Marcus McCurdy’s Blog

My personal blog about games, movies, blogging, and whatever else I’m currently into.

Using Photoshop highpass filter on textures.

I stumbled upon (not the stumble upon site) this great post on Gamasutra about using the highpass filter in photoshop to make it easier to tile textures. The focus is on textures in games and 3D graphics, but it is sill pertinant for any kind of texture use. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010523/hajba_pfv.htm

Grungy, Greasy, Grimey, and best of all free!

I just found this really cool free grunge texture photo site called Urban Dirty. I checked out some of the textures and they look really top-notch.

Happy Earth day!

Today is Earth Day if you weren’t already aware and I just wanted to make a special post wishing everyone a happy day. Take a moment to step outside and enjoy nature for a few minutes to help celebrate the day.

Speed up your website with these advanced tips

I found these advanced tips to speed up your website at Jaisen Mathai’s blog. He used yslow to get a grade on his website’s speed then used the tips from that program to speed up his site. He went from an F to an A so check it out. I’m going to run yslow on my site later. http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2008/02/27/speed-up-apache-how-i-went-from-f-to-a-in-yslow/

Lola the mail carrying Chihuahua

Here is Lola the Chihuahua performing her newest trick.

All your servers are belong to media temple

Everything has been switched over to the new media temple server and is working great. The only hiccup I had was that I needed to change my .htaccess file slightly due to the different server configuration, but everything is copacetic now.

I’m a Go Daddy switcher

The servers are too slow!

I’ve decided to switch hosting from Go Daddy to Media Temple. Go daddy is just too slow. I’m not sure if it is the database server that is causing my wordpress to be unacceptably slow or if I just got stuck on a bad shared hosting server e.g. someone else is bogging the server down. Hopefully there will be no downtime as I’ve already transfered everything over and the only thing I have to do now is change my DNS information. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

I’ve read many posts complaining about Go Daddy’s support, but I haven’t had to use their support for anything. They are very economical, but when the server is so slow that the page times out when you try to make a post that just isn’t acceptable.

How to highlight author comments in Wordpress without a plugin

First, I know there are plugins that do this, but I didn’t feel like using a plugin. Second, I got the idea for this from Jennifer Slegg’s blog post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break. The link that she gave to Matt Cutt’s blog post How to highlight author comments in WordPress  didn’t match up with the code my theme is using or the the default Kubrick theme (I think he designed his own theme). I’ll show you the method I used to modify my comments.php and style.css. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Remove Chroma noise with photoshop

Lately, I’ve been looking at noise ninja (a plugin for photoshop that removes digital noise from photographs) because my wife’s camera seems to take very noisy pictures. Then, I came across this cool tutorial that shows how to remove the noise without a plugin. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Awesome photoshop glow effect

I love these glowing light trails in photoshop and here is another tutorial on them. The last tutorial I linked to wasn’t really a light trails tutorial, but more of a tutorial on making a background for said light trails. This one looks really cool though so check it out… bah who am I kidding I don’t have any readers so I’ll check it out later.