Cubic

An IT person's favorite joke about Windows is how you click "Start" to stop the computer. The Start button is perhaps the most joked about icon in Windows, but I suppose without some sort of text written on the screen, figuring out what to click in lengthy 2 hour technical support calls would only extend the painful experience. Of course, VerifyMyPC reduces technical support times from 2 hours to 5 minutes. And you have a more intelligent conversation with the person on the other end. And you don't end up having the user re-install Windows because you can't figure out what they did to mess up their computer. But that's not what I want to talk about. Instead, Add/Remove Programs finally drove me up the wall. I have a 3GHz PC. Even though it is about 3 years old, it is still a considerably high-end PC. How long does it take to figure out what is installed on my PC? About 1 minute. I've been on slower PCs where it takes several minutes before I can d...

Amazingly no one has figured out how to make a hollow rectangle with Photoshop. I recently needed to be able to do this and came up with a method of accomplishing this with shapes. Here's how: 1) Create a new document (or use the workspace you want the shape to be added to. 2) Select the shape tool you wish to use. Most people want a hollow rectangle (i.e. rectangle tool), but this works with any of the shapes: Hollow rounded rectangle, hollow circle, hollow ellipse, etc. Even hollow lines (but those are effectively rotated rectangles). You get the idea. 3) Draw the shape on the canvas. A new shape object should be added to the layers palette. 4) Double-click the shape object in the layers palette to open the "Layer Style" window. 5) On the "Blending Options" page, change the "Advanced Blending"'s "Fill Opacity" to 0%. 6) Next, go to the "Stroke" page. If preview is enabled, you should see what I'm getting at b...