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Up until now, using a piece of clipart in a one/two color design was a real pain. A complex piece of vector art could take hours to recolor manually in Illustrator. You were limited to searching your clipart book for something you determined easy to use, such as a solid 100% black. Not anymore!

Now you can easily recolor vector art that is CMYK/RGB or Grayscale while retaining tint values by using Adobe Illustrator CS3’s new “Live Color” feature. Perfect for a spot color layout. I had a chance to try this new feature when a customer requested a brown ink business card for his company. The artwork was purchased from a stock image site and only provided as CMYK. See my example below.

1. Open the file in Illustrator CS3 and Select All (CTRL+A)
2. Edit Menu | Edit Colors -> Choose Recolor Preset 1 Color
3. Choose your Pantone library. Leave recoloring option as-is because tint is preserved by default.
4. In the assign tab you can double-click the color swatch to choose a specific Pantone number.

Before (CMYK):

After (Pantone 469 C):

That’s it! You can also recolor with multiple colors/tints and swatch sets, so play around with it. So don’t be afraid you won’t be able to create something interesting when a customer requests a layout for low cost 1-color printing. If done right, a spot color layout is usually more attractive than a full color layout.

Did you know you can create a hard link (aka symbolic link) to a network share in Windows XP? This is undocumented as far as I can tell and was discovered by me on accident. Its very easy.

1. Access the share as you would normally. Hopefully this causes it to show up in “My Network Places.” If it doesn’t, wait a while and try again, I’m not really sure what justifies a link in My Network Places anyway.
2. Open “My Network Places” and drag the location to your Desktop.
3. Done!

You now have a symbolic link (NOT a shortcut) which acts as an actual folder on your Desktop. Its almost like it was “mounted.” Go ahead and move it if you wish. The only way this works is when dragging out of My Network Places.

EDIT: Here is the spreadsheet so you can edit with your own specs: link

I’ve been wanting to rebuild my fileserver/NAS box which has 500GB of movies, music, and pictures. Its got to be fast and cheap, and I also wanted to play with linux RAID. After doing some reading, a RAID5 configuration seemed to be my best bet. I’m also going to go ahead and upgrade the space to about 1TB so I don’t have to worry about expanding for a while. I decided to make a little spreadsheet to figure out which would be the most cost effective way to build a RAID5 array totaling 1TB of usable data. I’ll share it with you.

Goals: Have about 1TB of usable space for as cheap as possible.

As you can see, the 320GB seems to be the best value at or around 1TB. Even though you lost a few gb over the other 3 options, the total cost of the hard drives seems much more affordable. The 250gb is similar in price and gets you a little more space, but the more hard drives you add, the more you risk hard drive failure. As the quantity of hard drives in your box increase, the rate of failure increases. The chance of 1 out of 5 disks failing is greater than 1 out of 4. Additionally, increased temperature, losing an hdd slot, and more stress on the PSU makes 250GB’s really not worth it. Not to mention they are 3 cents more expensive.
Now lets prepare for the future. I already upgraded my 500GB server to 1000GB. What happens when I want to upgrade to 1500GB? Obviously hardware costs will be a little different when that time comes, but just for fun, lets put it on paper.

And 2000GB?

Again and again, the 320GB is best in value. Thats why I went with some WD 320GB RE’s and didn’t look back.

I was disappointed when the display on my new computer with a fresh copy of Vista (not 64bit) looked like a light bulb burned out. A quick google revealed the fix:

Under the Catalyst Control Center, under Colors, if you scroll down there is an option for Black and White Levels. On Vista64, this option is most likely set to PC Standard. Setting it to Microsoft MCE standard will restore the brightness of colors.

Credit goes to this guy: http://www.vistareadygames.com/showthread.php?t=42530

This is a photo collection of nuclear explosions (56 photos)

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Remember the scene in pulp fiction where Samuel L. Jackson shoots that guy in his apartment after yelling at him about Mr. Marseilles? Someone took the audio from that scene and animated their speech using font size, shape, color, and movement to convey emotion.

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Sideshow of NY’s bridges circa 1900-1930.

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Whoever did these is very good at photoshop, you just have to see for yourself.

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WARNING : NSFW (However, awesome design, ideas)
UK Design company Taylor Lane created this twist of pin-up girl calendar by making all of the naughty images using typography!

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Design magazine Before & After shows you how to turn letters into a logo using a variety of techniques. This is cool if you are known by your initials as you can create a stunning signature.read more | digg story