This kid is awesome:

He’s 11 years old, and the world’s fastest cup stacker. He made this “Fastest Firefox” video for the upcoming Firefox 3.5 launch. Of course Firefox can’t stack cups, but its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is also one of the fastest in the world!

The new feature called “content-aware image resizing” in Photoshop is amazing. There is a promotional video up on the Adobe site that’s really fun to watch. For example, they make a Volkswagen bus more “economical” (mind you, while keeping the wheels round):

The technology behind it is based on research from an Isreali research group. That group put a video up on youtube in 2007 already:

It’s a little more technical, but no less impressive, so all of you geeks who wonder how it actually works should watch this as well.

I can tell you one thing: I want this in Firefox’s page resizing code. Sadly, I assume it is strictly patented and Adobe will probably have made sure to have some sort of exclusive deal on it.

Update: A commenter points out, there is an open source plugin for the GIMP that does content-aware resizing–already since 2007. Thank you, Gandalf!

Google’s Picasa Web Album supports downloading an entire album, however, it requires the Picasa software to do so. Bummer if you are on a Mac, or don’t want to (or can’t) install Picasa on your computer.

There’s another tutorial online that suggests using a Greasemonkey script to surface the download links, then use the DownThemAll Firefox extension to grab the links.

Sadly, the Greasemonkey script in question stopped working after a recent code change on the picasa website. I was able to easily fix it, but due to the lack of an open license, I am unable to share the script with you

However, I found an alternative solution: The album’s RSS feed! Along with the aforementioned DownThemAll extension, you can easily download a complete album off Picasa Web. Here is how:

Go to the desired Album, and click the “RSS” link on the right hand side:

Firefox will show you the RSS feed in a more or less appealing way. Note that each of the pictures shown has an “attached” JPEG file underneath:

The only thing we need to do is download all of these with DownThemAll. For that, right-click, and choose “DownThemAll”. In the “links” tab, it’ll automatically grab all pictures for you:

Just hit “start” and let it load!

Hope this helps!

I promise, my blog is not going to turn into a “desktop wallpaper collection”, but this one is too cool not to show it to you:

“Ceci n’est pas le fond d’écran officiel de Firefox / This Is Not The Official Firefox Background Picture”

By the way, the photographer Denis-Carl Robidoux publishes a picture per day, all of which in different sizes to fit your screen, and for free, too.