A few years later, when I began to produce my Silicon Graffiti videos, an unanticipated side benefit is that I found myself using Photoshop more and more to produce artwork to go into the videos, including on the monitors in the virtual set behind me. If you watch the shot that begins here of a mushroom cloud followed by photos of various dictators, everything behind me, including the virtual set, is a single Photoshop .PSD file, with various layers animated in Adobe’s Premiere Pro to appear in sequence, timed to an ancient British Cinesound explosion sound effect.)

However, producing artwork for PJM, including many of the 85X85 pixel thumbnails on the PJM homepage greatly accelerated my learning curve. Around Christmas of 2009, while visiting the now sadly closed Borders bookstore in Santana Row, I came across Art and Design in Photoshop: How to simulate just about anything from great works of art to urban graffiti. While a fair amount of political correctness and left-wing sucker punches (including a demonic Reagan Photoshop parody) mars the book, there’s a lot to be gleaned from it. As its subtitle implies, the book walks the reader through how to recreate everything from old movie posters to food and toy packaging to Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop art images.

I also found a slightly older title, Photoshop Classic Effects: The Essential Effects Every User Needs to Know, which I purchased later, to be an excellent learning guide. (The one thing I miss about the local Borders closing is being able to browse through books such as these to see which ones viscerally grab me. If it’s love at first sight, I’m much more likely to spend hours in the book, rather than a how-to guide I feel like I’m pulling teeth to learn from.)

And so from those books, and a lot of trial and error, here are some of the better images I’ve produced over the last few years.

This image of President Obama in his plus-fours, inspired by a quip by Mark Steyn, grew out of a shot of Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, and was bordered by a Polaroid Photoshop brush plug-in, which James Lileks referred me to:

This Salvador Dali parody was produced following the instructions in the aforementioned Art and Design in Photoshop. I just replaced the melting clocks with similarly dissipated Obama logos:

Last fall, when Obama became obsessed with his sippin’ Slurpees metaphor, this was a natural, which I used for a time as my Twitter avatar. It’s just the hat artwork that Stacy Tabb produced for my blog’s masthead back in 2004 on top of an existing 7-11 Slurpee ad, on top of a default Photoshop gradient layer. The shadows and reflection at the bottom were cribbed from the instructions in  Photoshop Classic Effects:

Having been one of those legendary 45,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album shortly before forming his own rock group, this parody for a Zombie blog post’s thumbnail, when former VU drummer Mo Tucker supported the Tea Party last year, was a natural:

I had lots of fun parodying MSNBC’s silly “Lean Forward” ads in the fall of 2010. This one, created when Olbermann was still earning a paycheck from General Electric proved to be strangely prophetic…

When it was obvious that their party was going to lose Congress last year, and a majority of Americans disapproved of the Ground Zero Mosque, the MSM really teed off on their customers. This was my response to a bitter and punitive Time magazine cover late in the summer of 2010:

In 2009 or so, I purchased some Photoshop templates from Digital Juice for use in both videos, and as stand-alone artwork. I spent a pleasant half an hour or so putting this one together one Saturday last year:

This one I think I did around Christmas of 2009. It took quite a while to copy and paste, and line-up the text to produce this Spinal Tap-inspired image, which appeared in a Silicon Graffiti video on media bias, and an item here and during a stint guest-hosting on Hot Air.com about studying the Washington Post (then Newsweek’s owners) Kremlinologist-style.

This image was for a thumbnail for a post last year by Richard Fernandez called “Gone with the Wind.” For most of these images, I start big, and then use Photoshop’s “Save To Web” feature to reduce the images down to an 80 or 85 pixels square jpeg. I always save the layers in their original size as a Photoshop file, since you never know when you’ll need a larger image, or want to modify the image into something else. For obvious reasons, I’m hoping to reuse this image right around this time next year:

This was for a Victor Davis Hanson post last year on Obama’s poll numbers going into freefall. I wonder how many people have looked at this, and assumed it was simply a skydiver promoting Obama in 2008? I took an existing photo of a skydiver, tilted his angle to make him appear more out of control, and then placed the Obama logo on top of his ‘chute. I cut the various colors of the Obama logo into different layers, and then set the blending options on each layer to different settings, and different degrees of transparency, to make it appear as if the whole thing was blended into the fabric of the parachute. A fair amount of work, but the end result was pretty effective, I thought:

Finally, another image for a VDH post, this one from last month on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance,” and really well received. (The lads on Trifecta even mentioned it on PJTV.) It’s a photo of Obama heading for Marine One, with the sky clipped out, and a glorious sunrise pasted in underneath. I tried to visually convey the message of VDH’s post: When BHO is no longer POTUS, it will be Morning in America once again:

I’m probably the last Windows guy at PJM, but Allahpundit has a moving encomium at Hot Air:

We knew it was coming but that doesn’t make it easier. Horrendous.

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.

Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

Apple’s homepage tonight is a requiem for the departed. I’m straining to find a cultural analogy for Jobs and am struck by the fact that I have to leave the business/tech fields entirely to do it. You can do it if you go back far enough — Henry Ford and Edison pop to mind, but … that’s awfully far. The obvious modern comparison is to Bill Gates, but that doesn’t work. Gates, like Jobs, is capital-I Important to the computer age, but in sort of the same way that ancient cave painters were important to the development of art. Jobs started out as a cave painter too but kept at it until he turned into Rembrandt. I think Lileks is close to the mark in comparing him to Walt Disney; my first thought when I heard the news was that only Steven Spielberg’s passing today would hit quite as hard. The common thread among those three is that they all made magic, but Jobs put it in your hands so that you felt like you were the one making it. That’s the crucial difference between Apple and Microsoft — Gates made computers easier to use but Jobs made them objects of wonder. He made magic, literally. There’s no greater epitaph.

The first computer I ever used was an Altair 8800 at St. Mary’s, around 1976 or so. (One of our math teachers built it from a kit and mated it to first an old teletypewriter, and then to an old black & white TV set.) But as marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout once wrote, nobody remembers the Altair 8800 as being the first personal computer, because of how difficult it was to built and program. Not to mention the name. Right from the start, Jobs knew that style and ease of use were the keys to success, as Stephen Green writes at PJM:

With the Apple II, Jobs made personal computers useful. In the mid-Seventies, home computers were build-it-yourself hobby boxes, useful only to the nerdiest nerds. By the time I entered middle school in 1981 there was an entire lab filled with Apple II Plus machines, and lots of fun software to run on them. The first computer “clone” wasn’t Compaq’s copy of the IBM PC — it was a cloneof the Apple II. An industry was born.

Three years later Jobs made the personal computer approachable with the Macintosh. He didn’t invent the GUI or the WIMP metaphor but he and his team made them useable and affordable. What most computer users took for granted in 1995 was deemed a “toy” by many critics when the first Mac arrived in 1984.

And last year, Jobs made the personal computer ubiquitous with the iPad. This third revolution is only beginning, yet still many critics deride this “toy” as a “media consumption device.” I do most of my photo editing on my fat, slow, first-generation iPad — and I’m outlining a novel on it, too. Others use it to create music, paintings and video. That’s some “consumption” going on.

As Noah Wyle said, portraying Jobs in 1999′s Pirates of Silicon Valley, passing by some protesting hippies, “Those guys think they’re revolutionaries. They’re not revolutionaries, we are.”

That seems equally apropos today, given the Occupy Wall Street types similarly stuck in a reactionary sixties time warp. But then, as Virginia Postrel recently wrote, by the early 1980s, “Steve Jobs Made Business Cool Again.”

That’s not a bad epitaph for an entrepreneur, either.

Great question by the Anchoress: “I wonder if [Jobs] is the last capitalist we’re going to be permitted to admire for his creativity, his invention and his sheer genius?”

Update: Read. The. Whole. Thing.

There’s so much visual data in the average photo that’s indecipherable, whether due to parts being out of focus, shot in poor light, and so forth. A bad pic is like a badly damaged hard drive, with only some of the “files” readable. Can’t technology figure out a way to recover the unrecoverable data?

* * * * * *

Surveillance. Isn’t that the most obvious application for this? How many times have you watched a true-crime show where the perp walks by a gas-station camera 25 feet away and the best they can do to get a description of him is magnify his face until it’s a pixelated blotch? Universal focus would be a very tasty treat for security agencies. There’s certainly a market for it. Chop chop, Lytro!

Paging Mr. Deckard, Mr. Rick Deckard, your photo scanner is ready….

Click here to view the embedded video.

(A much cleaner version of this scene is available here, but for some reason, it’s not playable as an embedded clip.)

Last year, I spent some time on Twitter musing about whether or not I should buy a Kindle to accompany me on a cross-country plane trip. In the end, I decided that it was just too pricey (this was before the smaller, lower-priced ones came out) and opted for audio-books downloads instead.

That worked fine, but when I came back, a kind pal gave me a Kindle DX — that’s the big one — as a gift.

I now read books. Old books. New books. Lots of books.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t read books before. I have always been a voracious reader and, in my time, have plopped down untold amounts of cash in bookstores and on Amazon.com.

But the way I read books is different now.

I tried getting books from the library. One was on a list, but when I finally got it, it proved to be a dense tome and had to be read slowly. I couldn’t finish it in time, and since it was on a list, the library wouldn’t let me renew it.

That’s the last time I went to the library. I put this book on my Kindle for a very low price (it wasn’t a new release), so nobody can tell me how fast I have to read it.

Facing a long train ride but not wanting to spend a whole pile of money, I took advantage of the many free books available for Kindle download. I went the American-history route and got “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” “The Federalist Papers (Optimized for Kindle),” Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America, Volume 1 & Volume 2.”

Then, for fun, I threw on “Pride & Prejudice” and the complete works of William Shakespeare.

For very nominal fees, I’ve added a couple of Bibles, a pile of Oscar Wilde and “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”

And that’s only a fraction of the classic works available for Kindle (and, one assumes, for Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the iPad and other devices) at low or no cost.

I’m increasingly liking the concept behind the Kindle, though I have mixed emotions about the actual physical Kindle device itself. But the ability to read a book anywhere, and carry the digital equivalent of a massive stack of them onto an airplane via my Kindle, laptop or Android Tablet is pretty darn nifty. Not to mention the prospect of freeing up space on my overflowing bookshelves. As is the ability, at least on my PC or laptop, to cut and paste text from a book into a blogpost rather than have to physically put a book into a scanner and OCR the whole thing, as I’ve done for a few blog posts. And pray that a word doesn’t become gobbledygook somewhere in the translation process.

For a more Luddite point of view, naturally enough, we turn to the L.A. Times, for an article whose arguments are quite similar to those made when physical newspapers began to lose out to the Internet. As James Lileks said in one of the Ricochet podcasts a while back, everybody longs for that nostalgic Annie Hall-like feeling of having the Sunday New York Times spread out alongside the bagels and orange juice on the kitchen table. Or as Marshall McLuhan once quipped, “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”

Similarly, I think everybody has that feeling of buying a book (or taking it out of the library), bringing it home, and taking it outside on a sunny day to become utterly absorbed in it. Perhaps that tactile feeling is lost or greatly diminished with the Kindle, but the flexibility it provides offsets it in many ways.

Of course for that reason, perhaps books are about to become luxury items, given at birthdays and at Christmas, the equivalent of giving someone an expensive necktie or sweater. Or these days, a compact disc, for that matter.

Related: The London Independent wonders if the home library will become a casualty to the Kindle, which is one of their less preposterous predictions.

Related: The dead tree equivalent of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, or life imitates the ending of Fahrenheit 451.

But years before that, beginning in the early 1960s, Townshend was first recording his music at home, initially on large reel-to-reel machines. Townshend, then a fledgling songwriter in the earliest incarnation of The Who, initially couldn’t read music. To make up for that, he started “writing” his songs by overdubbing first a drum track (first with real drums, eventually with drum machines), then a guitar track, then a bass track, and finally a vocal track to present his bandmates in The Who with an audio demo of his song.

Today, the technology has advanced sufficiently so that the line between “demo” recordings and the finished product has blurred — and the recording technology inside a $35,000 Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early 1980s is inside almost any PC with a good quality soundcard and the appropriate software. And actually, the video below is a little outdated, since it promotes the benefits of 64-bit computing for recording, a technology that’s now fairly ubiquitous. But it does a good overview of what’s possible these days with the right hardware, software, and musical chops:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s just what happened to the four other people who criticized Google or nitecruzr.

They want me to provide a cell phone number. That’s what Aaron, and Hoystory, and Dead Dog Bounce, and EnigmatiCore all did. Me, I went and left a support ticket with a different e-mail address, because I wasn’t thrilled about giving them a cell phone number. I have not heard back yet.

I rely on Gmail, so I’ll probably hand over the cell phone number if necessary. But I don’t like it. And I would strongly advise people who don’t already rely on Gmail to explore different options.

Since I am locked out of my Google account, I also cannot access Google Reader:

* * *

I am convinced that Google has given this fellow nitecruzr the authority to flag accounts and require them to hand over cell phone numbers. (And if, instead, they are just asking for cell phone numbers wholesale, that’s a concern as well.)

Google, do something about this clown. GIve me back my Gmail without making me give you more personal information of mine.

In short: don’t be evil, Google.

Or hey, at least when you’re done, restore Althouse’s archives.

20 years ago, the buzzword in home theater was convergence — with technology such as this, and Amazon’s recent MP3-cloud player thingee (if you’ll pardon the technical jargon) it’s increasingly a reality.

Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” the much-maligned but still catchy pop music video that’s taken the web by storm, has passed into nothingness. The video was removed from YouTube by the original publisher (Black’s record label, Ark Music Factory) as of 4 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.The single is still available for sale on iTunes, but all you’ll find among the 11,500 YouTube search results for “Rebecca Black Friday” are parody videos, remixes and commentary. In fact, the entire account that originally housed “Friday” has been closed.

Love it or hate it — and chances are, you hate it — Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” had racked up an impressive 64 million YouTube views since its inauspicious debut last month. However, when it comes to sentiment, “Friday” was killing it, and by “it,” we mean “any feelings of charity or kindness you may feel toward Ark and its teenie bopping popsters.”

Mashable adds, “We’ll keep an eye on the video’s URL; the clip may pop up again shortly. In the meantime, we have reached out to Ark for a statement on why the video was pulled in the first place.”

Fortunately though, in the interim, Phil Connors can rest a little easier in the morning:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Update: Our short national nightmare is over — or has only just begun; the video has been restored. No word yet as to why it had gone down the memory hole in the first place, although, as Mashable notes in an addendum, “Ark Music Factory owner Patrice Wilson reported that his YouTube account had been hacked last Thursday; however, he reported back yesterday that the account status was ‘all good.’”

Of course for as long as I can remember, that’s what it always was, until Conde-Nast, having then recently purchased Wired magazine from its original management went haywire and decided to arbitrararily retcon a hyphen into the word back in 2000.

Those of us who still own our original spiral bound/slipcase 1996 first edition versions of WiredStyle: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Language, From the Editors of Wired, Edited by Constance Hale, which we purchased at the late lamented Computer Literacy Bookstore on North First Street in San Jose, when the dot.com bubble was just being inflated, know better.

(See also: how do you pronounce “GIF.”)

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Meanwhile, James Lileks has the scoop on the little man in the big black suit:

Child actor Max Page really has The Force. “He’s an inspiration,” his mom Jennifer said during a Today Show interview Monday morning. Her son, better known as the boy who starred as Darth Vader in the Super Bowl Volkswagen commercial, was born with a congenital heart defect.”He had his first operation when he was 3-months old and now has a pacemaker.” But Max, who has never actually watched any of the Star Wars movies, isn’t letting his condition damper his spirit – or his career. “I’m okay,” said the 6-year-old, who has done other commercials including one for Walgreens, and has appeared on the soap opera The Young and the Restless.

Also, this clip, focusing on the making of Volkswagen’s “Black Beetle” advertisement is an interesting look at combining a huge diorama with 3d digital animation:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

And yes, I know I know I’m giving VW a free plug here — but on the plus side, both ads are 100 percent Eminem free.