- cocoa booklet lets you create a (center bound) booklet out of a PDF file. just print, and staple in the center - page layout is taken care of by the program.
- diffusion ebooks, by proboscis, host ebooks as PDF files. the books are designed to be freely downloaded, printed on a home printer, constructed, and distributed. there is no need for trimming, gluing or stitching. templates are available on the site, or you can make your own book using the diffusion ebook generator
- iText Class Library is an open source pure Java class library for creating and manipulating PDF documents

Also from Cool Hunting,

Bay Area Free WiFi has an iPod ready guide called wiPod that lists free hot spots all around the SF Bay Area. Can't wait for the NYC equivalent. nycwireless, please?

Use the 'movie' search term in google and see their version of metacritic - Google Reviews: Shaun of the Dead (2004)

not to mention the awesome Google maps whose user interface kicks yahoo and mapquest's buttocks.

Ahh. I had an IE hack a long time ago that put this option into the right-click menu. I have no idea where that original site is anymore. Nicholas Roussos has some bookmarklets that wil automatically resize your browser to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 - superhandy for seeing what your website will look like at different resolutions.

More bookmarklets at Jesse's Bookmarklets site, such as a W3C HMTL validator, linked images, and linked pages.

via LifeHacker

Ooh. A new blog for the RSS feed! I'm hoping that Self-Reliant Filmmaking turns out to be another HD for Indies information mother lode. The first post (only November 2005, a young'un) lays out the declaration of principles - "to talk about and to encourage the practice of making high-quality films at a low-cost and/or with small-labor systems." Sweet.

The topic that caught my eye is a subject I've been meaning to aggregate and post for a while - DIY Film Equipment. Most people have seen the internet-famous $14 Steadycam, now there's a central place to find instructions on a home-made stabilizer, skateboard dolly, jib arm, car mount, depth of field reducer, and microphone pop filter. Sounds to me like a good reason to visit Home Depot and finally make all those animations/videos sitting on the back burner.

Here's a couple more jib arms, 1, 2, to play with. and from some old posts - DIY Bottle Cap Tripod and DIY Waterproof Camera Enclosure.

After Effects 7.0.1 is out. Most notably fixed is the awful bug that caused you to lose your project if you hid the AE window. I've been told on a PC you can use alt+tab to get it back, but on a mac you were totally screwed and couldn't even save your project. Another nice UI fix: "Layers no longer are inadvertently selected in the Timeline panel when moving the mouse quickly after clicking in an empty area to deselect all."

Hot on the heels of AE7.0.1 improvements, MacRumors reports: Photoshop CS3 Beta is out today. Anyone with a (real) serial for a previous version can download and try it out.

Full rundown of new features here. Most notably, a modified user interface and 'smart filters'. Smart filters being what we've been aching for... non destructive filters that modify your image but don't bake the changes... letting you go back and change them later a la after effects. You must change a layer into a 'smart object' in order to use 'smart filters', but no big loss there. Another note is that if you're editing a 16bit image, not all of the filters are available.

Two great built-in features are a mask for the layer's smart filters, and a blending options palette for each filter. The blending options palette allows you to give a custom blending mode and opacity for each filter... HOW GREAT IS THAT?!?

Check it out in motion on Richard Harrington's sneak peak video podcast. The Smart Filters sneak peek is the one you want -- complete with demo of the Chris & Trish Meyer 'instant sex' technique using smart filter blending options palette (traditionally done by duplicating a layer, blurring, then an overlay blending mode).

Still no sign of a solo layers button (sad). And when are they going to make luma mattes work with the same opt+click functionality as alpha mattes?

Update: FlickR'd screenshots!