pentangeli

Sometimes when I needed to apply border to something, or apply a stroke within a indent of a border, or I just needed to crop a few pixels from the edges of an image, I would often select > select all > select > modify > Contract... however CS4 has other ideas. It's grayed out, which is like, really helpful. One way I've found to get around this obvious glitch was to create an action. I'd record a quick mask "q" and then select all and then edit stroke 1px and then exit quick mask. Save the action and assign a key on the keyboard to run it. Then once you're off the 1pixel edge, you can use modify> contract as usual. Slightly messy but you only need to record the action once and then you have it at a key stroke. Problem is, how simple for them to just provide it in the menu (like they did in the all the past versions?) Guess they have more important things to be getting on with, like fighting with apple over propeitary greed and not providing cs5 for older architextures.

Adobe are pretty notorious for their installation rigmarole. I've heard lots of complaints from people over the years, most support came to the tune of "if your software is pirated etc etc" but that's not always the case. Many issues came from adobe themselves with straight-out-of-the-box retail installations, and amusingly, the problems were often created by adobe themselves in their previous installations of the same exact software (suite). Me and several others really struggled to installed CS3 on mac computers, when it first came out. Realizing the depth of this problem, one which continues to this day, adobe released the "clean css" script, which requires you to removes previous adobe components from previous adobe versions from previous adobe installations before you can install the newest one. On a few occasions, the latter version had been completely removed (so we thought) but adobe had obviously littered the hard drive with invisible files and hidden folders, requiring the clean css script to remove them. So talking of nefarious, takes two to tango. They place a lot of unsolicited hidden callbacks on your computer, without your express permission or knowledge. But hey, you're the pirate. Right?

There's no real right way to get an irregular surface (like paper) to repeat without obvious patterns beginning to appear once it's been tiled many times, but there is many programs and applications which will attempt to make a seamless tile from whatever image you give it (I suggest no more 100px by 100px) you can go up or down a fair bit in size but realistically, anything a lot larger isn't even worth tiling. I would let the app (texture magic for mac is good) attempt to make a seamless tile for you, then I'd definitely take it into photoshop and refine it. You can test it in there. Simple open the tile it generated, go to "Define pattern" and define it as a pattern. Extend the canvas area to a really big size and go to Fill from the top menu and select the pattern you've just defined, you'll now see how seamlessly it tiles. No doubt it'll have a few problems (edge or center). Edge problems will be it not repeating uniformally (like black sharp artifacts going into lighter parts of the next tile on the mirrored edge) or center problems (there's a lot of detail in the center of the tile creating a kind of "tapestry" effect all over once tiled (which looks horrible). So with tiling, less is more. less detail in the center and experiment with making the edges bleed into each other, around all 4 sides until the transition is truly "seamless". Concerning your question, you should use the background attachment to be either fixed or scrolling and to repeat both x and y with the css background image property in the body selector and you could then maybe use an absolute relative div overlay with a transparent background to hold a png image with an alpha channel to show the background tiling through it. This is a method of having images with transparency which seem part of the background yet are free of it's restrictions. For example, you could have the background scroll beneath a banner. Forgive me if I misunderstood as the link to the example blog you posted wasn't there. This method is pretty simple though. Seamlessly tile a background with css styling and use positioned divs to add unique fixed or otherwise details to them. Any background larger than a large image slice tends to load really slowly, unless it's a gif which is a horrible image format for detail. A low resolution jpeg can offer some suitable results but you should always be tiling smaller background images (taking phones and laptops into account) most of the world will never see your 1024 by whatever slower loader.

One time when my ISP was doing maintenance I did the usual scan for local unprotected wireless networks in the hope that I could piggyback one or two and at least check my emails that I knew were awaiting my response. I did manage to find one unprotected one. A local router presumably administered by some technophobe seemingly providing the entire neighbouring area with free internet access. It was terribly slow and unusable (google took about 12 minutes to load) but alas it was the only means of internet I could find in my hour of need. So I tried a few router admin ip addresses usually of the 192.168.x variety, and lo and behold the router's homepage loaded instantly telling me that the signal was good, just maybe about 50 different households locally were also piggybacking and draining this guy's resources to the limit. I figured since he was obviously so inept in protecting and it being such a simple proceedure, he'd maybe not changed the default password (which is nothing, just return in the text area) and true enough, I was logged right in. So I set about doing him (me haha) a favor and turning off his UPnP and maybe kicking a few of these greedy piggybackers (seemed like there was laptops on here running torrents and uploading gbs).So I did that. I admined the page for him. All koser at this point. Changed his signal to a lower channel. Turned off his automatic plug n play. Closed a few open ports, booted a few IPs and reset and let it restart with such an improved speed and signal. This was now on a par, if not faster than my own wireless network. So I became his admin for the next few days, repeatedly maintaining his network and keeping it clean and safe and fast, yet still unprotected. What kind of uber geek hacks into somebody's network and troubleshoots tech support eh?So this geek did I guess, until one night I was expierencing a slower than usual connection and checked in to see what the problem area was. It seemed somebody else had the same idea as me and was admining his router to provide for his needs. There was a ton of new ports opened and an ip set for the DMZ. This is war! So I changed the password (I'd change it back after I'd dealt with this rival piggybacker overlord) and went to attatched devices area and blocked him by his MAC address ensuring that he could never reenter this gentlemen's network and configure it again for his fat, greedy self. As soon as I blocked him I lost connection.I'd blocked him alright, but he was me.Doh. Now nobody can access that router page, because genius here changed the password to something only I know and can't access.Double doh.You know what two doh's make? A dead extinct bird popularly refered to in the "as dead as..." idiom.