When you have a large file or group of large files that you want to send to someone, but you don't want to clog up your Dropbox account and you don't have time to just drive over to your friend's house with a USB drive, Justbeamit is a new web service that lets you upload a file, get a private link, and send it to a friend. When they open it, a private peer-to-peer download session will start and they'll grab the file from you over the web.

Justbeamit makes the process easy on purpose: all you have to do is drag and drop the file you want to share into your browser window, and the webapp will give you the URL you can send to your friend. You'll be able to watch the progress while your file is uploaded, and when it's finished, you'll see a "waiting" indicator, meaning the service is waiting for the recipient to download the file. When they visit the link, Justbeamit opens the connection between you and the recipient and lets them download the file.

The service is dead simple to use, and doesn't require that you sign up for an account of any kind. The only downside is that because the service is little more than a gateway, the sender can't leave the page until the download is complete, and once both parties leave the page, the transfer link is useless, so if there's a problem, you'll have to start over. Even so, the service works and is incredibly easy to use.

Justbeamit | via AddictiveTips

According to Droid Life, Verizon Wireless is sending out emails to its customers informing them of a new policy of tracking the websites you visit, the apps you use and where you are in order to sell that info to advertisers. The only way to to get out of this is to opt out, which we recommend you do, even if Verizon says they anonymize that data.

Here's the place to go to opt out of being tracked. You'll need to log into your account, then, as GottaBeMobile explains:

you should be taken to a page where you can opt out of two sections. You'll want to opt-out of the first section, click save. Then, you'll want to go back in and opt-out of the second option and hit save. And then you'll want to go in and opt-out of the third section and click save. One of them, in the middle is pretty well hidden.

It's pretty objectionable that not being tracked on Verizon is opt-out, but perhaps if customers make enough noise about this, the company will be forced to change.

Verizon Plans To Start Tracking Your Mobile Information – Instead Of Freaking Out, Simply Opt-Out Of It | Droid Life via GottaBeMobile

Today I’m sharing these highly useful vintage paper Photoshop patterns. These would work great for creating a lightweight and seamless web background, or a fast way to add some texture in your Photoshop project. In the download file I’ve included the core 200px jpeg files as well as the .PAT file. Enjoy!

Preview

Download .ZIP

Today I’m sharing these 5 textures from inside the covers of a few different vintage books. There is a range of content, from blank pages through illustrations and handwriting. Each has its own personality. Each one is about 2500×4000 pixels.

Happy Friday everyone, today I’m releasing this very useful set of 8 different grunge brushes. The source of these was mostly distressed wood textures I had lying around. The preview images below don’t do these justice, they will add some great texture and touch to your work. Each one is the maximum resolution of 2500px.

Preview

Download .ZIP

Today’s Grab Bag contains 5 completely diverse textures taken from unique materials. Each one is 3000 pixels tall and over 4000 pixels wide. Click the thumbnails to go to the Flickr album where you can download each one at full size.

Miles Aldridge is a fashion and commercial photographer originally hailing from London, UK.

http://milesaldridge.com

Yulia Brodskaya is an artist from Russia that creates paper illustrations. Her recent creation ‘Babushka’ is a process she calls quilling. A process where she uses paper strips, formed, rolled and glued to the background. Check out Yulia’s crafty process below.

http://www.artyulia.com

"I work around the clock-- 10⁴³ Planck times per second-- providing the gravitational attraction to hold this galaxy cluster together. And some baryonic cosmologist wants to explain me away as a modification of Newtonian gravity?

"I have been silent for 13.7 billion years, but no more.

"I AM THE 96%"

(Original Pandora Cluster image from NASA)

This is living proof of “be careful what you wish for.” After Terry Francona was unceremoniously shit-canned, I wanted answers. Today, Bob Hohler and the Globe published a nasty tell-all about the Red Sox collapse, “based on a series of interviews the Globe conducted with individuals familiar with the Sox operation at all levels.” Translation: the smear campaign continues.

According to the Globe’s “sources,” Terry Francona is a pill-popping, wife-dropping, gutless mess. The unholy trio of Lackey, Beckett and Lester are just a band of lawless, beer-drinking, chicken-eating slobs. Where was all this intrepid reporting during the season?

This is the lowest point in the tenure of the present ownership. The standard operating procedure of bashing anyone who leaves Boston is unacceptable. Are we really expected to believe this? That all of this culminated in a perfect storm in September and resulted in the 7-20 record? Sorry, I’m not buying what the Red Sox PR machine is selling.

Now that Theo is on his way to Chicago, expect some skeletons to come out of the closet…probably from a Globe “source.”

Here in Boulder we get magnificent sunsets, especially in the summer when the clouds interplay with the mountains to the west. But I have never seen anything like this: the shadow of Washington state’s Mt. Rainier cast along the clouds at sunrise:

Holy (yes, in this case appropriately) Haleakala! [Click to cascadenate.]

That’s amazing. Mt. Rainier is a volcano, climbing to a height of over 14,000 feet (4300 meters). There are no other mountains anywhere near that height nearby, so it’s really prominent in the landscape (by comparison, there are several fourteeners, as they’re called, in the Rockies, so they don’t stick out as much though they’re still breathtaking). The rising Sun catches the peak, and the shadow is cast on the underside of the cloud layer. The dramatic sunrise colors really make this an incredibly beautiful shot.

The KOMO news site has lots more pictures of this, too. Go take a look!

And remember, when you’re outside, it always pays to look around you for a moment. You never know what incredible vista nature may have in store for you.

Tip o’ the snow cap (har har) to John Baxter.

Austin likes its hellish Halloweens and on that score Titus Andronicus deserves standing-room-only audiences and ticket queues around the block, down there on César Chávez Avenue just a few blocks east of Interstate 35.

Forget all that stuff about Shakespeare they taught you in high school and college. This one he wrote really early in his career, in 1591 or so when he had only a couple of comedies and the three-part history Henry VI under his belt. The wannabe playwright gleefully embraced the new and popular genre of the blood-and-gore revenge tragedy pioneered by Thomas Kyd with The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again (ca. 1585, published in 1592).

Looking for shivers? Try these: agéd Roman general Titus Andronicus returns to Rome after forty years of battles in which twenty-one of his twenty-five sons have been killed. He parades in captured Goth queen Tamora and her three sons; despite her pleading he orders his troops to take reprisal by killing the eldest and burning his corpse. Titus refuses the people's choice of him as their emperor and moves them to acclaim Saturninus, son of the former emperor.

Now emperor, Saturninus selects Titus' daughter Lavinia as his wife, thereby depriving his brother Bassanius of a sweetheart; Titus' sons refuse and spirit away their sister. Furious at this disobedience, Titus kills his own son Martius. Only after Titus' brother Marcus intervenes does the old warrior permit them to place the corpse of Martius in the family mausoleum. Annoyed at Bassanius' "rape" -- kidnapping -- of Lavinia, the emperor decides to take Goth queen Tamora to wife, giving her and her two remaining sons Roman citizenship. Tamora counsels new hubby Emperor Saturninus to stay calm, promising him "I'll find a day to massacre them all,/and raze their faction and their family. . . "

And that's just the first act.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

My husband and I, well, we’re exactly as exciting as you might imagine because we talk about pears a lot. I’ll take the blame, I’m sure I usually start the conversation, which goes roughly like, “Pears? Really? You just don’t like pears?” And he’ll say “They’re just so one note. They’re sweet and boring,” usually while slicing another of his beloved Granny Smith apples into perfect quarters. (He’s such a tidy eater people, I comparatively eat with the grace of a Hoover). And the thing is, I agree with him 100 percent, but I see these things as characteristics, not flaws. However, in baking, I agree that pears could use a little help. They like acid and they like berries; brighter fall spices like ginger play off them well and you’ll be surprised what a pinch of white pepper can do to wake them up.

... Read the rest of pear cranberry and gingersnap crumble on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2011. | permalink to pear cranberry and gingersnap crumble | 281 comments to date | see more: Cranberries, Fall, Pear, Photo, Tarts/Pies, Winter

If you're getting a call from someone you haven't added to your address book, sometimes you can determine who it is by looking up the number's area code. Caller Info displays a small popup with incoming calls letting you know the number's origin.

Caller Info doesn't show you where the call is coming from, per se—it just shows where the area code is from. So, it isn't a creepy way to pinpoint someone's location, but rather a way to see that if a call is coming from Minnesota, and you only know one person from Minnesota, that you can determine who's calling you. Caller Info also lets you look up area codes on demand from the app's minimal interface, on the off chance you missed the call. It's a really handy little app to have, if you run into this problem often.

Caller Info is a free download for Android devices.

Caller Info - ID: Call Area | Android Market