I have seen tonight's eclipse yesterday...

Yes, I have seen the eclipse happening tonight. Yesterday.

No, I'm not clairvoyant, silly. I'm resourceful. I saw the lunar eclipse, as well as the 9/11/2007 partial solar eclipse (from the best viewing location in the world) and other future celestial phenomena using a software called Starry Night. It's a "planetarium" program that lets you see the night, or day, skies at any given instant (read: past, present, & future) right at the comfort of your desktop. In possession of a telescope? You can also hook it up to Starry Night and let the program control the motion and position of your telescope.

Starry Night sells for about $200 but hey, you can't put a price on education. The amount of information inside this piece of software will have Galileo jumping and dancing with glee like a kid on Christmas Morning.

Now, excuse me, I'm off to watch the real thing...

Wallpapers From Mobile Pictures

Say goodbye to plain desktop wallpapers taken from your mobile phone. With a few steps, you can turn that dull desktop you'd like to cover up with apps into something you'd like to frame.

1. Take a snapshot of your favorite subject or choose a photo from your huge library of cellphone/digital pictures. In my case, I chose this (not so glamorous) shot of myself to demonstrate how a dull, unattractive (to some), picture can turn your desktop into something worthwhile to look at.
   


2. Fire up your favorite image editor and make some adjustments (levels, brightness/contrast, curves) to fine-tune the brightness and overall exposure of your image to the look you want for your desktop. Don't forget to do this all on a duplicate layer so that you can undo your mistakes. For this particular project, I chose a darker, subdued, and slightly reddish look to go with my plan on making the background red (plus my shirt is red in this image).


3. Once that is done, use the pen tool (or your favorite crop tool) to draw a mask around the face so we only select the part of the photo we want on the foreground. Put this on a separate layer.


4. Before we can smooth out the skin for that "magazine model look," we have to remove the major imperfections (like that garish mole on my nose). We can do this easily using the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop or your favorite editor. take care not to remove too much lest you end up looking like a picture-perfect alien.


5. Next, once the major blemishes are taken care of, it's time to smooth out the wrinkles and close the PORES. We do this by once again duplicating the image layer and applying a low-power, low-opacity median filter to our face. This smoothens out the complexion quite a bit so I emphasize low-power, low-opacity (These are not options. What I mean is you lower the median effect radius and the layer opacity until you achieve the desired level of smoothness to your skin). Use the Liquefy filter to modify the shape of your face. Slight modifications work fine, like the one i did to shrink my nose. Don't change your face too much or no one will know it's you.


6. Select the original image layer and duplicate it. To the bottom duplicate, we apply a Gaussian Blur filter, and to the upper one apply a pixelate -> mosaic filter for the pixelated look. Draw a gradient mask from black to white on the upper layer to show only half of the pixelated layer and show the bottom blurred layer beneath it.


7. Lastly, apply an HSL (Hue/Saturation/Lightness) adjustment to the two layers we just used. I colorized the two layers to a deep, dark red that it the look I wanted for my image.


8. Export to your favorite file format and place on your desktop as wallpaper and you're done!


9. Enjoy your new desktop. Show it off to your friends.

the iPhone and Pinoy

With Apple's iPhone already out on the streets, it'll only be a matter of time before it falls in the hands of the people who will use it the most: the Filipino Rich Kid (PRK from this point on in the article).

Yes, folks, you read right. If you're in the Philippines, do not expect the iPhone to show up on the hands of the business elite just yet; instead, watch for it in malls, universities, and in some extreme cases, inside high school classrooms, well before it hits the hands of the Filipino business community.

Don't expect the half the users to know half the iPhone's functions, either. Among the advertised features of the iPhone (read: Cellphone + Internet Browser + iPod + kitchen sink), probably the ones they will use will be text messaging, calls, camera, and music player.

"But hey," you say, "My cellphone can already do all that at less than half the cost of the iPhone!"

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. But not everyone knows that cellular phones in the Philippines are like luxury sports cars in other countries. They're not used for their primary purpose (In the case of cars, transportation. You figure it out for cellphones). They're status symbols.

So, while you may throw the occasional look of Gee, I wish I had a phone like that... at PRKs hanging out at the mall, think about how they had to spend more than twice the amount you paid for your phone to be able to do what your phone can do (the iPhone has a 2-megapixel camera, some existing phones have 3 and even 5-megapixel ones), smile to yourself, and walk away.