Why I’m For Twitter’s 280 Character increase

On November 7th, 2017 Twitter announced they were increasing the character limit on tweets from 140 to 280 characters. The internet tends to be resistant to any kind of big changes so not surprisingly a lot of people complained. Personally,  I say that it is about time!

Twitter has never been the best place in sharing certain views, especially complex geopolitical situations and that 140 character limit can be extremely frustrating. There have been plenty of times where if that limit were increased just a tad bit it would’ve made my tweeting immensely easier.

So you might be asking yourself, if you want to elaborate on something further than just setup a blog and write about it there. That’s definitely a good alternative but unfortunately writing blogs can take awhile and sometimes you just don’t have the time to do that. For example, if you’re on-the-go then it’d be a lot easier to quickly express things in 1-2 tweets.

The old limit of 140 characters was roughly about 1.5 sentences and doubling to 280 now makes it up to 3. Really… you can’t be bothered to read up to 3 sentences? In my opinion if your attention span is that short, then perhaps the issue is less with Twitter and more with you? Just something to seriously think about it…..

Photoshop – Easiest Way to Blend Tutorial

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Here’s a method I’ve done in Adobe Photoshop that makes blending colors in images easy and looks real nice as well. You are going to use the smudge tool and create a custom brush preset in several steps down below.

 

Step 1:  Select the Smudge tool and at the menu bar click Window>Brush.

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Continue reading Photoshop – Easiest Way to Blend Tutorial

Historical Events Captured on Photo

This slideshow video on history is not something I usually do but it’s something I’ve been wanting to put together for sometime. Some of the earliest pictures ever made are fascinating such as the last survivors of the American Revolution for example. Before doing this, I didn’t know any of them lived long enough for the camera to be invented and to have their pics taken.

There are lots more interesting pictures out that I was unable to include due to the background music only lasting about 3 minutes. I might possibly feature the other pics and create a ‘part 2’ video sometime in the future.

This was difficult to put together because the size ratio of early 19th century photos was way different than the standard widescreen format videos we have today. After doing some tinkering around in Photoshop I was able to get them to look reasonably nice in the video. I also remove some watermarks and timestamps in some of the photos as well. As I was removing a couple of these watermarks I was starting to get a bit upset. Think about it some of these pics are almost 200 years old and people are claiming ownership in something that clearly isn’t theirs…

Continue reading Historical Events Captured on Photo

Carrie Fisher

If you all remember a few days ago on the news that they said Stars Wars actress Carrie Fisher had suffered a heart attack during a flight? Eventually saying that Fisher was in “stable” condition but unfortunately it was not so stable because she died earlier today. Normally when hearing news of a celeb dying I just kinda say “oh that sucks” and kinda move on but this news of Carrie Fisher has me a bit upset.

Rest in Peace Carrie Fisher and may the force be with you!

 

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Number 1 tip to saving on eBay

I didn’t want to spend another $40 on a case, especially for a phone that’s now a backup since I just got the new iPhone 6s Plus. So I start searching around on eBay and immediately found a seller who was asking $12 for it.

After digging around, I found another eBayer selling the same case for $9.99

Then I searched ebay deeper and found one for $8.33  but there was no ‘Buy It Now’ option. So I placed my bid and during the last hour of the auction, someone outbids me. Understandably I was disappointed at this point and I was thinking about giving up and just buying from the guy selling it at $9.99

I decided to scour eBay one more time and sure enough I found another seller wanting the same case for $7 and included the ‘Best Offer’ option. I send him my offer price of $6 but he just lets me sit there for almost 24 hours and doesn’t respond.

After getting tired of waiting, I found yet another eBayer selling a case made by the same manufacturer but it was the higher model# case that retails slightly higher ($45) than the one i was shopping for. He was asking $6.49 and had the ‘Best Offer’ option available.

I didn’t want to risk pissing the seller off by low balling him cuz I’ve been at this for 2 days. I didn’t think i’d find a deal better than this, so I made an offer of $6 and within 10 minutes the seller accepts.

$45 protective case for $6!

Number 1 tip saving money on eBay? Patience and lots of it!