If you just want to use GarageBand to do some simple edits to an audio file you might want to change from displaying Measures in LCD to display time, which is usefull when you edit an audio file. In order to display time instead of measures in GarageBand menu go to:

Control -> Show Time in LCD

and voila, time is displayed.

If you’ve just recorded and synced your Voice Memos from iPhone to your OSX Lion (on other version it might be different) you can find your Voice Memos by going (using finder) to: user -> Music -> iTunes -> iTunes Media -> Voice Memos.

Voice Memos are .m4a files, you can copy anywhere you like, you can open with iTunes or QuickTime.Or you can insert in a Garage Band Track and edit it.

To quickly adjust highlights and tone of an image we can use Levels tool.

Open an image in Gimp and then to access level tools we will click Tools -> Color Tools -> Level.

Then if we want to work with level curves we will click on Edit these Settings as Curves button.

When processing an image the idea is to obtain an S curve that looks good, without blowing out image with too much white and without black/too dark areas.

Note: The same tool can be accessed from Colors -> Levels submenu.

Gimp level tool is very useful for image processing.

You already know about Gimp, the best free, open source photo editing app.

If you want to know how to scale an image in Gimp, here’s a quick how to.

1. Load your image in Gimp. If you are in Windows you will open the file using Gimp menu. If you are in Linux you might just run from command line: gimp photo.jpg. Yeah gimp knows command line parameters.

2. Scale the image by clicking: Image -> Scale Image. Choose a new width or height and press Scale.

3. This step is optional. If you’ve scaled down the image and you are not happy with image sharpness, go to Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask. This will make your image sharper. Adjust parameters according to your need, if the image is too sharp, lower down Amount parameter.

4. Save the image by clicking File -> Save as menu option.

Tip: If you scale down an image you might want to apply a little sharp effect to that scaled down image. If you scale up (enlarge) the image you might want to apply a little blur effect. That’s the recommended approach to scaling images.

Gimp is a very useful photo/image editing tool. The best thing is that it’s free. Second best thing is that it’s available on many platforms from Windows, OSX to Linux and FreeBSD (and other platforms).

Let’s say we have a selection from an image and we want to save that selection to a new image.

This task is very simple, so we will:

1. Select the part of the image we want to save using Gimp select tool.

2. Copy the selection by clicking Edit -> Copy (submenu).

3. Past the selection to a new file by clicking Edit -> Paste as -> New Image. Then we choose the image name and press ok.

If you want to know more about Gimp here is a Quick introduction to Gimp.

Some developers use Midnight Commander from Terminal on an Apple computer using OSX. People who use Midnight Commander will also use FTP client embedded into that program. With such use sometimes appear the need to automatically login to a FTP account from MC without entering username and password, and just by entering the host name.

There’s also a second case when our FTP username is with the following format: username@hostname. In that case we cannot enter in MC FTP client username@hostname@hostname.

(more…)

If you want to save flash videos loaded in Safari browser’s cache after you’ve watched a video in Safari just press:

Command + Option (Alt) + A keys together to activate Activity window.

Then, scroll down and look in the list for your url to find a flv file that would be your video.

To activate Crop tool and see Crop window when working with Aperture in full screen mode just press:

C Key.

Then select the area you want to keep from your image. To crop, press Enter key.

Simple, right?

To see the Inspector window when working in Aperture in full screen mode just press:

H key.

Simple, isn’t it?

To reveal hot sports and cold spots from a photography when working with Aperture press:

Alt + Shift + H

To reduce cold spots use Black Point slider and Recovery slider from Exposure Adjustments.
To reduce hot spots use Exposure slider from Explosure Adjustments.