Free spray and splatter Photoshop brushes

Digital painting has come a long way, but it can be too perfect. Now you can make more of a mess if you want.

Tips:

Photoshop and Painter are both used for digital painting, but they are very expensive unless you buy the student versions (campus bookstores usually carry these).

Downloading random copies of Photoshop, etc. can be very dangerous for your computer security because pirated software is a popular vector for computer malware (viruses, trojans, back doors).

Photoshop brushes might work with software you already have.

MacHeist Bundle - 3 more days only - Mac apps for charity

The MacHeist bundles are always a good deal, but this one is the best ever. Buy hundreds of dollars worth of new, full Tiger and Leopard apps for only $39 (Tiger apps also work on Leopard. If you're running Tiger, download the Leopard apps too for later on.)

No joke. $25 bucks from each sale goes to important humanitarian and conservation charities.

Things you may find interesting in the bundle include:

- iSale for making eBay pages (Tiger)
- Kinemac for making 3D animations (Tiger)
- PhoneView which lets you work with your iPhone or iPod Touch like a hard drive (Tiger)
- Little Snapper (Leopard) and Acorn (Tiger) image editors
- WireTap Studio (Tiger) which can record and convert any audio your Mac plays

There are also some games, a newsreader and other good stuff.

You get 12 applications today for your $39 and 3 more are possible, depending on how many people buy the bundle in the next 3 days. BoinxTV is the next one to be unlocked, a TV studio program that sells for $199 normally. These are full versions too, not demos.

You can download the 12 free and unlocked apps immediately after you pay. Everyone who buys the bundle is entitled to all the apps that unlock during the event, so there's no reason to wait until the end to buy them. Remember to print your receipt with your unlock codes and bookmark the receipt page so you can go back and get any apps that unlock over the next couple of days.

ArtRage painting software

ArtRage is getting good reviews. It works on MacOS and Windows, and it has a free downloadable trial version. It's optimized to work with tablets, but you don't have to have a tablet.

Tablets are the way to go though if you're doing graphic design or digital painting. The good news there is that the Wacom Bamboo finally brings the price down to something comparable with new sneakers.

Surveillance Self-Defense

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

Even though this is a US-centric site, you are surfing US sites, maybe storing your email on one or more of them, your MySpace and Facebook, chats, and so on are crossing borders constantly. So this article is applicable to almost everyone, at least technically, if not legally.

Online Etch-a-Sketch

This is better than the real thing because you can use arrow keys instead of knobs to draw with. No more dropping it on the floor, either.

Best of all, with computer sketching, you can get screenshots to preserve your work. Firefox users, for example, can use an extension called Page Saver for easy screenshots. Unlike most screen capturing software, it can be set to capture the entire page even on very long pages. (Use PNG format for best results.)

NIN - Seattle show 2008

I saw Nine Inch Nails on this tour, and no recording technology of today could do the show justice. I sincerely hope NIN tried to capture it for us to see later on DVD anyway. So this youtube vid is just to give you a tiny little taste of the mind boggling things that concertgoers experienced. It was stunningly good and used technology I've not seen before, such as something that looked a lot like a mesh LCD screen (stage size) and some, well, interactive 3D visualization topographical mapping software merging recorded and live ... well have a look.

Thanks to Joker for digging up the video link.

Here's Wired's technical explanation and more photos of the hardware.

Official NIN site and tour info.

30 tutorials that will teach you Photoshop

Plus, they have Illustrator tutorials and soon Fireworks, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects and Flash. And the tutorials are from other sites ... that also have tutorials! Best of all, it's all free and at your own pace. (Actually, the best part is that if you take the time to sharpen your digital design skills, you'll have very well-paid work in your future if you want it.)

Tip: Students and teachers get amazing educational discounts on software.

Mac Game Store

Painting / Image software for Windows

This looks like it might be worth trying out if you don't have your own copy of Photoshop for Windows.