I just installed a bluetooth card and Airport Extreme card in my first generation Mac Pro. It’s actually fairly simple once you know where to look (using this article as a basic guide). What I did have trouble with is finding out what size of mounting screw was required. I ordered both cards from DV Warehouse but I guess I failed to inquire about mounting hardware.

An exhaustive search online revealed nothing about the thread size so I took the smallest machine screw I had (about an M2.5) and wondered down to Huron Fasteners and told them I needed something smaller. They gave me a sample M2 to take home and try and sure enough that was the right size.

So for anyone else looking for this information, a first generation Mac Pro requires “M2-0.4 x 4″ mounting screws to install a wifi and bluetooth card. Hope this helps.

To read more about the actual installation, read this article — How To: Installing an Airport Extreme Card in an Intel Mac Pro « Meandering Passage.

new level of geekdom, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.

I am a bit of a business card junkie and a moo card junkie at that, so any excuse to print more is a good enough excuse for me. When Chris showed me this inspired design a few weeks back, I had to get them printed.

The idea is that as web professionals, our websites are our business cards, and those small bits of paper we hand out are just little notes to tell people to go there. So why not play with that idea, bringing a piece of the web to our cards. It’s not a completely original idea, you can find a few examples out there, but I’ve yet to see an executable business card (granted I haven’t really looked all that hard).

Chris’ original concept had the contact info in HTML, but it didn’t really say “me”. So I set out to make something a little more fun — an executable business card with all the code required to run my contact info in a web browser. Fun huh? Glad you thought so.

So if you’re interested in making your own executable business card (as a number of people have expressed already), I’ve made the source code available here, and you can see how it runs here. Use it as a spring board to do something really cool.

Obsessive designer? You may have noticed: icons made in Mac OS X 10.6 are often washed-out/lighter.

Normally we create .png files of each icon state, then drag them into Icon Composer. But, starting with 10.6, the colors would lighten unexpectedly. It wasn’t dramatic, but with certain icons (like the one below) it was totally noticeable. The source is on the left. See how the red is washed out in the final icon on the right?

via Panic Blog » Saving Icons for Snow Leopard.

With the [just fresh news][a_100727131834] of the W3C’s new [Unicorn validator][a_100727133050] I thought I would jump right in and make myself a couple of new bookmaklets to utilize the new validation platform. I thought I could share them with you.

* The General Conformance Check (drag to bookmarks bar): [Unicorn-GC][a_100727132204]
* The CSS Profile Validation (drag to bookmarks bar): [Unicorn-CSS][a_100727132437]
* The MobileOK Checker (drag to bookmarks bar): [Unicorn-MB][a_100727132828]
* The Feed Validator (drag to bookmarks bar): [Unicorn-FD][a_100727132928]

[a_100727131834]: http://www.w3.org/News/2010.html#entry-8862
[a_100727133050]: http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/
[a_100727132204]: javascript:void(open(‘http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/check?ucn_uri=’+escape(document.location)+’&ucn_task=conformance#’))
[a_100727132437]: javascript:void(open(‘http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/check?ucn_uri=’+escape(document.location)+’&ucn_task=full-css&warning=no&usermedium=all#’))
[a_100727132828]: javascript:void(open(‘http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/check?ucn_uri=’+escape(document.location)+’&ucn_task=mobileok#’))
[a_100727132928]: javascript:void(open(‘http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/check?ucn_uri=’+escape(document.location)+’&ucn_task=feed#’))

Swinging on the monkey bars, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.

I’ve long since been displeased with Photoshop, so much so that my last version was from CS3. Until recently there hasn’t been any hopeful contenders to step in the ring, but the release of [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) 1.6 has certainly got a lot of peoples hopes up.

I don’t work in photo editors all that much anymore and I don’t get much into graphics since working with Chris at DEVi8.design, so granted my needs are light. But still, I know what I want in an image and I want to be able to get it out. I want an editor that makes that process intuitive.

Yesterday I blogged about making a high pass filter in [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) and honestly I had not done it the manual way in years, but I had no trouble at all finding what I was after in [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”). I cannot say the same of Photoshop.

Well this is the image I was working on. All I wanted was a high pass filter to sharpen up the eyes, a little vignette (which I will blog about making a convincing vignette next week), some color pop and a little bit of exposure tweaking. I can honestly say that it took me no more time or effort then it would have in Photoshop. In fact, I’m convinced that it was far less stressful.

So how do I think [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) will stack up in the pro world? It’s still a little light. Graphic designers used to making rich icons courtesy of Photoshops confused vector tools (yes that’s me) will be looking for a proper vector editor if they dropped Photoshop all together. And there is something to be said for Photoshops layers styles and smart filters which I haven’t been able to reproduce in [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) (someone point them out if they exist please), but honestly those were nothing you couldn’t do with masks and a little know-how.

I think [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) has a way to go before becoming every photographers sweetheart but it’s very exiting to see how far they have come in such a short time. I’m putting smart money on [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) being a real thorn in Adobe’s side in 3 to 5 years.

**EDIT:** *Before this tutorial even got cold, the Pixelmator Tutorial Podcast picked up the technique and improved on it! Be sure to [check out their slightly different method](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae29SOl8lqU “YouTube – Creating a High Pass filter in Pixelmator”) which allows for greater control by allowing you to visualize the sharpening effect.*

I recently canned Adobe Photoshop and switched to [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”). No, [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) is not yet everything that Photoshop is. It is missing key items like vector tools (one could argue that Photoshop should not have had them anyway), but [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) is catching up really fast. [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) might even have a leg up on Adobe in a number of areas — like that fact that is looks, smells and feels like a Mac app from *this* decade.

One thing I found missing that I use quite regularly in photo enhancement work is the high pass filter. A high pass filter is a great way to add some sharpness to your images if you find the edges a little fuzzy. You may not be aware, but the high pass filter in Photoshop is little more then an inverted, blurred copy of the original. It’s easy enough to create manually, but having the feature built into Photoshop made it quick and easy.

So my plan is to write some AppleScript to make happen in [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”). Unfortunately [Pixelmator](http://www.pixelmator.com/ “Pixelmator”) doesn’t yet have an AppleScript Dictionary, so such a script is going to have to be done with what we call menu scripting. Until I have time to sort that out though, here is how you manually emulate the high pass filter found in Photoshop.

### 1. Duplicate your original layer (⌘J) ###

### 2. Name the duplicate “high pass” ###

### 3. Remove the color ###
You want to remove the color but preserve the luminescence of the image, so the easiest way to do this is with `Edit > Fill` (⌥⌘F), then choose `black`, and the blending option `color`. Keep the `opacity` at 100% and click ok.


### 4. Duplicate “high pass” (⌘J) and Invert (⌘I) ###

### 5. Add Gaussian blur (`Filter > Blur > Gaussian`) ###
Add as much or as little Gaussian blur to the duplicate as you need. The radius will directly correlate to the number you would have used in your Photoshop high pass filter setting. I typically used between 4 and 20, depending on the amount of sharpening I was after, but you are welcome to go to any extreme you like.


### 6. Set Blending to `Linear Light` and Opacity to 50% ###

### 7. Merge “high pass” layers ###

### 8. Set the Blending of “high pass merged” to overlay and enjoy! ###

Since I went through the arduous, two hour long process of upgrading my iPhone OS to iOS 4, I’ve been nothing but thrilled with what felt like a brand new iPhone 3G. There was just one exception; I couldn’t sync my photos.

I don’t store music on my iPhone. I have little in the way of apps. I don’t keep voice recordings. I use the bulk of my iPhone’s 8 GB of storage space to carry my photos — lots of them.

As an [avid photographer][a_100716073342] I have tens of thousand of photos digitally stored on my Mac Pro going back as early as 2003 (when I started scanning my film onto disk), so I wouldn’t expect my iPhone 3G to carry all that, but prior to the update to iOS 4 I was at least able to sync the photos from 2009 and 2010 (just over 3000 images). Any attempts — 3 thus far — to get any photos on my iPhone resulted hours of, “Syncing seyDoggy’s iPhone” and a candy striped status bar with no progress to report. I literally left it run overnight and woke to no advance in the process.

Clearly something was amiss with iOS 4 so I sought to solve this mystery myself. It took one quick look into the Pictures library where I was drawing these two folders from (2009 and 2010) and noticed a folder called “iPod Photo Cache”. Trashed it. Quickly looked in any other folder I may have synced with my iPhone in the past and trashed them as well.

Back in iTunes I attempted another sync and without blinking an eye, iTunes and my iPhone ticked happily along syncing my photos to phone once again. A quick search on Google for [delete "iPod Photo Cache" iOS4][a_100716075410] turns up oodles of results of others with similar syncing problems, so I clearly was not alone.

Hopefully this helps you out.

[a_100716073342]: http://adam.merrifield.ca/category/photography/
[a_100716075410]: http://www.google.com/search?q=delete%20%22iPod%20Photo%20Cache%22%20iOS4