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Tilt-shift photos made easy

Tobi — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:50:08 +0000

Did you ever wonder, how you can make Tilt-shift photos on your own? Maybe without exepensive camera equipment? Then you should definitely have a look at Tiltshiftmaker.

A photo of a beach in Gran Canaria I took in 2007 – tilt shifted with Tiltshiftmaker.

Tilt-shift style miniature photos are simply photos of real life scenes that are made to look like miniature scale models. This is done using either a special camera lens (one with tilt capability), or with software, instead of a special lens. These photos are sometimes called “fake” miniatures, because they are pictures of real-life scenes.

Thanks to Magnus Jepsen for discovering this free tool to tilt-shift your photos.

Use unique passwords and save them in a password manager!

Tobi — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:19:35 +0000

Today every second website has a closed area where you can register yourself and create a username and password for it. Perhaps you have your own blog (or more of them) and there you probably have an administration account, which also needs username and password. Or think about email and ftp. With more and more websites needing login data to use them, it gets harder to remember this credentials correctly. So what are you doing to avoid this problem? Can you remember all your passwords for every site you registered on? You say yes? Then maybe you only have one master-password – which isn’t good at all.

Use unique passwords

You should have unique passwords for each service you use to be on the safe side. When a website got hacked and user data has been stolen, you don’t have to rush and change all the passwords from your other services, since you have an unique one for each.

Use a password manager

I assume you have separate passwords for your websites or the services you use. Now what to do with them? You can write them down on paper, but that’s not really safe, since everyone can read this plaintext-message. A better way is to use a password manager, where you can store all data for your different accounts. You will need one master password to get access to the data in one of that tools. But one password should be easy to remember for everyones brain.

I would like to introduce two password management tools to you, which make handling passwords a piece of cake.

KeePass and KeePassX

KeePass is a free password management tool for Windows and Linux and KeePass is Open Source (OSI certified). It keeps all your data encrypted in one database. The database can be accessed with one single password or a key file.

There is also a port for Mac OS X available, called KeePassX. Some Screenshots of KeePassX can be found on their website. But for me, KeePassX looks a little bit odd on OS X.

1Password

The most used password safe on Mac OS X is probably 1Password. This tool costs $39,95 but is worth the buy. It saves user/password combinations and builds on OS X Keychain. It is directly integrated into the main browsers so you can access your passwords very quick.

1Password provides an additional iPhone / iPod touch version. So you have your passwords everywhere you go. You can sync 1Password touch with the Mac Version over WiFi very easily. And the iPhone App is available for free.

Conclusion

Password management should be very comfortable and secure. With the help of these tools, you can remember very complicated passwords, to keep your website accounts and the corresponding data safe.

Download a CSS Book for free

Tobi — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:27:42 +0000

Sitepoint currently offers one of its bestseller books as a free PDF download – The Art & Science Of CSS. To get the book you have to follow Sitepoint at twitter. With this so called “twitaway” promotion, you can save 29,95$. You don’t have a twitter account? Look at http://twitaway.com for more information, how to get this free download.

I just had a quick look into the book, but I think it’s very complete. It covers the important parts you need to know when working with CSS and also gets into the trickier things like valid forms or rounded corners.

So follow Sitepoint and get the free book. The download will only be availabe for 5 more days from now on. After that time you have to buy it.

By the way, Sitepoint also has a great CSS Reference online. Maybe it is also worth a look for you.

Kick-off for OpenWebDesign.de

Tobi — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:25:21 +0000

Finally I got it working! I installed Wordpress 2.7 and did the basic configuration, so this website has now more than a “Check back later” message. The next step will be searching for a wordpress theme, that fits the topic of this blog.

On OpenWebDesign.de i will write about all things around webdesign and webdevelopment. This includes graphical things, programming tips and application reviews. Actually I don’t know how regularly I can post here, but I will try to do it once a week at least.

I hope I will write about things, that others are interested in too. So don’t be shy and leave comments here.