My personal Photoshop use is decreasing drastically

When I got Photoshop 4 back in the day, I used it daily to do work at home and to do my own personal creations. I also scanned in lots of photos and fixed them up.

Now that I'm a full-time developer (as opposed to part designer/part developer), I find myself using PS less and less. I've since upgraded to CS2, which in retrospect was actually quite a waste of money - PS 6 had everything I needed. My first digital camera was great (Sony DSC F-707), but almost every image really required post-processing to really look good, so I used PS quite a bit back then. I now have a Canon S2 IS, which has excellent color reproduction - good enough that I don't bother with most images anymore. And I've pretty much stopped doing my own image composites for fun (though I occasionally knock a few off for friends/co-workers).

But I still do a fair amount of image manipulation overall, considering I take tons of photos. I've found Google's Picasa software handles most of my modifications quite well (red-eye, cropping, slight color fixes) - its "Fill Light" tool is awesome for fixing underlit subjects btw, and way quicker than any method I've ever used in PS. Picasa also manages the photos better than Adobe's Bridge or Lightroom, IMHO. And I can upload straight to Snapfish. So my workflow all pretty much happens in one place.

For situations like noise reduction, I use Neat Image (free version). You can't beat its simplicity, and the results are fantastic in my experience so far (I've mostly used it to clean up high ISO noise in otherwise unacceptable-quality pictures). For stitched panoramas I use Hugin (also free). And for quick fixes, I use the free (and open source) Paint.NET application, which loads much quicker than PS, and has many of its basic tools.

There's still situations where I still use Photoshop - mostly for true HDR and HDR-like processing (levels adjustment layers, dodge/burn) to bring out detail, and I recently created a family photo for my parents from a number of different pictures that I wouldn't even consider using another application for, but it's probably dropped to about 5% or so of my total image processing time these days.

Retreiving and sending Hotmail email from Gmail

I had a Hotmail account years before Gmail was around, and I still keep it around just in case I get an important email there. I tried to use Gmail's "Get mail from other accounts" feature, but it always said "connection timed out". I had just assumed Hotmail offered POP3 - it doesn't. I found a helpful article on LifeHacker to get around this issue, but the software they mention is not a free service.

But, buried in the comments is a link to the "GetMail for Hotmail" Windows service. That link, however, sends you to the vendor's Web site, which wants you to sign up for a free trial of some other service in order to download the software. But, this Download.com link will let you download it with no strings attached.

You do have to enter your Hotmail password so that it can retreive the mail, which may be a deal-breaker for some. To be safer, I changed my Hotmail password to make sure it doesn't match any other service I use. I'm also confident that I don't use this account for any service I use, though that still doesn't technically make me 100% protected. I'm also keeping an eye on it from a network perpective to make sure it's not trying to do anything it's not supposed to. I may actually attempt to write my own simple version of this some day just for the extra piece of mind. The program also is a resource hog, so you don't want have it set to fetch mail too often.

It does work well, otherwise, though. I've got mail set up to go directly to my Gmail archive (Settings --> Filters), and labeled with "Hotmail", so it's separate from my regular Gmail mail. I also set up my Hotmail.com account under "Settings --> Send mail as" so that I can have email sent as if it came from Hotmail.

If everything keeps working well, I'll be very glad to not have to log into Hotmail anymore.

See screenshots of your web site with different browsers

I've been looking for a site like this for quite a while. BrowserShots.org lets you select from 67 different browsers/versions, and allows you to select parameters like screen size, color depth, and what features are enabled in the browser.

It takes a little while for the results to come back (at least five minutes or so, though you can begin browsing the first few screenshots almost immediately), but this is a really helpful service that I could have used years ago.