Did you know that?

Yeap it’s officialy quiz night here at Vagpod. No, wait! don’t get your drinks yet! Actually yesterday evening I was reading a book about graphic design and I came across some interesting historical facts which I’ll share with you. Now go and get the booze

:

• The term Graphic Design was introduced in the USA by Dwight Wiggins in 1927.
• The famous London Tube map, (more or less) as we see it today, was designed by Frank Beck around 1908.
• Guttenburg created the first printing press by adapting a wine press in 1440-1450.
• The typewriter was invented in 1865.

A Ducati for your pocket

It seems that the trend nowadays is motoring and large companies in general that have nothing to do with computer products to collaborate with companies that produce electronic and computer products. We already have seen the Ferrari-Acer 4000 laptop and the Sony Ericsson K800i Ferrari Edition, not to mention the Prada – LG KE850 mobile phone.

Perhaps it coincides with Sandisk’s decision to sponsor the Ducati racing team, but the Italian firm already gave the green light on Sandisk to put Ducati’s logo on a specially designed 4GB USB disk.

The design is extraordinary and very stylish, the product reminds of a racing motorcycle’s fuel tank and when the USB adapter is inside it reminds the exhaust as it comes out from the back of the bike’s tail.

In terms of capacity, 4GB is today’s standard and with 20 MB/sec speed … it is not mentioned anywhere if the 20MB/sec is the writing or reading speed, they are different on ALL USB sticks. Definitely IF 20MB/sec is the writing speed it is very fast!

So you got a package of exquisite design that produces superb looks, a standard capacity that is enough for the average user and the Ducati logo on!

What’s the price for such an gadget of desire? It retails about $124.99 = (80.25 euros)! Yeap you’ve read that one right! Other 4GB sticks with approximately the same performance retail at 16.00 euros ($24.92). Also for around 60.00 euros you can get the OCZ ATV 16GB USB stick with superb writng speed (all prices are at the time I’m writing this). I’m mentioning the OCZ product because it is the one I’m using on an everyday basis and in my experience it is really fast, plus it can carry 16GB of data, we’re talking about whole graphics project folders here! And all that for half the price of the Sandisk-Ducati.

So you gotta pay that nice piece of plastic a bit too high if you want it with a Ducati logo on!

Ressurection by stupidity!

Silly me!

Although being involved with the “things with loads of keys on” (aka computers) since 1984, sometimes I’m still driven by pure stupidity! Here’s what happened yesterday; read, laugh and learn!

I woke up Sunday morning, so naturally (of course) the first thing is to go make myself a nice cup of coffee and turn on my pc. So I did! But… the damn thing wouldn’t boot! Hell! It wouldn’t even show the bios-set image of the motherboard!!!..

The Mac-Pro fetish

Having and using an Apple Mac computer is one of the top objects of desire on my wish-list. I simply love the feeling, the stability, the looks of the interface and their sleek design. Compared to a pc, a Mac is light years ahead! It’s not the i-pod, i-tunes connectivity and all the gimmicks that go with it, it’s the fact that a Mac is a reliable machine and a real pleasure to work with, pure QUALITY, period! And for the amount of time I’m spending in front of a computer screen, I demand that quality.

Fairly recently Apple has released a new model in their Pro series. And that machine is a real monster! On the outside, the design haven’t changed much, but inside things just got hotter. First of all the powerplant of this workstation is 8 powerplants really! Using 2 X Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors up to 3.2GHz you can vaguely begin to imagine the capabilities of this machine! Larger powerplant means that you also need a larger storeroom to support the production volume So the new MacPro can have RAM up to a whopping 32GB!!! It comes with only 2GB as a retail standard, but don’t tell me you’re not intrigued with such capacity to order a machine with more RAM!

Powering Up for Photoshop!

If you’re, like me, spending endless hours on Photoshop, drawing or just editing/retouching photos, or just doing collages, you’ll probably want more out of your machine. Chances are that you already know most if not some of the tips I’ll give you below. By the way these tips are for PC users only.

Again, these are intended for the serious artist or the professional that demands more out of the application and works with large format artwork for print. If you’re editing small images for everyday or web use, you’ll definitely not need all this gear, as your everyday pc does the job beautifully.

First of all I would strongly recommend a dedicated system for running Photoshop and other graphics/DTP applications like Illustrator, Corel Draw, Quark Express etc. The reason for that being that Photoshop draws a hell of a lot system resources upon running, so for instance if you’re having a mail client, a download client or a web browser also running at the same time, they also drain system resources and therefore hold back valuable resources that would have been allocated to Photoshop otherwise.