r3fresh

Turn a Simple Doodle into an Awesome Vector

Look at the sides of any paper of mine and you’ll always see some sort of doodle. I’m not one to fall asleep in class, but I am one to go overboard and cover my paper in inked randomness. I decided to take one of my doodles farther than the trash can and turn it into a vector, something surprisingly easy to do.

1. Choose a Doodle: Any doodle or pattern will work as long as it has clean lines. For best results have the work outlined with a dark marker on a solid colored paper.

2. Scan and Place: Scan in you’re work. Make sure it’s scanned at high dpi to prevent pixelation (I chose 200).

Then, open up Illustrator and place your scanned piece onto the canvas.

3. Live Trace, Expand, and Clean: With the image selected press the Live Trace button (in the top toolbar). To tweak Live Trace you can chose some of the presets. I chose the Inked Drawing setting.

Use the Expand feature to turn the object into an editable vector, which may need some cleaning up depending on the complexity of your work.

4. Live Paint and More: Now that the doodle is a vector you can add color using the Live Paint feature. Add other effects like shadow and text if you would like. Bask in your accomplishment.

Tags: doodle, drawing, robot, vector

How Secure is Mint.com?

Leo Laporte brought up a really good point on this week’s TWiT. Should we (the users) surrender our bank account numbers and passwords to Mint? Mint, for those who don’t know, is an online money management tool that will supposedly save you money and allow you to keep a really close eye on the money you spend. The only question is security.Banks and credit card firms spend millions, if not hundreds of millions on keeping people’s information safe, but they still end up misplacing a “laptop” with account numbers of a few thousand people. A relative works for a company that creates applications for credit card processors. They get 10,000 attempted breaches a DAY and they don’t even use or have any legit credit card information. If the big companies are having trouble keeping information safe, then why should we trust Mint?

Like me, most think of Mint as another web service, but it’s a web service that uses (and could someday lose) your account numbers. Personally, I had put my PayPal account into Mint to try it out because my bank account didn’t work in Mint. Now I’m glad it didn’t work. We need to remember that for every good website there are a hundred more that are trying to access your information maliciously. I’m not saying Mint is going to ever lose your money, but a close eye should be kept on them.

I don’t want to surrender my information for better deals or a cool interface no matter how good the deal or how slick the interface is. Want a much safer alternative? Try an application like Quicken or just use your banks online banking site.

Ten Tips for Starting a Blog

I’ve been blogging for about three years and some of the them have been misses, but it’s been a great experience. Here are ten tips (not in any real order) for starting a blog:

1. Aesthetics are great, but content is king: The first time a person comes to your site they’ll see the theme or design of your site. The look of your site needs to bring people in, but that’s it. After seeing the site design, they’ll go straight for your content.

2. Promote yourself by promoting others: Really like a certain blog? Fan of a podcast? Write about it. Post a review of the site you like or just leave a link on your blog. Others will appreciate the recognition and they might even link back to your site.

3. Keep it simple: If your just starting a blog, just blog. There isn’t a reason to over extend yourself. I have made this mistake many times and have overcomplicated this blog, as well as many others. Before starting a forum or another blog make sure to get an audience.

4. Make friends (with fellow blog folk): I never thought that making friends with other bloggers would help my blog, but it does. Just break the ice and send a question to another blogger, they’ll be happy to respond.
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