Cristi Cotovan

Just found a nice resource for free and royalty free sound effects: SoundBible is offering a library of thousands of sound bites and makes it easy to preview and download each clip. 

Free Sound Library-Sound Effects, Sound Bites and Sound Bytes.

Another tool along the lines of ninite is allmyapps, a website where you can add your favorite apps to a list, pretty much like using a shopping cart and then automatically download and install all of them.

Unlike ninite or filehippo, you are required to create an account, but the list of applications, compared to ninite is far longer (about 125 at the time of writing), although some very popular ones were missing (Chrome, Skype?).

The site also has a ‘My purchases’ section likely to refer to buying apps that are not free, and I am curious to see how they are going to implement that.

Now, don’t tell me you hate reinstalling, with all this automation-goodness!

Two things though:

- the installation is not quite so ‘unattended’ as it is with ninite. Some programs do trigger the install wizard and you need to drive
- at first it was odd that the installation of their client installed and did not say anything else. I thought it had not installed properly. But it gets run when you click ‘Install’ from your ‘list’ in your account.

I used to install Windows like every two-three months. Hopefully this won’t be the case with Windows7. But when you DO reinstall, the time spent to get all those apps you love back onto the machine gets longer each month.

After having played around with a number of  ‘automatic’ installer/updater programs for multiple apps, the app of the week is… a website: ninite.com — select what apps you want to install (currently from a list of the most popular ones – hopefully they will expand it fast!), and one button away you get a small installer which after you run, installs (quietly) all the selected apps. Neat!

Second on the list of great apps in this category is FileHippo’s automatic updater. This one discovers which apps have had updated versions and redirects you to a page where you can download all of them (manually, I’m afraid).

Now, if only FileHippo teamed with Ninite! Hmm.. it would be a winner combination!

Those with Flickr Pro accounts know very well that the task of constantly trying to figure out which photos you have uploaded or not, to avoid duplicates, is not something they look forward to…

Lifehacker pointed out a very nice Python script to help automate uploading of photos from your computer to Flickr.

Automatically upload a folder’s photos to Flickr – Automation – Lifehacker.

Once you’ve set it up (works on Windows, Mac and probably on Linux as well), it monitors a folder of choice and uploads any new photos directly to your Flickr account. Privacy options can also be customized.

If you frequently shoot panoramas and stitch the photos together using Photoshop’s brilliant Photomerge script, and you often have to stitch together more sets of photos, you may get the ‘Repeated-Open-File-Dialog-Stress-Disorder’ and boredom will soon appear. I have managed to find a script to ‘automate-the-automation’ that works with multiple folders (each folder containing your individual shots).

So, this is the setup:

Folder1/Shot1.jpg
Folder1/Shot2.jpg
Folder1/Shot3.jpg
Folder1/Shot??.jpg

Folder2/Shot1.jpg
Folder2/Shot2.jpg
Folder2/Shot??.jpg
…you get the idea.

Now, this script will dig down in each of these folders (you have to supply the starting folder when you run it — ie. the folder CONTAINING Folder1 and Folder2), and then it will read the files and blend/stitch/vignette, you name it, and save the file in each of the respective folders as ‘Stitch.psd’. Sweet, eh? Enjoy and thanks to the smart dudes at www.ps-scripts.com for this immense time-saver (now I can leave it running overnight and in the morning, all panoramas are stitched!).

And here’s the script (paste this in Adobe’s ExtendScript Editor thingy). Make sure you customize the includepath to the Scripts folder to your installation and also uncomment the desired alignmentKey for your situation:

var runphotomergeFromScript = true; // must be before Photomerge include
// @includepath "/c/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS4 (64 Bit)/Presets/Scripts/"
// @include "Photomerge.jsx"
// @show include
psdOpts = new PhotoshopSaveOptions();
psdOpts.embedColorProfile = true;
psdOpts.alphaChannels = true;
psdOpts.layers = true;
var workFolder = Folder.selectDialog();
var folders = workFolder.getFiles( function( file ) { return file instanceof Folder; } );
for( var i = 0; i < folders.length; i++ )
{
var folder = folders[i];
var fList = folder.getFiles( '*.jpg' );
// override Photomerge.jsx settings. Default is "Auto". Uncomment to override the default.
//photomerge.alignmentKey   = "Auto";
//photomerge.alignmentKey   = "Prsp";
photomerge.alignmentKey   = "cylindrical";
//photomerge.alignmentKey   = "spherical";
//photomerge.alignmentKey   = "sceneCollage";
//photomerge.alignmentKey   = "translation"; // "Reposition" in layout dialog
// other setting that may need to be changed. Defaults below
photomerge.advancedBlending      = true; // 'Bend Images Together' checkbox in dialog
photomerge.lensCorrection      = false; // Geometric Distortion Correction'checkbox in dialog
photomerge.removeVignette      = true; // 'Vignette Removal' checkbox in dialog
if( fList.length > 1 )
{
photomerge.createPanorama(fList,false);
}
// The merged doc will be the activeDocument
activeDocument.saveAs( new File( fList[0].parent + '/Stitch.psd' ) , psdOpts, true, Extension.LOWERCASE);
activeDocument.close( SaveOptions.DONOTSAVECHANGES );
}

UPDATE:
The above script works fine, as long as you don’t need to save files that go beyond the PSD size limitation. The Large Document Format (PSB) supports documents up to 300,000 pixels in any dimension. All Photoshop features, such as layers, effects, and filters, are supported by the PSB format. Currently, if you save a document in PSB format, it can only be opened in Photoshop CS. Other applications and older versions of Photoshop cannot open documents saved in PSB format. Note: Most other applications and older versions of Photoshop cannot support documents with file sizes larger than 2 GB.
A modification to the above script is required. Instead of the line where it reads: activeDocument.SaveAs(….) use the following script:

savePSB(fList[0].parent + '/Stitch.psb');

… and then add, at the end of the script, the following function:

function savePSB(fileNameAndPath)
{
	function cTID(s) { return app.charIDToTypeID(s); };
	function sTID(s) { return app.stringIDToTypeID(s); };

	var desc19 = new ActionDescriptor();
     var desc20 = new ActionDescriptor();
	desc20.putBoolean( sTID('maximizeCompatibility'), true );
	desc19.putObject( cTID('As  '), cTID('Pht8'), desc20 );
    desc19.putPath( cTID('In  '), new File( fileNameAndPath ) );
    desc19.putBoolean( cTID('LwCs'), true );
    executeAction( cTID('save'), desc19, DialogModes.NO );
};

This should allow saving to PSB automatically. Since there’s no function to save to PSB directly, the savePSB function was necessary.
To make things easier, you can download the full version of the script, with PSB enabled from the link below:

Download BatchMerge.jsx

Hope you like this script, please leave any comments below. If this script saved you as much time as it saved me, maybe you would consider making a small donation towards coffee an such? Use the PayPal button below if you wish to donate:

JQuery File Upload Plugin Script – Implementation – Uploadify.

This is a very slick upload feature using some of the well-known technologies: flash, swfobject and my newest favorite: jQuery.

This may be trivial to some, but I thought I’d share it anyway, since the links I found online were a bit hard to dig up about this one: If you need to make a column in a MSSQL table UNIQUE, using SQL Server Management Studio Express, here’s how:

1. Open your tables, right-click on the table you need to make the unique key,  and select ‘Design’ (or Modify):

2. Right-click on any of the columns in the righ panel and select ‘Indexes/Keys…’

3. On the window that opens up, click ‘Add’ on the bottom-left corner

4. A new entry is created on the left. Select it and notice on the right side the ‘Columns’ field. Click the three dots to select the desired column(s), then change the ‘Is Unique’ setting to ‘Yes’.

5. Click ‘Close’ and save your table. That’s it!

Note that you will not be able to add this Unique key if the desired column has duplicated data in it.

I have developed a website where you can buy land in an almost fairy tale location — Bran, Romania. The website included something new, never before done on one of my websites — 360-degree panoramic views for the plots being sold.

Photography for it has been also shot by me. View some of my photos on flickr.

I have developed a new site for a company that builds new, and very cheap apartments in Brasov. The site included availability information, customised filtering, 3D virtual tours of the apartments and slideshows. Go check it out: www.avantgarden3.ro

Just came across a nice website for sharing your PowerPoint presentations online. It looks pretty much like an obscure site I saw somewhere, can’t really remember, … I think ‘YouTube’ it was called.

authorSTREAM.

The site lets you upload presentations in PPT format and after a bit of processing you can either view them online, present them in almost full screen and download them as PPT, video for iPod or normal video.

Quite a handy tool for quickly sharing presentations online.