Many years ago, I attended a seminar given by a professional photographer who said something like this: “Every decision I make is a business decision.” I took his comment quite seriously, making many decisions over the past 20 years based on the final and potential financial outcome of the project - be it a book, assignment, speaking engagement, workshop, seminar and so on.

We all love our technology, and certainly it enables us to do amazing things with music, with pictures, with ideas. But sometimes I think it becomes a bit of a burden. We feel a responsibility to all that technology, all those possibilities. It's important to remember who is working for whom. A good role model in this area is Brian Eno, renowned producer, recording artist, and creative strategist. To spur creative thinking or break artistic logjams, he developed the "Oblique Strategies," a set of cards designed with the artist Peter Schmidt.

On my way across the Tioga Pass road I stopped at Olmstead Point. I made my way out a few hundred yards, and distanced myself from the road, parking lot, and people. Then I laid my head on a rock pillow and watched the clouds hurry past. After a while, I got up refreshed and pulled out my camera and...

I sorted through the various versions of the GIMP bitmap editor available for the Mac last week. This week, I report on what I found after playing with GIMP on my slightly underpowered Macbook. The results were good. In fact, very good IMHO.

I just set up my best-sounding podcast playback system ever, but there was one problem: I missed the first ten seconds during the time it took me to hit Play and then scamper down the stairs to the kitchen. AppleScript and speech synths to the rescue....

Sometimes, small events deserve some blog coverage well beyond their target audience's locale to make sure that the word gets out. One such event is Macoun, a new one-day conference aimed at OS X developers, which will debut in Frankfurt, Germany, on 25 October.

Photoshop World returns to Las Vegas September 4-6. O'Reillians will be well represented.

Guitarist and programmer Lucas Gonze made an interesting observation about my new experimental Web audio player. Although it's clunky compared to his work, he focused instead on its "cool new ideas" and how they evolved.

I wanted to install a free (Open Source if possible) image editor on my MacBook. After looking around, I returned to look at GIMP whose multi-window interface always bothered me. Here's what I found about GIMP for Mac OS X 10.5.

While editing a podcast in BIAS Peak 6 recently, I was disturbed to hear the audio distorting even though the peak levels were below 100%. Turns out the culprit was a stealthy slider.