Save money: Green up your workstation.

Aug 9, 2010

faronics.jpg For the past year, I’ve been using Faronics Power Save for Mac. This is a fantastic little application that manages the electricity being wasted by your computer workstation during periods of inactivity. Like when you’re out to lunch, or forgot to shut down, helping deliver a baby, etc.

This is a definite money saver as well as doing your part to cut energy waste. On your own machine, as well as for others who really couldn’t care less. I’m using the Mac version here but it’s available for both Mac & Windows. You can set Faronics Power Save to turn off monitors after so many minutes of inactivity, or put the computer to sleep after a different number of minutes. Hard drives can optionally be powered down, or the whole computer shut down after another period of non-use.

It is much more powerful than OS X’s “Energy Saver”. You have the ability to precisely determine inactivity; you define it for your own conditions. Thankfully, you can also set it so Power Save does not manage power at all if certain applications are running. I’ve yet to have it manage power at a time when it would be disruptive.

chia_mac.jpgYou can enter your kWH electric cost and view custom reports showing how much you’ve actually saved, in dollars and kWH. Faronics notes an average savings of $50/yr. per workstation. While great for individual users, this is an exceptional product for schools, libraries, or government, and anywhere IT managers are in charge of many workstations. The savings are incredible. Their site covers different licensing options. I just went with Faronics Power Save for Mac with 1 Year Maintenance Package: $14.40. They also offer some other great software worth checking out. Faronics says they’ve partnered with the largest energy utilities in North America to offer rebates that make Power Save Mac free or available at a 50% discount.

I can’t think of many reasons not to have Faronics Power Save on all computers.

Have more fun with this Firefox smooth scrolling add-on

Jul 31, 2010

Do you use Firefox? One of the great things about it is all the available “add-ons” that you can get, both free or maybe a small donation to the developer. There is a great Firefox add-on that you can get called “Yet Another Smooth Scrolling” by kataho. What this does is it makes your scrolling feel very fluid and alive, and fun to use. (Maybe it’s like iPhone scrolling; I’ve never used one.)
yass.jpg

I wish the whole operating system scrolled like this. YASS is really easy to customize to your own tastes. This works great with a scroll wheel, Griffin PowerMate, or touch pad, as well as with your page up/page down keys. I couldn’t stand scrolling around on the web without it now. Hope it never goes away!

Yet Another Smooth Scrolling add-on for Firefox

They laughed when I placed the puck on my monitor…

Jul 27, 2010

Anyone who works with color on their computer monitor needs to have one that’s accurately calibrated and profiled. One that will show you the actual colors in a file as they’re meant to be displayed. Now, a little bird told me there are a lot of monitors out there in front of graphic designers that haven’t been profiled in a long time—if ever. Every one of them is probably different, no two are the same and not one is correct.

monitorpuck.jpg

Generally speaking, you really need to calibrate and profile on a regular basis with a hardware profiling device. I’m using the little Eye-One Display 2 model, a colorimeter by X-Rite (formerly Gretag Macbeth). I’ve had very good results with mine, and it’s the one I recommend. It’s USB and resembles a computer mouse. You can probably pick one up for under $200. [Read More…]

PPI? DPI? What should I say?

Jul 26, 2010

I admit it—it’s confusing as hell! DPI…PPI… A quick look over on Google clears things up. DPI is the acronym for Degreasing, Pickling and Inhibiting.

No, looks like that’s for the Hydraulicsdpi_ppi3sm.jpg Systems Maintenance crowd. For graphics folks, it means Dots-Per-Inch. Usually, this refers to the resolution of a printer or printing press, describing how many dots it can put down in a given distance.

Now, PPI, that’s Pixels-Per-Inch. We all know what pixels are, those flat little squares of image detail that start to look more like continuous tone the more densely you use them. They don’t really have any size. The resolution could refer to how many of these [Read More…]

Handy Display & Banner Resolution Calculator

Jul 23, 2010

A lot of people ask “What resolution do I need for my banner” or else “Look at that digital camera image “weaselfoot.tif”, how big can we blow it up?” Or maybe you need to figure how big to make a drum scan, but not too much larger than what is really needed. Well, Andrew Gregory has a great section on resolution at his site, explaining all the details about this and more. Through Andrew’s mathematical wizardry using radians, tans, and arcs, he’s been able to calculate the average angle of human visual acuity*, and from that, give us the magic number: 3438. [Read More…]

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