First of all what is HDR?

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.  That’s Wikipedia’s definition on HDR; in fewer and simpler words you have to make three or more pictures of the same subject using different exposures and using a rendering software such as Adobe’s Photoshop you “mix” all the images into a new one for a great visual effect.

Without a good camera you can’t really make good HDR images and that’s why more and more people search for ways to make fake HDR images from only one picture made with a regular camera.

Method no.1

open the image in Adobe Photoshop

duplicate the layer

go to image/Adjustments/ and desaturate the layer (make it black and white)

go to image/Adjustments/invert  (make the layer negative)

apply a gaussian blur filter to the layer (play a bit with the value)

then set the layer to Overlay  and you’re done.

That’s the easiest way to fake and HDR image.

Method no.2

open you image in Photoshop

this step is very important:

go to image/adjustments/shadow/highlight and use the following values:

shadows amount:50%, tonal width 45%,radius 44px;

High-light amount 67%, tonal width 65%, radius 46px;

The values may vary but it’s only a fine tunning

Duplicate this layer and set it to Color Dodge, this will give you strong collors and make the light colors pure white.

Duplicate the layer again, make it linear burn, select black as the foreground color

go to Select/Color Range and set the Fuzziness at about 100

click the mask button from the bottom of the layers window

To correct the noise just select the mask and apply a gaussian filter.

Now you have to duplicate the last layer and make it Overlay, then select the mask and pres Ctrl+i to invert

now all you need to do is play with the opacity for every layer until the image si just right. i can’t give you any values because every image is different….

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OK! So what is Verichip? Well, Verichip was until now a tiny RDIF chip that used to be implanted in pets as a digital under skin TAG, but now Verichip has the FCC approval to be used on humans as well. Some companies in the US have already requested their employees to have the Verichip implanted and probably more will join this Big Brother style of tracking their employees.

Officially there are lots of reasonable applications for this RDIF chip but you can’t stop thinking of all the privacy issues that could come with this.

We’ll show you a video material from CNN that will explain more on this issue!

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The research team from Microsoft has come up with a really interesting way of communicating with your computer, using only a nice piece of software and a regular webcam. This application can sense what the background and the foreground of the video is allowing the use of gestures for a completely natural user interface.

This is really cool because if this software will be developed even further and released to the public you won’t have to buy a new computer or a new screen with touch or multi touch built in it, you’ll only need a webcam that most of us already have on our computers.

This is one of the so many products Microsoft is working on right now for the way we’ll see UIs in the near future, the only thing i can think of right now is what kind of products hide behind the research team from Apple, and how long do we have to wait to see something like this for personal use.

Here is the video:

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The new iMac is hotter than ever, made out of aluminum and glass, with a slick design, even thinner than it’s older brother. Elegant, slim and very trendy the new iMac comes in 4 basic versions:

• 20 inch, 2.0GHz with 1GB memory, 250GB hard drive and the new ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB memory graphical board for just $1,199.00
• 20 inch, 2.4GHz with 1GB memory,320GB hard drive and the new ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory graphical board for  $1,499.00
• 24 inch, 2.4GHz with 1GB memory,320GB hard drive and the new ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory graphical board for $1,799.00
• 24 inch, 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme with 2GB memory, 500GB hard drive  and ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory graphical board for $2,299.00

The new look is amazing, it comes with the new keyboard that is much thinner, made out of aluminum as well with two USB ports built in and a few new keys for the media apps.

Now let’s talk about the apps. Jobs presented the new iLife and iWork ‘08 that come with some upgrades for some of the apps in them and for some completely redesigned new apps.

iLife:

iPhoto - lets you organize your photos in a new way using Events, it gives you a new feature to hide the pictures that you don’t want to delete but still don’t want to have them show up in your face every time you want to look at the pictures from an Event, advanced editing tools to make your photos look even better, super fast and easy upload to your .mac gallery for other visitours to upload or download pictures.

iMovie - the new iMovie is not updated on enhanced, it’s a completely new application designed to help you make great movies with just a few clicks and less time, and it’s great!

GarageBand - create and play with a virtual band using Magic GarageBand,organize sections of your songs with Arrangements, capture the perfect performance with multiple-take recording, use Visual EQ to graphically shape your sound, create high-fidelity recordings with 24-bit audio support, print sheet music with simple notation printing.

iWeb - creating cool websites complete with photo, movies and widgets with a few clicks and a few drags, cool new templates and features.

iDVD - For those that still want to burn DVDs, iDVD  comes with new templates for Hollywood style menus, pro level encoding and higher quality DVDs.

it costs $79 and it comes free with every new iMac.

iWork:

Keynote ‘08Create stunning, cinema-quality presentations more easily than ever with Keynote ’08. Use new animation tools to move and scale images along a path. Or rotate them on the face of a cube or on a turntable. Add dazzling text effects and slide transitions. Even record and deliver narrated presentations.

Pages ‘08

Writing comes naturally when you’re using Pages ’08. Start with one of over 140 templates to write beautiful letters, resumes, reports, business plans, and more. And create media-rich newsletters, brochures, and flyers with point-and-click ease.

and the new app for iWork, a spread sheet that’s innovative, cool and easy to use that lets you organize your data the way you want it and keeps those hard complicated formulas away from you.

Numbers ‘08

• More than 150 functions
• Intelligent tables
• 2D and 3D charts
• Interactive print view
• Apple-designed templates for home, education, and business
• Import from and export to Microsoft Excel and other formats

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Update and test your site while visitors are redirected to the page of your choice:

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 123.123.123.123

ErrorDocument 403 /page.html

<Files page.html>
allow from all
</Files>

Replace 123.123.123.123 with your IP address. Also replace page.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

2 - Display a Custom 404 Error Page

Your server displays a “404 File Not Found” error page whenever a visitor tries to access a page on your site that doesn’t exist.

You can replace the server’s default error page with one of your own that explains the error in plain language and links visitors to your home page. Here’s how to use your own page:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Replace 404.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

3 - Handle Moved or Renamed Pages

You’ve moved or renamed a page on your site and you want visitors automatically sent to the new page when they try to access the old one. Use a 301 redirect:

Redirect 301 /old.html http://yoursite.com/new.html

Using a 301 redirect also ensures the page doesn’t lose its search engine ranking.

4 - Prevent Directory Browsing

When there’s no index page in a directory, visitors can look and see what’s inside. Some servers are configured to prevent directory browsing like this. If yours isn’t, here’s how to set it up:

Options All -Indexes

5 - Create User Friendly URLs

Which of the two URLs below looks friendlier?

http://yoursite.com/about
http://yoursite.com/pages/about.html

When it comes to URLs, as long as the meaning is clear, shorter is always better.

With htaccess and an Apache module called mod_rewrite, you can set up URLs however you want. Your server can show the contents of “/pages/about.html” whenever anyone visits “http://yoursite.com/about”. Here are a few examples:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^about/$    /pages/about.html [L]
RewriteRule ^features/$ /features.php [L]
RewriteRule ^buy/$      /buy.html [L]
RewriteRule ^contact/$  /pages/contact.htm [L]

There’s a lot more to mod_rewrite and htaccess. Check out the links below for more details and tricks.

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1. Akismet
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) Wordpress Plugin is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue, so you never have to worry about spam again.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

2. podPress
The podPress pluggin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

3. Technochrati Tagging
Allows you to use Technorati tags (http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html) in your blog entries by adding a custom field to blog posts. Also allows for tag listings (http://www.technorati.com/tags/) to be added to your website.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

4. Flexible Upload
Flexible Upload is a plugin for Wordpress 2.0.x and 2.1.x to enhance the image upload functionality. It resizes pictures to a specific dimension, creates custom-sized thumbnails, adds an optional watermark signature, and other options
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

5. Google Analytics
The Google Analytics plugin for WordPress lets you easily add Google’s web tracking script to your WordPress powered site.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

6. Mighty AdSense
It will allow you to host the code in WordPress without having to modify the templates. Google Ads are displayed in post item and you can specify how many blocks are going to show up in a page. Ads preview tool is included in the control panel.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

7. Wordpress Video Plugin
This plugin will let you embed Flash Videos (flv) in your WordPress posts/pages. It supports YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, MyspaceTV, Yahoo! Video… and many others!
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

8. Wordpress-phpMyAdmin
This is a simple plugin that will allow you direct access to your WordPress database through phpMyAdmin within your WP admin console. No need to deal with phpMyAdmin setup and login and settings are taken from your WP settings.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

9. Search Pages
This plugin lets your visitors search through posts and pages instead of only posts.
Plugin Page | Download Plugin

10. WP-Print 2.11
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
Download Plugin | Plugin Demo

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Under the spam companies Burnsville Internet and Xpress Pharmacy Direct, Smith allegedly sent more than one billion emails through America Online. The FBI claims he made approximately $18m during his final year as a penis pill pusher. Federal authorities raided Xpress Pharmacy and Smith’s home, seized $4.2m in assets, including a $1.1m house and 17 luxury vehicles worth $1.8m.

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The underlying problem is that the Alexa data is derived from users who use the Alexa toolbar. At the end of the day, the audience is just not large enough, and the dependency on a willingness to install the toolbar introduces a natural bias into the date. My own experience suggests that these problem become worse and worse as you deal with lower and lower traffic level sites. Have a site that gets 20,000 visitors per day? You are not really on the map with Alexa at that level.

Because your competitors are in the same business as you are, the bias problem no longer is a factor to worry about (because the bias will affect all the compares sites equally). For most businesses this will provide a quick way to compare the relative web site traffic levels in their industry. So the accuracy problems are real, but there is still a way to use the tool to extract useful information.

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Here is a great collection of Firefox Extensions for webmasters:

1. Web Developer 1.1.4

This Extension adds a toolbar with some great features for easily editing the CSS, work on the accessibility of your site and other cool features. Get it here!

2. Firefox Accessibility Extension 1.01

Firefox Accessibility Extension makes it easier for people with a disability to view and navigate webpages, but it also helps developers to check the accessibility of their pages. Get it here!

3. SeoQuake 2.0.4

SeoQuake is huge, i use it every single day and it saves me a lot of time. This Extension basically adds a toolbar in the corner of the websites and with the push of a button it expands giving you almost instant information about the way search engines view and index that website, along with statistics from Alexa and other great features for the webmaster that works with Search Engine Optimisation. Also every time you search for something in Google, Yahoo or Msn you’ll get the same statistics under every result. Get it here!

4.Total Validator 4.1

Provides true HTML validation (HTML 2.0 to XHTML 1.1) using the official DTDs, plus added attribute checking. So you no longer have to put up with the limitations of the W3C validator (no type checking) and tools like HTML Tidy which interpret the standards incorrectly (they don’t use the official DTDs).

Also performs accessibility validation (WCAG, US-508), broken link checking, spell checking (5 languages), and takes screenshots using 24 browsers on Windows, Linux, and OS/X. Get it here!

5. KGen 0.2.1

KGen retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears on her and their weight in the page (a word in the title of a page has a stronger weight than a word in a paragraph).

So, you can easily know how to optimize your pages, know what’s the secret of your competitors or simply know what’s the main subject of a webpage.

You can also select some words and transfer them to your clipboard and paste them on tag fields on your favorite social network or fill meta-keywords of your web pages.

To open the KGen sidebar : View>Sidebar>KGen. Get it here!

6. IE Tab 1.3.3.20070528

We all know how frustrating and time consuming is to edit your page especially the CSS file to make your site display correctly in IE as well as in Firefox, this Extension gives you an embedded IE in a new tab!

This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. Get it here!

7. Yet Another Window Resizer 1.1

This Extension helps you view your web page in several resolutions. Get it here!

8. MeasureIt 0.3.6

Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage. Get it here!

9. Clear Cache Button 0.5

Adds a clear cache toolbar button. After installing the extension, find the clear cache button in the toolbar customization panel. YES, this is an extension for the very lazy webmaster! Get it here!

10. Font Finder 0.5a

Simply highlight a single element (e.g. a paragraph or a strong tag ), right-click and select `Font Finder`, then marvel as the full CSS text styling of the selected element appears. Get it here!

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XUL was developed by Mozilla to use for its cross-platform apps like FireFox. XUL was developed for creating UI for apps just like DHTML is used for web page interface. The only complete implementation of XUL can be found in the Gecko layout engine. XUL basically relies on existing web technologies like CSS, JavaScrips and DOM which makes it reasonable easy to master if you have a background in web programming and design.

A XUL interface is typically defined to consist of three discrete sets of components:

• Content: The XUL document(s), whose elements define the layout of the user interface.
• Skin: The CSS and image files, which define the appearance of an application.
• Locale: The files containing user-visible strings for easy software localization.

Drawbacks of XUL:

• The main drawback is the lack or message when errors occurs. The interface just does not display.
• Using RDF to fill widgets is rather difficult.
• Using XPCom, XPConnect is more difficult again.

You can go as deep and you want into XUL on Mozilla’s Introduction to XUL.

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