I received one of the new $5 bills in change the other day which prompted myself and a coworker to wonder how they did the rumored anti-counterfitting protection. So I thought I'd try it out. I tossed the new $5 and an old $5 into the scanner we have at work to see what would happen.

The results were surprising. It didn't scan correctly. You can see what I got back here.

Deke McClelland said... "My understanding is that it works like this: In cooperation with governments, security, and software firms, the International Bank has devised an elaborate matrix of recognizable patterns that may be embedded into the design of paper currency. The matrix includes the yellow circles mentioned earlier, as well as a variety of lightly colored waving lines and subtly patterned background images. This matrix has worked its way into the new US bills, as well as all Euros, English pound notes, and who knows how many other currencies. The International Bank petitions tech developers such as Adobe to incorporate its scan detection protocol. Adobe added it to Photoshop, which satisfied all parties, but omitted it from ImageReady and other Adobe apps. Hence the potential for madcap humor in dekePod.

Given the fair-use options, and the many workarounds (the one I show in dekePod is just one of several), I am skeptical of software's ability to limit counterfeiting. Those that have successfully counterfeited money have done much more than scan it, clean it up in Photoshop, and print it two-sided on sheets of 20-pound bond. The real savvy bad boys weave and watermark their own paper and print the ink in layers, frequently using old-school presses. I might recommend spending less effort constraining fair-use activities and more effort looking for guys who are etching lithgraphic plates to resemble real money."

Pretty interesting and cool.

As a product manager and the guy working with the design folks at Redfin each day, I spend a lot of my time looking at "comps" (Photoshop image files for something that will be turned into web pages.) Comps are used to tune up the design ideas and execution until it's ready for developers to crank out the final product.

Most of the time in a comp, there's a minor, trivial error (capitalization, missing underlines, something silly like that) that I notice and point out. This isn't really because designers are all sloppy; they spend their time focused on the minute details of the colors, lines, images and alignment. Often they've stared at it so long they can't even really "see it" anymore; sort of like highway hypnosis, but with Photoshop. I get to come along with a "fresh pair" of eyes and it's easy then to find those things.

My friend, Mike, sent over the Photoshop Disasters blog which takes this effort of detecting Photoshop errors to a whole new level. Some are just creepy, others vampirephone.html">observant and others, just rude.

But in the end, it makes for a lot of fun and realization that we're all human and working too fast to not make a mistake here and there. :-)

I debated switching blog platforms as I really don't like the lack of integration of Live Spaces and OSX. It's bascially a web-browser page that I have to log into and go to in order to post. Before I switch though, I thought I'd give a couple Mac OSX blogging clients a try with my current blog.

I hadn't known that Windows Live Spaces could enable support for Mac blogging clients. It turns out they each basically use the E-Mail Publishing support available in Live Spaces to access the blog. You need to enable that support on your Space (it's off by default.) This Microsoft MSDN article explains how to do it.

Thanks to this great post at Devlounge, I'm trying out Ecto, Blogo and MarsEdit.

Blogo definitely won on website branding and simplicity and the ease of adding markup to the post, but it didn't successfully post to my blog even though it said it had. And then it lost my last version, so here I am re-writing it in MarsEdit.

MarsEdit seems to be more stable on connectivity and blog access, but is far inferior in usability when it comes to markup in a post. I can't believe there's not even a simple toolbar to add a link or bold. Instead it's buried under a weird dropdown menu on the top right. (Additional note: WYSI-not-WYG! It didn't even automatically add line breaks where I had spacing in the original post. It does look like you can choose different editors though, so I might still have good luck.)

Anyway, if you've used any of these clients and have thoughts, let me know. If you know of others I should try, let me know about them too!