Droid Bionic rolling out a month from now

Having had your fair share of hot dogs and grilled burgers, how about keeping the appetite for rumors of new and upcoming smartphones satiated? Here’s the latest snippet that we managed to discover – it seems that the Droid Bionic will be headed to Verizon Wireless exactly one month from now – this goes down nicely with the Q3 window which was talked about before.

Interestingly enough, an August 4th release date would be just seven months down the road since the Bionic was announced back at CES earlier this year, and perhaps the time period in between would have resulted in better hardware components thrown into the mix, in addition to updated software. Keep your fingers crossed that Android 2.3 Gingerbread will be a given right out of the box, so that you need not wait for a software update to arrive. 

Droid Bionic rolling out a month from now, By Ubergizmo. Top Stories : Xperia Play Review, HTC Sensation Review,

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Tips on taking your project from the paper to the wall

Sometime ago, before I got interested in street art and other tradicional medias, I was walking thru a street and stumbled with a graffiti artist painting a huge mural. I asked him how he could scale from such small drawing to a big wall like that, he said that this was due his experience and nothing more. Not satisfied with this simple answer, I found that after doing a few works on bigger scales I should share with you some tips on how transfer your artworks on bigger scales.

So, basically what I'm going to teach today is couple of tips I learned from my own experience, I'm going to use a recent project so I can exemplify and justify all that I'm going to say. Also I would like to thanks Juliano Araujo for the awesome photo shoot he did of this project. The project I will present was done for a Night Club in Porto Alegre, Brasil.

Always make a pre-project

Some may wonder "Hey, I already did that drawing that I will scale, so what's more to do?" , well first of all you should think that there's a lot of factor that involve painting a wall. Before you start the drawing you should ALWAYS visit the place and take the measures of the wall and take a lot of photos. Why? Because you can make your drawing on the actual size or scale it on Illustrator or Photoshop, trust me this one of the best things If you want it to get as you imagined.

Second thing: Having the illustration done, remember the photos you took when you visited the place? Well, take then to your computer, because it's time to make some simulations. However, feel free not to just make normal 2D simulations on Photoshop, you got to understand how the public will interact with that.

So a good tip it's to make at least a simple 3D simulation, you can make some simple but yet effective simulations with applications like Google Sketch Up. This will give you a deeper understanding of the space and the visibility of the artwork, what is quite important If you're working indoor, like was my case.

Make a good budget

Everyone who worked with tradicional medias knows that is always necessary to make at least two budgets for a project: a materials budget and your invoice. I know nobody wants to work for free, but you can't work without your tools, so before anything you should think about how much ink you're going to use, brushes you will need and other stuff. One of the worst things that can happen to you is working hard on a project and suddenly you have to stop because theres not enough ink or other resource you may need. So always think on the materials first and calculate your invoice later.

Photo by Juliano Araujo

Measure everything

Remeber when I said that you should measure the wall/place your going to paint and use the same measures in the project on Photoshop/illustrator? So, this will help you a lot when you're going to tranfer it, in my case I had to transfer the measures from centimeters to meters, the wall had 2,6 x 3,7 meters so on Illustrator I did the illustration with 26 x 37 centimeters. It may sound obvious, but you must get the measures of every element you can, having the measures and making a GRID, will make almost impossible to make big mistakes.

Photo by Juliano Araujo

Use a GRID

I'm truly addict to GRID's , why? Because they make graphic arts more logic and organized. Even while I'm doing a illustration, I always make a simple GRID to at least divide it on a X and Y axis. So, my tip is to do it on the digital project, dividing the illustration in sectors, almost like puzzle pieces. And using masking tape, divide the wall trying to make the same sector division you created. Trust me, this will make it almost piece of cake to execute, regardless the detailment of the piece.

Photo by Juliano Araujo

Choose the right tools

When dealing with offline medias you gotta understand what tools are better for each surface. Some walls are more flat and other are more texturized, you got to have it in mind when planning how to execute your illustration. Let me give you a example: I though I would do the outline of this piece with a 8k pen Uniball Posca, unfortunately what happened was that the pen didn't stick well over other paints and so I had to do it oldschool: using a brush and the ink from the spray cans to do the outline. So, whatever the tools you might plan to use, always have a plan B If things don't work out as they should.

Photo by Juliano Araujo

Trust on simple techniques

Once during a workshop, a graffiti artist called Graphis taught us a really simple way to create perfect circles on a wall: Using a shoelace and a spray can on the other hand he made a "hand compass" by simply rotating his hand grabbing the shoelace. The truth is there a lot of ways to make circles, you can use stencils, do it freehand and other ways. However you should always try to simplify the execution, not because of a matter of time necessarily, but because of the materials and the final result. Sometimes, a drip or scratch here and there is what make it look real and handmade, so do it the way you want, just remember that it's a artwork, not a billboard.

Photo by Juliano Araujo

The Final Result

So, I hope you learned a bit from my experience and if you want to see the whole process of this artwork, please watch the video bellow, he quite explains everything I told here.

Lord of his own Kingdom from Marcos Torres on Vimeo.

Photo by Juliano Araujo

Photo by Juliano Araujo

About the author

My name is Marcos Torres, I'm Graphic Artist from Porto Alegre, Brasil. You can get to know more about me by acessing my Website ( http://marcostorres.info/ ) or by following me on Twitter: @marcos333.

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Saving your computer from Virus for FREE

For years, you have relied on ratings of various FREE anti-virus software to choose the one you want for your home PC. the choice has been mostly between AVG or Avira. If you were me, you would believe that one should pay for minimum 2 softwares on your PC:

1. Your Operating System i.e. Windows
2. Your Anti-Virus i.e. Norton/ McAfee

Now, Microsoft wants you to keep your computer safe for you. After including a world class firewall since Windows XP, Microsoft has now made available a FREE antivirus for your PC. This antivirus is called Microsoft Security Essentials. The antivirus is available as a FREE download from the link above. It is 4.28 MB of download for Win Vista/ Win 7.

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for home PC and counters viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. The software runs in the background and silently monitors the files for all the malware. It schedules scans when the PC is most likely idle and interrupts the user only when there is an action required to keep their PC secure. The software updates itself automatically with the latest definitions without any user intervention. Many of the antivirus behaviours are configurable via the “Settings” tab including scheduled scans, turning real time protections on/ off, excluded file/ file types and many more. MSE is backed up by a series of web services, including telemetry data through the SpyNet service, Microsoft Update, and a separate signature update service.

The antivirus uses the same technology as the Forefront product family (meant for enterprise use). It employs practices like active memory swapping and CPU throttling to limit the impact on your PC performance, even on older or less powerful PCs. On my Windows 7 PC, the process (msseces.exe) takes zero CPU and 1.2 Mb RAM (small, fast and light).

You can install Security Essentials on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 (both x86 and x64 machines). The minimum requirement for the PC though is 1 GB RAM. It does though require a “Genuine” PC check when you install the same. If you have any questions on installation or usage, a support forum is also available to post your queries. In case you discover viruses, spyware, Trojans, worms or other malicious software that were undetected by Microsoft Security Essentials you can send these files to Malware protection Center for analysis.

So take the guesswork out and install the MS Security Essentials TODAY!

P.S.: If you were running a BETA of the product earlier, please make sure that you update the same to the release build. The build no. is (1.0.1611.0) for the released product.

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Indian Mobile Users still Far Away from Internet

Here’s a question that I have been asking whenever I have had more than a handful of people around me - “How many of you use internet on your mobile phone?” And invariably the response were horribly negative. We frequently hear the great number of mobile phones that Indian consumers have been lapping up.. will this communication revolution lead to information revolution? The answer reflects in the recently released report by IAMAI.

Here’s a quick snapshot of how the mobile usage in India looks like:

From the hugely touted Indian mobile penetration, only 0.4% users actively use Internet. And here is what my worry is: Mobile adoption in India is leading to telecom revolution while the larger information revolution is still far away.

The future of the mobile internet seems to hold some promise though. The young generation of school going and college going kids constitute around 68% of this mobile online population. When this generation grows up (probably in 10 years) they will grow this usage of theirs.

So, do we wait till then?

There are two main challenges I see in internet usage on mobile devices:

1. Availability of affordable mobile handsets. Only 27% of all Indian mobile users have internet capable devices.
2. Internet Usage rates on mobile devices are still too high. TRAI had helped reduce tariffs on mobile telephone usage leading to this explosion. It needs to take the next step and recommend lower tariffs for internet usage.

The potential of mobile computing can only come true if these last two last issues are successfully mitigated by policy intervention.

What do you think?

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