I came across this photoshop technique today that's fucking easy to duplicate...and produces great results. Works best on raw portrait pictures with high detail and good lighting.

This is a picture i chose to work(in the loosest sense of the work) on a high definition mag scan of a natalie portman photoshoot.

The next photo is after 1 min of editing.

How to do this trick? You start off with a picture in photoshop, duplicate the background layer.

On this 2nd layer you apply a gaussian blur. The amount that needs to be applied relies on the amount of detail. ideally it should be around 10-20. Any more and the effect becomes overly magnified.You should still be able make out the general outline of the object. Go to blending options on the second layer and select overlay. voila.

Other generally good modes to try out include solf light. Which replicates the mood of a 90's soap drama. Like Days Of Our Lifes or something. Hard light is well..harsh. Vivid light gives the feel of an acid trip. So in my opinion overlay is stil best :)

I replicated this on a photography of the recent s1a board games outing. source image is very good coming from a 3 megapixel camera that wasn't my own :) its a tad...bland though.

Hehe.

Winamp tweaks

Ever tried playing japanese or chinese songs your friends give you in winamp but seeing only this ???? - ???? or worse this ‚Ç‚¤‚µ‚Ä‚±‚ñ‚È - ‚ƒ`ƒƒƒCƒ€? Theres a way to fix that! Only works for winxp cos thats the only thing i have now.

First you have to go to date, time, language and regional options in WinXp and select Regional And Language Options. Click on the Advanced Tab and under the language for non-unicode programs option select Japanese, which provides the option of seeing the jap/chinese song title on the taskbar since japanese has kanji (chinese chars) too

By now your media library shld be able to display the jap and chinese titles. Some ??? will still appear occasionally since not all of the chinese chars are available in the japanese char set but you can still play them. the playlist editor uses a diff font from the media library however and for that you have to go to preferences < playlist under there you shld find the option "Use skin or language pack font". Unselect that and under font select Lucida Sans Unicode or any other unicode font and walla! chinese/japanese support. The only thing left remaing is the scroling song title in the main window, but since i couldn't find a tweak for that and i dun really stare at that already.

Now why am i putting this down here? Cause i searched for a frigging long time and found no site that provides this information in a an easily inaccessible form. Plus i'm going thru my mp3 collection and putting proper unicode ID3 tags on them.

i just tried out this new bittorrent client called µtorrent and man this thing is wacked out! it is only 100+kb in size but it is a full feature client in the same vein as azureus and bitcomet. Unfortunately singapore users should currently still stick with bitcomet beacuse of two important features - nat transversal and packet encryption. i'm not sure about other service providers but starhub has this transparent proxy on the server site which messes up the connections to certain trackers. nat transversal punches this hole through and allows two people behind firewalls and proxies to connect to each other. packet encryption disguises bittorrent traffic and allows it to bypass some (not all) university filters.

my download speed on bitcomet is currently 4x as high as those i get on µtorrent but once µtorrent adds these features its gonna be my default client. my sis is always complaining that my downloads are slowing her msn and internet surfing, which is quite true but while using µtorrent i didn't notice any slowdown. average memory usage by bitcomet can reach as high as 15mb but µtorrent only reached 5mb which is a lot considering i only have 96 mb of ram...

I'm thinking of setting up a gmail distribution channel for all our files until jermee gets his server :) since i have 6 gmail invites. Since gmail offers 1 gb of space...we can upload to our hearts content. Bcos evertime one of us finds sth interesting we have to send it from one person to another and then to another thru msn..which is time consuming and quite inefficient actually. And dl from gmail will be a lot faster than dl from someone. the gmail thing would work this way...

Each person would have one individual account and there will be one master account where everyone logs in and uploads stuff. If anyone finds sth interesting on the master account he or she can msg and i can log in and send it to their gmail account. i'm doing this in such a roundabout way instead of just getting ppl to dl fromthe master acc bcos gmail logs the ip of the person who logs into the account and if everyone just dls from the master account then it would look as if we are using it as a http downloader (which we are :) on the other hand if we just upload stuff from diff ips then it would just look like we are accesing from home or work or school.

The only drawback would be that file attachments are limited to 10 mb in size each...so that means no videos :) However music and images would work just fine.

The main beneficiary would be tk i think lol

So wat 'dy-all think?

How to upgrade a com for less than 300...

gRaphICs cArD- Innovision (Inno3D) GeForce4 MX440 64MB DDR (w/TV-out) $74.00
mOthErBoaRd - ABIT NF7 (NVIDIA nForce2) DDR400+AGP8x+ATA-133+IEE1394 $125.00
rAm- Corsair XMS2700 256 MB -333 MHZ $83.00

which comes out to arnd $282....time to start saving