Photoshop tutorials for medical researchers: simple color conversion

I often get emails from my sister (who is a medical researcher) asking me how to do some very simple image processing tasks. I usually just do it for her but when she recently sent a file to me I thought that maybe it would be easier to just teach her how to do it so she can do it herself.

The task was really simple: convert a color graph against black background to a black graph against the white background. I did this in Cantonese with a mix of English because this is how we speak to each other – this video is really meant for her. But maybe when I have time I will go and add some closed-captioning.

Lessons learned from making this video:

• As someone who has been using Photoshop since 1995, all the keyboard shortcuts are really second-nature, but for a complete n00b the learning curve is fairly steep.
• I am on a Mac right now but my sister is on a PC. It is quite a mouthful to explain both.
• I think conceptually and visually so I often have trouble spelling out what the functions are.
• Found a nice Mac app for displaying keyboard / mouse press interaction: Mousexposé. Useful for both Skype screen share as well as video capture.
• I used Screenflow 3 to capture the video but the audio track is in fact recorded separately. Process: audio was captured with the internal microphone. I clapped at the beginning to make a visual wave mark, and then I used my Sony PCM-M10 to record at the same time. I am doing it this way because I don't currently have a mini cable to connect the field recorder to the computer. Otherwise I probably would just connect the line-out directly to computer.
• The audio file from the PCM-M10 is then placed into Ableton Live and cleaned up with some EQ / mastering tweaks using iZotope Ozone. The finished 24-bit 96kHz aiff is then exported and placed into Premiere where I visually matched the ‘clap’ mark and then I discard the bad audio from the video.

I know, it's a lot of steps – but if you don‘t want to deal with having to drive yourself mad to clean up audio from bad microphones with huge noise floors, this is the way to do it!

How to use Gmail filters to maintain sanity with social media

One of the unfortunate side-effects when you belong to many social networks and subscribe to many listserv is the insane amount of emails you get on a daily basis. In this tutorial, I will illustrate how you can track these activities at your own pace and keeping your inbox tidy and maintaining an overall sanity in your very active technologically sound life.

Gmail Filters, in conjunction with Gmail Labels is all you need to achieve this. And is very simple to use as illustrated below:

How to maintain a clutter free Gmail Inbox

This example illustrate how to take out those Twitter follow invites from your Inbox while allowing you to review them at your own pace.

1. Start by selecting Create a filter next to the search box.

2. In the Subject: field, enter "is now following you on Twitter!" and press Next Step > to continue.

3. Now choose the action you want to apply. You can do anything you want to it, but this is the common things that I do:

3A. Check Skip the Inbox (Archive it). This ensures that it will not show up in your inbox when it arrives.

3B. Create a new label in the Apply the label dropdown, or select an existing label that you would like to apply.

3C. If you are creating a new label, you might want to Also apply filter to conversations below. I guess I had 5000 follows on Twitter since I started using Gmail. Now *that* would be insane if I didn't use Gmail filters!

Don't be alarm if you think that you will never see them again since you have skip the inbox, they still show up in your filter list, and unread items still show up as bold.

I use Gmail filters for pretty much everything, and auto-archive most of the stuff that goes into my inbox, leaving it clutter-free only with important stuff that I need to get to. Here's a list of examples of where you would want to auto-filter:

Gmail filters examples

1. Social network activites. I label all of these with a prefix soc: so they are grouped together nicely in the filter list. Aardvark, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, or whatever. All gone. Best of all and especially for Facebook activities, I usually can just take a quick glance at the list titles to note the things that require actions, then select all and Mark as Read.

2. Listserv. Do you subscribe to a lot of listserv? Anyone of those IxDA list will turn your inbox into a nightmare!

3. Magazine subscription. I enjoy some of the publication alerts like MKQ and WSJ but they get scary very soon. I like keeping these as email items instead of just reading them in list readers so I can search for them later.

4. Google Alerts. Comes in thousands. Good to know when your stuff get blogged etc. This is especially useful if you license your content via Creative Commons.

5. Keywords. Some times come through in multiple places and does not have a particular subject / email address. Use keywords to bundle them up together.

6. Email addresses. Gmail support retrieving other external accounts. So you can use the same strategy to check your other mails, and also apply labels where necessary.

Social networking explained by CommonCraft

Folks from CommonCraft did it again. This time, they aim at explaining social networking to peeps in plain English:



The main focus of the video is the exploration of the core idea in network theory: "your weak links are your strong connection." The video suggests that social networks make these weak relationship apparent. Unless these applications allow an easier way to explore your friends' friends, I don't think that it is that apparent.

It does point out an important feature that most social network lacks: a way to explore your 2nd degree of separation, and perhaps your third. LinkedIn tries to do that by allowing users to only see profiles from people within your cluster. Most people don't realize that: of the 375 connections I have had on LinkedIn, that has only happened to me once, which felt really awkward to me at first, but after a while it was apparent what they were trying to do. Still a bit awkward.

SML Thank You
I would like to thank Olivia Lin, a video extraordinaire that I've only met on Facebook for sending me this wonderful video. When I finally meet Olivia in person, she would become a few handful of people who belong in my Life 2.0 circles--something which I have been drafting in my mind but never got my acts together to write about!

Related SML Universe
+ SML Facebook
+ SML Flickr
+ SML Network
+ SML Twitter

SML Copyright Notice
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Things to do in your Google search box

Work hard

YouTube: Google Search Tips / a video interview with Matt Cutts (Blog / Google), a senior engineer at Google who works on the Google search algorithm. Matt is currently the head of Google's Webspam team. He joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000.



Play hard

YouTube: Google hacks, easter eggs, hacks, and tricks

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English / Common Craft

Last year, I did a presentation on del.icio.us to a group of designers at work, because I felt that it is an awesome tool. I still find myself spending a whole lot of time everyday trying to explain why I like it so much.

Last week I found this awesome video tutorial posted on the official del.icio.us blog and it explains the concept much better than I can. As such, I present to you: Social Bookmarking in Plain English by the wonderful folks at Common Craft:



Related SML
SML Del.icio.us
SML Flickr Set: del.icio.us & the culture of tagging / 2007-10-26
SML Wiki: del.icio.us & the culture of tagging

SML Copyright Notice

© 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

GUIdebook = Graphical User Interface Repository

GUIdebook is "a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them.”

1. Screenshots. This site has an amazing repository of screenshots of all the main applications from pretty much all the OS that's ever been introduced, all saved in 24-bit PNGs (aka lossless) quality.

2. Interface Elements. Additionally, you can compare icons of application components, drives and devices, documents and folders, as well as mouse pointers across different OS environments.

3. Sound. Fairly interesting, and is often missing in other GUI repositories is the collection of sounds in WAV (lossless) format, which is a very effective means of user feedback in interface designs.

4. Applications. The site also include application splash screens, and an applications section that detail every aspect of iTunes and Photoshop during their entire history.

5. Additional resources. It even has repositories for ads, videos, articles, books and tutorials of everything known to human history about GUIs.

More information about specific GUI families can be found on the site's site map.