This has a nice earthy feel to it. What more can I say? The drum in the original photo is a djembe, but this can obviously be used for any type of hand drumming design.

There are a lot of great Photoshop brushes floating around the internet, but where do you turn if you want to grungy, corroded, or otherwyse distressed vector art? I couldn't find a good answer online so I created these textured overlays from some photos.

The resulting pieces of line art are very useful; when placed over an image they can be combined with this technique to create non-uniform grunginess, rustiness, etc.

Feel free to use these for any purpose you like, but please include a credit and link to this site.

By now you might have heard the widely-covered story of Judge Kozinski's web site scandal.

To summarize, a well-regarded judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was found, in the midst of presiding over an obscenity trial, to have posted obscene materials on his personal web site. The resulting conflict of interest forced him to declare a mistrial and he is now under investigation by a panel of federal judges.

Whoops.

The first thing that comes to mind when you hear this story is, "What an idiot! How could such a smart guy could do something so dumb?", Then you might start searching for his site, or perhaps you just move on to the sports page and get on with your life.

But if you have your own web site you should probably pay attention to this story and ask yourself, "How can I avoid this type of shame and humiliation?"

The easy answer is, "Don't post anything that you don't want the whole world to see." This is a surefire solution but it doesn't help you when you want to post confidential materials for review or testing purposes.

So let's look at a what Judge Kozinski should have done to cover his arse...

Why Doesn't The Printer Like My Word Document?

It's not just some sort of geeky "I hate Microsoft" thing, I swear. Microsoft Office Suite products simply aren't made for producing high-quality print work and translation problems that often occur when Microsoft files are opened by non-Microsoft applications.