October 15, 2021

👩‍💻 Some fun with Spektrel Art from JixiPix 🖼

Spektrel Art is one of my favorite tools from JixiPix. It turns images into interesting works of art by saturating the colors, blending and blurring lines, and creating texture patterns that give any image a unique look. From their website: Spektrel Art features a Light and Dark style. The light one glimmers and gleams with white tapered light, and the dark one creates a stark contrast of black intersecting lines. Each style allows you to exaggerate them with glowing color and soften or smooth the art form for a variety of out-of-this-world fun and imaginative imagery. Depending on the preset, images and details can be made lighter or darker. Lines details can be extended, or blurred together. Images can take on a neon or glow effect or can be darkened to create deep details and lines. The result is an image that looks familiar but in a new way. For example, night scenes become more vivid and detailed. Lights will […]

October 14, 2021

🤽 Scheduling my leisure time

It may seem cliche, like those commercials where the activity planner says, “We’ll have X from 10am-11am. Then we’ll have Y, from 11am until lunch. Lunch will be…” However, I find myself gravitating to that idea. Working remotely has been fine. I have no issue getting my work done, mostly because it’s all laid out in Jira. I have tickets. The ticket tells me what to do. I write up my results, then move on to the next one. I give my status each morning and the process flows smoothly. The same has been true for life after work. With the extra time from not commuting, I got tons of work done at home. I organized my physical life, taking care of all those chores that normally had to wait until the weekend. Then I organized my digital life, sorting files, sorting documents, recovering disk space, installing and removing apps to make me as productive as possible. With all that […]

October 13, 2021

🍎 Apple Event – Unleashed – Oct 18.

Exciting times, a new Apple Event is right around the corner. And lots of guesses about the content. Personally, I’m anxious to see the new Mac mini, if there is one. I would be thrilled if it’s more inline with the rumors of a Mac mini Pro. I would love to see the Mac mini grow up and become a Mac. A real Mac with a lot more ram, not just 32GB or even 64GB. But, a model that goes much further with 128-256GB ram and 4-8TB hard drive. I’d love to see the Mac mini break out of it’s shell and be showcased as a full fledged desktop machine, not just an entry level Mac. There needs to be a bridge between the mini and the Pro. I doubt it will happen, it’s too soon for another iMac, but is the 30 inch perhaps in the cards? That will be a spectacular machine to see. I’d love to see […]

October 12, 2021

🎃 Some fun with Hallow’s Eve from JixiPix 👻

With the festive Halloween season almost upon us, it’s time to get into the spirit of things. See what I did there? This includes dressing up the desktop with some fun wallpaper. One tool that comes into play is Hallow’s Eve by JixiPix. It’s a simple tool for giving images a Halloween look, but there’s a bit more to it. While things can get a little over the top when selecting their Presets, it actually has 3 very cool features that make it a fun graphics tool. First, you can change the “Tone” of an image. The typical scenario would be to use blacks, browns, orange, blue, green, red, etc, to create a “cast” over the image. This darkens the image and gives an ambient feel. Dark blues cool the image down and make it look like night time. Browns give a sepia tone feel to age an image. Red gives a sinister aspect. Select a color and the image […]

October 11, 2021

👩‍💻 An impressive array of features in DevUtils ⌘

Like several apps in my tool belt, I picked up DevUtils in a Bundlehunt sale. It wasn’t on my original list of tools to get, but the feature set looked really good. It has turned out to be a real gem. And getting more polished with each release. Originally, I was drawn to the JSON formatter, XML Beautify, and Text Diff Checker. I use those all the time in my QA work. Further, it’s just a bad idea to paste company text and code into random websites to get the same functionality. I also became a fan of the RegEx Tester. I can use all the help I can get with RegEx, and this is very handy. I have a tool called Patterns, but if I’m already in DevUtils, why open something else? Further, Pattens hasn’t seen an update in a couple of years. Might not need it, but still, new OS version have come along. DevUtils has regular updates […]

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