - nice, right). In its sixth edition of ‘Guide to Greener Electronics‘, Nintendo debuted on the report and recorded the first ever 0/10.

At first, I was unsettled by this and thought about how lazy Nintendo was for not making a better effort to be green. Then I read this article from Ars Technica where they make the point that Greenpeace just might be the lazy ones here (”lazy” - I did it again. I’m on fire). It seems that all of the Greenpeace scoring was based solely on Nintendo’s “protecting the environment” entry on their Corporate FAQ page. The PDF report from Greenpeace on Nintendo gives you the option of “More Info” for sections of the scoring, but instead of being directed to significant Greenpeace findings citing exact Nintendo environmental shortcomings, you’re taken straight to the Nintendo FAQ. Huh???

Laziness aside, with all of the “green” talk these days, I’m sure Nintendo will respond positively in an effort to crush this bad publicity. At the very least, some intern is going to be updating the FAQ page for the next month.

Thanks DS Fanboy for the find.

Fishwreck and I were discussing the fact that Apple is taking pre-orders for Leopard today when I realized that I wasn’t familiar with ALL of the features shipping with the new OS. Thanks to the Diggnation, I found this Apple page listing all 315 new features. Enjoy!

Normally, we’d let You So G handle this one, but it’s just too perfect for DbD. This is the video for Loop Duplicate My Heart from Suburban Kids With Biblical Names. I like these guys and I think you will too.

I’m happy to announce the launch of JustinSeiter.com! This Blogger powered blog will cover more “life in general” posts. As you know, DbD handles all the super techy stuff and YouSoG — well, YouSoG does whatever the heck it wants — JustinSeiter.com will handle all the other crazy that’s in my brain and in my world. Like this post on a vintage Califone record player that I’ve grown to love.

JustinSeiter.com will feature the latest posts from both DbD and YouSoG in the form of RSS feeds in the side bar. This gives all of my loyal readers a nice landing page to keep up with my family of sites. It also contains feeds from my Twitter, Flickr and YouTube accounts.

To give this post the tech it deserves, I should mention that this launch is mainly an effort to boost my name in Google rankings. The problem is that a guy from my same home town with the same name was quite the athlete in high school and college. So a Google search for our name returns all kinds of baseball and basketball stats and stories. Not that I wasn’t a fine athlete myself, my performances just weren’t quite as news worthy I suppose. Moving on, in my field (webernet technologies and communications) it’s highly likely that I’ll be “Googled” when I apply for a job. Not that it would be bad to be confused with a great athlete, but I’d rather give a potential employer a direct link to THE Justin Seiter.

Shameless plug — Please help me fight the battle to overcome the evil Justin Seiter and link to JustinSeiter.com on your website or blog. Thank you for your support!

UPDATE — As fishwreck pointed out, I neglected to show you the evil in action. Don’t worry, it won’t last long. ; )

UPDATE — I’M NUMBER THREE! Two more spots to conquer.

Downbydesign.com has always been a realm free of spam. This was mostly due to lack of content, but nevertheless, we were spam free. However, the sanctity of this great land has come under attack by used car spam from the likes of Achilles and other mortals such as Evis and Gondikas. Maybe they were deities? Who cares, because I’ve ridded our great state of these 1992 Corolla pushin’ spammers with the help of the God of Spam Killing himself, Akismet.

Armed with the knowledge that 93% of all comments are spam, Akismet has slain 2,556,840,066 spam scum and counting. After I sacrificed a virgin in the name of Akismet, (i.e. - I created a WordPress account to get an API key, a necessary component for the Akismet plugin) the all powerful Akismet agreed to watch over my blog.

If Akismet is not strong enough to resist the hordes of spam, I will summon the powers of reCAPTCHA to bring peace once more.

All hail Akismet!

With the recent launch of Reflected Signal (site dedicated to photographic observations of life) and c-m-h.net’s purchase of a big boy Cannon, I thought I’d write up a post on a little Photoshop trick I found a few months back.

I’m awful at taking pictures and I’m even worse at trying to adjust the color after the fact. This is now much less painful thanks to Unfocused Brain’s post, “Improve your photography with classical art“.

I was able to take this photo taken at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center….

match color from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks…

and I got this…

Side by side (click to see larger views)…

Now Crazy Stairs has come alive and we get a feeling of just how “crazy” it is. The best part is that it took no time flat to produce the enhanced image.

Another example where I used Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus…

This is a much more subtle approach as opposed to what I did with Crazy Stairs but you can see that dresses are poppin’ and cheeks are rosy! Not that these ladies needed any help from me ; )

Here are the Photoshop steps (brain has the screenshots if you need them):

1. Load the art image.
2. Load your photo.
3. Make sure your photo is the active one.
4. Image > Adjustments > Match Color…
5. Select the art work as the source.
6. Adjust “Image Options”.
7. Click OK once you’re satisfied.

I have by no means mastered this technique. However, if you check out Brain’s post (which was just short of 1600 diggs) and his Flickr page, you’ll see the full potential of this method. I found that it’s best to load up a 3 or 4 of your art images so that you can play with various sources while color matching your photo.

If you try it out and find some success, please post links to your work in the comments.

Justin on Flickr