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Storyboard: As stupid does
Playing a stupid character is oddly frustrating because it's incredibly difficult to do. This should not be the case. This should, in fact, be the opposite of the case. Playing someone with the mental alacrity of a ball of twine should be much easier than your brilliant wizard. But when you try to play a dumb character, it's easy for that character to wind up slipping into periods of pointless stupidity without acting like any of the nitwits you've actually dealt with over the course of your life. Intelligence is a hard thing to quantify at the best of times, but some of our characters are meant to be just plain slow. I've played a few, and it's always a challenge to make the character feel like a person instead of a caricature. So here are some tips for making your big dummy feel appropriately oafish and endearing instead of just being a strawman.
Daily Mac App: Sunset
Sometimes your screen is just too bright in the evenings. For the sake of your eyes, Sunset lets you reduce the brightness of your monitor below that of the standard brightness controls and without having to adjust the backlight. If you reduce the brightness of your screen using the on-board controls, what you're doing is reducing the brightness of the backlight bulbs or LEDs behind the screen. Sometimes that can cause buzzing, or other droning noises, and sometimes that just isn't dim enough. Sunset takes a different approach purely in software that overlays a dimming mask over your screen with different levels to suit your brightness needs. This means that if your display makes an annoying sound when dimmed, or you just can't get it dim enough, Sunset will dim your display to your satisfaction without issue. Sure, dimming your display with Sunset doesn't affect electricity usage or the life of your backlight, but it will save your eyes at night. The little program sits in the menu bar and can be configured to respond to global shortcut keys like F1 & F2. If you have more than one display, Sunset can dim all of them to the same level or you can pick and choose which one to dim independently. The only thing missing is some sort of auto-dimming set to a specific timer, but the manual control works well. Sunset is great if your lowest monitor's brightness setting is just too bright, or it makes an annoying sound when not on full brightness. It's simple, easy to use and gets the job done for an introductory price of US$1.99 (regular price $3.99).
Auto-dimming electrochromic panels reduce glare when driving (video)
It's rush hour, and you're headed due West on your evening commute -- the sun burning holes in your eyes. You could flip down a window visor, trading your field of view for visibility. Or, with a prototype shown off at Intel's 2010 International Science and Engineering Fair, you could simply let the windshield darken on its own. Two San Diego students (both accustomed to copious amounts of sunshine) rigged a Toyota Prius to do just that by stringing up electrochromic panels, which dim when voltage is applied. The trick is figuring out when and where to apply it, because when the sun is shining the panels themselves all receive the same amount of light. So instead of gauging it at the glass, Aaron Schild and Rafael Cosman found that an ultrasonic range finder could track the driver's position while a VGA webcam measured the light coming through, and darken the sections liable to cause the most eyestrain. We saw a prototype in person, and it most certainly works... albeit slowly. If you're rearing to roll your own, it seems raw materials are reasonably affordable -- Schild told us electrochromic segments cost $0.25 per square inch -- but you may not need to DIY. Having won $4,000 in prize money at the Fair, the teens say they intend to commercialize the technology, and envision it natively embedded in window glass in the not-too-distant future. Here's hoping GM gives them a call. See pics of the Prius below, or check out a video demo of their prototype right after the break. %Gallery-93034%
Darken apps in the background with Doodim
For those times when you need complete, uninterrupted concentration on a particular app you're working in, there is Doodim: a simple menubar utility that creates an Exposé-like dimming effect on the desktop and all background app windows. Doodim's product site offers a simple animated screenshot demo to help you see what really goes on, and users can even take the dimming effect all the way to black, so no nothing else is visible, save for the app you're working in. It's a slick idea and is done well, and toggling the dimming effect is simply handled from the menubar (the menubar, if you're wondering, is not dimmed). The site lists one known catch so far, which I personally haven't run into while playing with this: apparently, the dim effect can fail sometimes while switching between apps. Bouncing from Firefox to Mail, Adium, NetNewsWire, Safari and iTunes hasn't produced any issues for me yet though.Doodim is provided free from La Chose Interactive, and I'm not sure if it's 10.4-only or not.
