Very nice.

So I finally got around to wasting an hour and a half (sans commercials) watching the new  Knight Rider — or should I say Ford Rider.

Sorry, but, um, it’s cheesy and lame.    Stiff acting, gratuitous skin, weak plot, plus all of those other standard bad review descriptors.

I think an Ask-A-Ninja review is in order.

Adobe Photoshop has a nice posterize command built-in. Not so in Fireworks. I searched high and low for a nice way to do it. In desperation I posted an entry on the official Adobe Fireworks message board and Ilya Razmanov was posted exactly what I needed.

Here’s the steps with pictures to illustrate his technique:

1. Open a cool photo in Fireworks (Yes, Ray Allen is cool, if you didn’t already know).

2. Add this effect: Adjust Color -> Levels

3. Set the max value in Output Level to 4

4. Add another effect: Add this effect: Adjust Color -> Levels. This time set the max Input Level to 4

6. Voila! Here’s what you get. You can tweak the levels on both sides to get the amount of posterization you want.

This is totally worthy of a blog post.  You can now watch old (now vintage) episodes of the A-Team on NBC.com.

I’ve had Firefox 3 installed since Beta 1, but just recently started running both Firefox versions (2.0.0.12 and 3b3) using the steps found in this nice (as always) Lifehacker article.

Some early thoughts:

• The Nightly Tester Tools add-on is a must to make your add-ons work (for now).  That’ll change when the full version comes out.  The other add-ons I’m running: Adblock Plus and Greasemonkey.
• I don’t like it that they went all IE7-ish and moved the Home button to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• The icons set is better, IMO, in FF2 — except for the new forward and back buttons.  I like those.
• There are some issues in Gmail, specifically in the new contact manager.  The names of the contacts don’t show in the middle pane.
• This version is definitely faster than it’s predecessors.  I appreciate that.
• The Smart bookmarks and the stars are nice.  I don’t tend to use bookmarks at all, really, so I’m not sure I can give them a fair shake.
• The new download manager was supposed to be one of the new cool things, but honestly, I don’t see why.  There’s no buttons.  All of the actions for downloads are in the right-click context menu, which is not very intuitive.  I want the download manager in a tab and I use Download Manager Tweak extension in FF2
• I really like the new “save the tabs” feature when you close down.  That’s pretty cool and a nice new thing.
• One real subtle thing I’ve noticed: there’s a small white blank square that displays on the screen when you stop moving the mouse and hover.  Yeah, it bugs me.

UPDATE 2/16

• There’s also some issues in Gmail when attaching files.  You can make it work, but it’s pretty annoying.

You tried it?  Thoughts?