Kremalicious

The successor of the EOS 40D is (almost) here: Canon officially announced the Canon EOS 50D along with the new lens Canon EF-S 18-200/3.5-5.6IS. The EOS 50D and the new lens will be both available in October 2008, Canon says.

The EOS 50D comes with an CMOS APS-C sized sensor (crop factor 1.6) with 15.1 megapixels. Being Canons first DSLR with the new DIGIC 4 image processor the EOS 50D can burst 6.3 shots per second with improved image quality.

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There’s good news for all you Mac OS X Leopard GUI Themer out there. While there’s Panic’s Candybar for icon customization in OS X there is no application to alter all the user interface elements of Leopard. In Tiger there was an application called ShapeShifter but since the whole GUI in Leopard changed it stopped working.

Architect and Façade to the rescue: SlightlyPretentious announced its “Theming made easy”-application Architect is coming as a public beta next sunday (is it 08/31 or 09/07?) on Wednesday, September 3rd. Icon Designer Laurent Baumann already posted a new sweet application icon for this app a while ago and we can expect a nice and good looking solution for theming and customization in Leopard.

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A friend of mine asked me to craft an icon for his external hard drive case and I would like to share those with you too. These desktop icons show the the silver and black Icy Box external aluminium case with USB interface and are intended as a replacement for the generic external hard disk icon in Mac OS X Leopard.

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When on the road I always take a little mobile hard drive with me where all my referenced Aperture Masters from the past years and my mobile Aperture Vault (backing up the un-referenced Masters from the current year) reside. But being little and mobile also means the external hard drive can easily be lost or stolen exposing all my pictures to the thief. To avoid that you can use encryption so in the case of a lost or theft the data is not accessible by the thief. This can easily be done with sparse bundle disk images so you won’t have to encrypt the whole hard drive with additional software.

So in this quick tutorial I will show you how to create an encrypted Aperture Vault by using Sparse Bundle Disk Images and by utilizing tools built into Mac OS X. All this can be done in two simple steps.

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Personally I blog everything with RedSweater’s awesome application MarsEdit. MarsEdit has a cool preview window included where you can see your writing live while you type. The formatting of this preview is based on simple HTML and CSS so the style is pretty customizable.

A while ago I’ve made a custom style for the blog on kremalicious.com and would like to share this style with you. The style is based on the colors used on kremalicious.com with a black background and light grey text on top of it. The links have the same blueish hover style as on my website:

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Earlier this month PictureCode finally released their noise reduction software Noise Ninja as an Aperture plug-in for Aperture 2.1 and above.

The results are just as amazing as they are with the Photoshop plug-in. But the Aperture plug-in uses a streamlined interface which differs from the photoshop version. But the functionality is the same.

You can download a trial version of Noise Ninja for Aperture (images are watermarked with a grid pattern when you save them) and give it a try. The Noise Ninja plug-in for Aperture is available as a part of the Pro Bundle (US$ 79.95) which includes the Photoshop and the Aperture plug-in. If you have an existing Pro Bundle license you can upgrade it for US$ 20 to include the Aperture plug-in license.

Interested in more Aperture plug-ins? Just have a look at my article First overview: Aperture 2.1 adjustment plugins have arrived to get an overview about what’s available at the moment or browse my blog by the Aperture plug-in tag. Additionally you can have a look at the brand new Apple website for all the Aperture plug-ins and ressources.

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Jingjing and Chacha are watching you

As you may know there’s a huge Internet censorship going on in China. Contrary to promises made by chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) this Internet censorship is active during the Olympic Games even in the international media centre. And the IOC shares the current ideas of censorship in China.

And as in every political system with totalitarian elements there’s a good chance you will meet some angry lackeys if you’re going to report about topics the chinese authorities don’t want you to report. But more important they will threat your sources if their identity gets revealed. So if you want to report about the water shortage in the villages around Beijing, the massive air pollution in Beijing or about all the forced resettlements going on in China you should consider some security precautions to protect you and your sources.

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