Adobe Ink stylus and Slide ruler aim to replace your sketch pad with an iPad (video)

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Adobe has long dominated the business of providing software tools for creative professionals — but it has always shied away from hardware. Today that changes with the roll-out of two new accessories designed to play into the surging demand for mobile digital tools. Adobe Ink is a cleverly-designed version of an Adonit Bluetooth-enabled stylus, and Adobe Slide is a unique “digital ruler” that works with Adobe’s new iPad applications, Sketch and Line.
I was fortunate enough to have Ink, Slide, and pre-release software to use for a couple weeks prior to launch. I’m a huge fan of pen-based computing, so it didn’t take much to convince me that, as a more precise way to write or draw, Ink would be a useful addition to the iPad. While it is technically not a true active stylus, Ink’s pen tip does use some electronics, allowing its small tip to trick the iPad into thinking that it is a full “finger” touch. Ink connects over Bluetooth to allow its button to work, and enable it to support personalization. Ink connects to your Creative Cloud account, so you can store your favorite color palettes online and have them for use wherever you have your Ink.
At first I was a little skeptical of Adobe’s mini-ruler, called Slide. After all, what’s wrong with using a standard ruler when needed? I quickly became a believer. First, Slide is designed so that you don’t actually draw along the ruler itself. Instead, it causes the tablet to display a traceable line or shape on the screen near the ruler, that you can ink in. That way you don’t accidentally push the ruler while you are drawing (a danger on a slick touch display), and also means that Ink isn’t limited to drawing straight lines. It comes with quite a large library of pre-defined shapes and stamps — including everything from a French curve to a nearly complete set of Herman-Miller furniture templates. Currently only Adobe can create new shapes and stamps, but eventually it expects to have developer support for the capability.
It’s a little hard to get your head around how all this works from just a description, so here I am working with Ink and Slide on my drawing table:

Adobe Line and Sketch: Companion software for Ink and Slide

Since Ink and Slide are unique hardware, and Adobe hasn’t shipped its developer kit for them yet, using them to their full capability means using one of Adobe’s two new drawing applications for the iPad — Line and Sketch. Adobe has been continuing to tweak their interfaces and add features right up until release, so I’m not going to try to give you an exhaustive list, but basically they are very smart applications that provide an elegant interface for basic drawing. One nice feature of Line that it shares with its much bigger brother Illustrator, is an ability to project perspective grids for easy perspective drawing. Fortunately both applications are free to download so you can try them out yourself. They require a Creative Cloud membership — but even the free level is sufficient, so you don’t need to spend any money. Line even offers a software version of the Slide ruler capability, so you can experiment with it before you decide whether to shell out money for the hardware version.

Alternative solutions for digital drawing

Ink and Slide sell for $200, and require an iPad. As cool as they are, they’re not the only way to do digital sketching with cool tools. Autodesk’s Sketchbook application works with active stylus devices, and provides a fairly complete set of drafting tools, even including a software ruler. Ambient Design’s ArtRage far outshines Adobe’s fairly simple applications in features, and also has a very slick software ruler that can be extended and rotated — complete with a realistic set of pixel and inch markings. Of course, if you want to go the whole hog you can always get a Windows tablet with active stylus like the Surface Pro 3 or Cintiq Companion. Finally, for those who are dragging their heels about drawing digitally, the Livescribe 3 allows you to draw on its proprietary paper while it automatically digitizes your ink onto your iOS device.
If you’re addicted to your iPad for any kind of serious sketching or technical drawing, and have thought about purchasing an after-market stylus, Adobe Ink and Slide is certainly a more powerful, if more expensive, alternative. Adobe is cautious about future plans for its budding hardware initiative, saying only that it will gauge market response and future demand before deciding whether to add support for additional platforms or commit to more products in its Creative Hardware line.

Creative Cloud and Photoshop 2014: Adobe piles on the goodies for photographers

                            Adobe is continuing its full-court press to convince photographers to move to its Creative Cloud subscription-based licensing model. Today’s announcement of Creative Cloud 2014 marks its biggest effort yet. New features in Photoshop, lots of new mobile goodies, and a permanent discounted subscription for photographers were highlighted by Adobe as it rolled out its newly branded 2014 edition of its Creative Suite for the Cloud.

Photoshop 2014: Path-based blurs and focus-based selection are headline features

While Adobe plans to continue to roll out incremental improvements to its Suite as they are ready, it has decided to provide annual milestone releases to make it easier for plug-in developers to have known release numbers for testing. Today’s CC 2014 launch features updates to all 14 Creative Suite applications, but two new features in Photoshop CC will be of the most interest to photographers — path-based blurs and focus-based selections.

Photoshop’s new path-based blur lets you create just about any blur effect you can imagine

Adobe has previously provided a variety of tools for creative blurring on an image, including for simulating motion, but Photoshop 2014 takes the capability to a new level. Motion blurs can be made along a line, a radius, or just about any path that can be constructed using Photoshop’s curve construction tools. So in addition to simple motion, like a vehicle in a straight line, it is possible to mimic spinning wheels or even a vehicle in a swerving path.
Creating selections based on focus is also new in Photoshop 2014. You can tell Photoshop to only select areas that are in focus, and use that selection to create a mask for other commands. The magic is far from perfect, so you can further refine the selection using the usual set of Adobe tools, of course. This worked quite well for the demo images Adobe chose — that featured an in-focus subject in the foreground with a distant and out-of-focus background. We’ll see how accurate it is with real world images now that the production version has been released.

Photoshop 2014 now has “experimental features,” including touch and high-dpi support for Windows

With this release of Photoshop CC, Adobe is also providing an experimental features capability. Users will be able to selectively activate features that otherwise would not have made it into the product. The most exciting of these for Windows users are support for high-dpi displays and for touch gestures. The high-dpi support scales user interface elements by 200%, which will make Photoshop a lot less painful to use on high-resolution laptops and tablets. Touch gesture support includes standard Windows 8 gestures like pinch to zoom, and the new version offers improved stylus support.
Creative Cloud subscribers with an iPhone or iPad will also benefit from a new capability to manage their Adobe assets from their mobile device, using Adobe’s Creative Cloud app for iOS. All these goodies are available for immediate download from Adobe, or by using the integrated Update capability in your Creative Cloud applications.

Hacker hijacks thousands of Synology storage devices, forces them to mine 500 million Dogecoins

If you have a device that connects to the internet on a regular basis, patch it. That’s the big-picture takeaway from today’s news of a hacker who convinced Synology DiskStations (a type of network-attached storage device) to mine more than 500 million Dogecoins for him — and made out with an estimated $620,000 in cash in the process. Much of the focus has been on the size of his haul, which may represent the largest sum of cash ever mined by unwitting dupes, but Synology got in touch with us to point out that hey — they actually patched the hole used by the hacker quite some time ago.
Synology was warned that this particular flaw existed on DiskStation Manager (DSM) 4.2 and 4.3 boxes and patched it on September 23. It sent out an update informing users of the need to update their hardware. In February, they released a patch to fix the same bug in the beta version of the DSM 5.0 OS. Since February, the company has seen a huge spike in reports and service tickets, again, primarily from users who haven’t updated their software.

How to watch hacking, and cyberwarfare between the USA and China, in real time

You’ve no doubt heard countless stories about how the internet is rife with hackers and ruled by malware-peddling malcontents. You’ve probably read dozens of paragraphs on how the next great theater of war will be online rather than offline, and how China and the US are already battling each other for cyber supremacy. The truth is, though, unless you’ve actually been hacked, it’s hard to appreciate just how real the prospect of cyberwar actually is; after all, the effects of hacking are mostly invisible to the untrained eye, with the exception of very-high-profile database breaches. Now, though, a security company has produced a fascinating geographic map that shows you global hacking attempts in real-time — and sure enough, you really can see China waging cyberwar against the US.
The real-time map, maintained by the Norse security company, shows who’s hacking who and what attack vectors are being used. The data is sourced from a network of “honeypot” servers maintained by Norse, rather than real-world data from the Pentagon, Google, or other high-profile hacking targets. In hacking a honeypot is essentially a juicy-looking target that acts as a trap — either to gather important data about the would-be assailants, or to draw them away from the real target. The Norse website has some info about its “honeynet,” but it’s understandably quite sparse on actual technical details.
If you watch the map for a little while, it’s clear that most attacks originate in either China or the US, and that the US is by far the largest target for hack attacks. You can also see that the type of hack used, indicated by the target port, is rather varied. Microsoft-DS (port 445) is still one of the top targets (it’s the port used for Windows file sharing), but DNS (port 53), SSH (22), and HTTP (80) are all very popular too. You’ll probably see CrazzyNet and Black Ice, too — two common Windows backdoor programs often used by script kiddies and criminals, rather than actual cyberwar fighters.

Astronomers discover Earth-sized diamond-encrusted white dwarf

              Stars are usually unfathomably hot objects fueled by a nuclear inferno that can only be extinguished when it runs its course, but astronomers have detected an elusive object that doesn’t come close to fitting that description. A white dwarf star 900 light years away might be the coldest star ever found in the cosmos. Hovering near a much larger pulsar, this ancient stellar remnant has a temperature of less than 3,000 K, or about 2,700 degrees Celsius.

              That’s cooler than an industrial acetylene torch. It’s so old that it has crystallized into what is essentially a Earth-sized diamond, and it was surprisingly difficult to spot.
               A white dwarf like the one found near the pulsar is what’s left over after a star about the size of the Sun runs through all its nuclear fuel. The outer layers are thrown off, and all that’s left is a tiny, super-dense core of elements like carbon and oxygen. They burn at an excruciatingly slow pace, taking billions and billions of years to finally go out, and even newly transformed white dwarfs are incredibly hard to spot compared to active stars. This one was only discovered because it happens to be nestled right up next to a pulsar.
In the same way a white dwarf is what’s left after a sun-sized star runs out of fuel, a neutron star is what’s left after a slightly larger one runs its course. A spinning neutron star is known as a pulsar because it appears to pulse as it strobes the universe with beams of radio waves while whirring around. The pulsar partnered up with our diamond-encrusted white dwarf goes by the catchy name PSR J2222-0137, and is 1.2 times the mass of our sun, but even smaller than the white dwarf. Astronomers were tipped off to the presence of something near the pulsar by distortions in its radio waves. An old-fashioned space hunt was on for the culprit.

ET deals: LG 42-inch HDTV with Blu-ray player for $430, more

When manufacturers offer bundles that make sense, it can result in a big savings for consumers over buying the items separately. Right now Dell is offering a pretty great combo offer on an LG 42-inch 1080p HDTV and a net-connected Blu-ray player, together priced at just $430.
The LG 42LN5300 features a 42-inch 1920×1080 LED backlit panel. Dell has bundled it with an LG BP330 Blu-ray Player, which makes sense for a number of reasons. Obviously, you can play Blu-rays as well as DVDs, but it also turns your TV into a Smart TV. This Blu-ray player packs built-in WiFi and apps for Netflix, YouTube, Vudu, Pandora, HuluPlus and more. If you want to be able to watch Blu-rays, there’s little reason to spend the extra on a Smart TV when a player like this can do the work for you.
This HDTV includes a pair of MHL compatible HDMI ports, a component port, and a USB port, making it easy to connect your peripherals or share movies and pictures on your TV. If you have need of a second USB port, there’s also another one on the Blu-ray player, so it’ll be easy to leave a thumb drive plugged in and not worry about clogging up all your ports.
Picture will be sharp thanks to LG’s Triple XD Engine technology, and it also offers easy options for self-calibration with Picture Wizard II. It pumps out a respectable 20 total watts of audio via a pair of speakers, and the stand is detachable for easy mounting.
This bundle represents a tidy discount over buying these items separately, and is a savvy way to get a Smart TV without paying full freight for one. If this bundle’s not your thing though, we’ve also found some other great deals on TVs of various sizes, headlined by a 32-inch Samsung HDTV on sale with an effective price (after gift card) of just $98 — a crazy low cost for a brand new, brand name HDTV. Check out the

Android L vs. iOS 8: Can Apple take on Android’s biggest update ever?

We all thought Android 4.4 KitKat was a major change when it came out late last year, but the still unnamed L release of Android puts that to shame. Despite not telling us the codename (Lollipop?) or the version number (5.0?), Google demoed an updated UI called Material Design and a plethora of new features. You won’t be able to get your hands on the final version of L until this fall, but Apple is going to have its work cut out for it competing with the new Android, even after its lauded iOS 8 announcement. Here’s how Android is evolving and what that means for the iOS vs. Android matchup coming later this year.

Material Design

Material Design is the name of Google’s new interface guidelines — much like Microsoft and Metro — and it’s a radical departure from Android of the past. It adopts the color palette from Google Now with blues, muted greens, and red, but white is still the dominant color. It provides a more lively tapestry on which to paint the updated Android interface.
Android is still adhering to flat design, which is the trend, but it’s layered flatness. Google describes this as a take on stacks of paper, but a digital paper that can shift and morph into different shapes. The new SDK will allow developers to describe the way UI elements are layered (an elevation value), which can be used to render parts of an app as if they are floating just above another. Android L renders subtle shadows on the edges that give a feeling of depth without cluttering the screen. Every little change in the new Android UI also comes with some sort of animation, even if it’s fast. Ideally, there won’t be any more hard transitions.

The internet of 3500-pound things: Big data arrives in your car

Big data has the automobile in its sights and the results will be good for both the vehicle and its owner. In the coming years we can expect to see both safer vehicles and car-to-car communications. You’ll be advised of a needed repair before it’s a problem and recall notices will be delivered through the car. A mostly upbeat picture of big data was painted at Ford’s annual futures conference in Michigan, Further with Ford.
Ford’s panel of experts went broad on big data and talked about how Obama won re-election using it, how UPS improves the speed and quality of package delivery, and how MasterCard is able to help merchants pick the best locations for new stores by aggregating anonymous sales data. That left less time to ponder whether you’ll find pop-up ads on your center stack every time you pass McDonald’s, or if vehicle-to-vehicle communications reporting speed and location might help police write speeding tickets.

ET deals: $401 off Dell Inspiron One 2020 20-inch all-in-one multi-touch PC

One of the most common complaints against Windows 8 is that in its bid to get touch-friendly, it got decidedly keyboard and mouse unfriendly. A touchscreen desktop all-in-one is one solution aimed at delivering the best of both worlds, but they tend not to come cheap. Thanks to a huge new savings though, you can now nab a Dell Inspiron One 2020 for only $450 — a savings of 47%.
This Inspiron One features a 20-inch edge-to-edge glass touchscreen with 10-point touch capability, offering a sleek flat surface that’s easy to clean and easy to swipe on, even from the borders. The resolution is an HD+ 1600×900, giving you screen real estate that slides in between 720p and 1080p, letting you watch your movies and other media in fairly good quality.
This config is geared towards casual use, and it’s powered by a capable Intel Pentium G2020T processor that will perform well when it comes to typical everyday tasks. The included 4GB RAM and 500GB hard drive line up with what you’ll find in most basic mainstream computers, and will be enough for day-to-day use as well.

On the connectivity side you’ll find five USB ports (two on the side, three on the back), plus a multi-card reader and gigabit ethernet. Wireless-N and Bluetooth 4.0 are there too, giving you wireless options. A DVDRW is also present, making it simple to watch movies and more on the large display.
We’ve touted the touchscreen, but Dell does bundle this desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse to make it easy for you to interact with Windows 8 the way you want to, right out of the box. Dell covers this with a one-year warranty and 90 days of premium phone support to get you started. Pick up this capable touchscreen desktop today for one of the lowest prices we’ve seen.
Dell Inspiron One 2020 20-inch dual-core all-in-one multi-touch PCs for $449.99. Get  $401 savings instantly.

Even Warships and Giant Oil Platforms Need to Be Transported, This is What They Use

                              
                              Warships, giant oil platforms, and even the SBX-1 radar system need to be transported. Meet Blue Marlin, a semi-submersible heavy lift ship from Dockwise Shipping of the Netherlands, designed specifically for this task. It's equipped with 38 cabins to accommodate 60 people, a workout room, sauna and swimming facilities. Continue reading for a video, more pictures and information.

21 More Extremely Clever Business Cards That Will Make You Look Twice

                                       It's that time again, time for another round of extremely clever business cards that will make you look twice. Starting off, we have a tennis instructor that probably would not get many calls if they were to hand out flyers and / or cold call, but this clever court-shaped business card, complete with pop-up net, might make all the difference. Continue reading for more cool examples.

Linux almost dominates top 500 computer

                     

                                                                     This week's most recent release of the Top 500 list of supercomputers reveals to us what many had already suspected: that the Linux operating system almost dominates all systems when it comes to super computing and complex math applications. Not only does Linux power all of the top ten machines on the June 2014 list, including China's winning Tianhe-2 supercomputing node, which stole the show once again with its performance of 33.86 Petaflop/second on the Linpack benchmark, but it also now accounts for a full 97.2 percent of the full set of 500.