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Maghound – For Magazine Lovers Afraid of Commitment

What do you do when you want to subscribe to a magazine but you just can’t decide if you’re really going to like it for the full term of the subscription? What if your mood changes through the year and you always want something different to read?

maghound-website-uncovered

The Maghound website is going to deliver exactly what you’ve been looking for in your reading material. They say it’s the magazine lover’s best friend, I say it’s for magazine lovers afraid of commitment.

The Maghound service lets you select 3 magazines and subscribe to them for $4.95/mnth. If at some point you decide you don’t like one of the magazines, you can switch it out for another magazine. How cool is that?

I’ve got to give props to my friend Casey over at moosh in indy for pointing this one out to me. Her post about the service explains it all in absolutely perfect illustrations and detail.

All I can say is, I can’t decide if I want to fork over the $4.95/mnth for 3 magazines or $9.95/mnth for my choice of 7 subscriptions. Who can deal with that kind of pressure?

Uncover your new "library" reading room in your own home with Maghound, it’s a magazine lover’s best friend, whether they’re afraid of commitment or not.

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Who Knows How to Resize Images

I've been working with a few new clients lately that have had questions about resizing images and formatting them for use on the web. Other friends have also asked me about resizing images for use in their profile pictures on sites like Facebook and twitter.

 

Obviously the picture above wouldn't make a good profile photo. Almost my entire face is cut off in the image. The reason is the original resolution of the image as it came from my camera.

You see each one of those megapixels, which gives you a higher quality image, means that your original image isn't quite suited for use on the web. The picture above has been cropped and resized as well. The image above has the dimensions of 590 pixels by 248 pixels. Grabbing that sized square off the original image just gave me the end of my nose. The original photo was 3072 pixels by 2304 pixels and a total file size of 2.04MB.

The original image in its entirety looks like the one below

 

It's been resized to 300 pixels by 225 pixels and is now just under 12k in file size. That's quite a difference between the original photos.

I cropped the image above a little more to make it work as my Facebook profile photo and it's shown below at 200 pixels by 150 pixels and is just over 6k in size.

 

Why am I sharing all of this? Because there's a difference between actually resizing and resampling your images and just stretching them or squeezing them by the corners to make them "look" smaller. If you take your original photo and just stretch/squeeze it, you're making the same super large image file (over 2MB in our example) look like the smaller image file. But you've just changed the look. Your browser still has to load the larger file completely. This is why many sites have problems when you try to upload an original photo from your camera without resizing.

Since I can't cover all the how-to's for each of your image programs, I just want to point you in the direction of learning more about how to do resizing and resampling with whatever program you use. Just look for the Help section and search for the terms resizing and resampling.

Also learn how to crop images, a cropped image can have a much louder impact than one that was just resized to fit in the original format. Be creative use a bg remover app. Get out there and have fun.

If you're looking for a great image editing program, here are a few I use, have tried and or recommend highly: Picasa, IrfanView, Picnik, Paint.NET, Snagit.

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Find That Song You Just Heard on Musipedia

What's the most popular song on the planet? The last time I think I heard the answer to this question it was "Happy Birthday to You". Makes sense when you think about it. What do you do though when you can't think of the name of the song you just heard.

Musipedia Website Screenshot

Now you can go to the Musipedia website and figure out what that song is that you just heard. Sure, if you had a new HD radio with iTunes tagging you could figure out what that song was, but you may not have an HD radio and may not want to use iTunes.

The Musipedia website lets you play the rhythm and tones of the song you just heard and using that information it will tell you the name of the song.

Musipedia will let you play the notes of the song in a variety of different ways. You can use a keyboard, plot the notes on the musical staff, use a microphone or just type out the rhythm of the song.

What a great tool!

Go uncover your own musical mystery with the Musipedia website.

Update: iTunes no longer exists, looking for an iTunes alternative?