Don’t forget to breathe!

If the quest for a perfect holiday photo is stressing you out, forget the special posed portrait and go back through the last year’s worth of images and pull a few that represent how your children have grown and changed through the months.

Presenting the photos together in chronological order on the front of a card will be like a visual update for the year. Remember those annual Christmas letters from the long lost aunt? Like that, but in pictures.

via Top 10 Tips from Our Fave Kid Photographer! | Photojojo.

I love these tips from LifeHacker. Go check it out.

Be Productive

While it’s good to unwind on the weekend, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a few things done. As Weekendhacker has always focused on having a productive weekend we’ve offered up lots of options in the past. For example, you can get some cleaning done, upgrade your security, supercharge your smartphone, learn a new skill, establish a professional web presence, repurpose your old technology, upgrade your home office, and much more. Additionally, the weekend is a good time to solve some problems whether they are work- or life-related. So, you know, get to it!

Photo by Dennis Hamilton.

Turn Boredom Into Relaxation

Boredom is just what happens when you have nothing to do and you let that actually bother you. If you don’t care, you can pretty much label your boredom as relaxation. Aside from just having a new mindset there are, actually, a few ways to help yourself relax on the weekend.

Avoid a Weekend of Boredom.

The video above will walk you through the whole automation process, but here are the basic steps:

Go to the Window menu and choose Actions.

A little palette will pop up with Photoshop actions already predefined. To use any predefined action, just select it and press the play button at the bottom. If you want to make your own, click the menu button in the upper righthand corner and choose New Action.

Name your action, click OK, and then you’ll automatically be in record mode. Anything you do in Photoshop will now be recorded, so perform any actions you want to automate and then click the stop button at the bottom of the actions palette.

You’re done! Any time you want to reuse this action, just select it in the actions palette and press the play button.

How to Automate Anything in PhotoshopFor more tips on Photoshop actions, check out How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions over at How-To Geek.

via How to Automate Anything in Photoshop.

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

Even if you’re not a programmer, you can easily create tiny, time-saving applications that breeze through repetitive tasks—renaming large groups of files, executing terminal commands, and much more—with the simple, code-free, drag-and-drop interface of OS X’s built-in tool, Automator.

For those of you who don’t know, Automator is a program that allows you to create your own workflows, through the use of drag-and-drop actions, that automate repetitive tasks. We’ve featured numerous Automator workflows and applications on Lifehacker before, but you may not know how easy it is to make your own. You don’t need to be a programmer or hacker to make use of Automator, either—anyone can make use of this simple (yet powerful) tool, no matter what menial task you need to automate. Here’s a quick guide to using it, as well as a few examples to get the gears turning.

Creating a Simple Workflow in Automator

One of the easiest ways to use Automator involves creating workflows that perform batch operations. It only takes a minute or two to put together a workflow, thus saving you tons of time renaming files, cropping photos, or converting PDFs to an editable format.

Anatomy of a Workflow

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

An Automator workflow is a simple series of actions that perform in sequence. You can select any number of actions from Automator’s large library, and drag them into whatever sequence you want. When you run the workflow, Automator will go through each step, pushing the output from the last action into the next action. Thus, you can have an action that grabs some files, pass those onto an action that edits them, pass those edited files on to another action, and so on. It’s essentially programming for the non-programmer—you tell it what to do each step of the way.

Batch Rename a Group of Files

Let’s say we have a series of files that we want to be able to look through, but their filenames are a mess. A common example of this problem involves digital photos. Every time you copy photos from your camera to your computer, they have names like PICT_001, PICT_002 and so on. Say you want the filenames to actually convey something about where the photos come from, like “Italy Vacation 001″, “002″, and so on. Or, if you prefer, you can add the photo’s date and time after each filename, so you know when each photo was taken. With just the action “Rename Finder Items,” you can manipulate a group of filenames any way you want. You can even change a filename’s case or find and replace text. For this example, we’ll assume each group of photos is already sequential, and that we just want to give them a more descriptive name.

via Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required.

For professional and amateur photographers both-

 

“…we’ve discovered over 100 brilliant photographers for you to follow. Google+ is a great showcase for professional photographers. With in-house editing tools like Picnik, and beautiful ways to display your work, photographers can really shine.”

via Top 104 Amazing Photographers to Circle on Google+ « Google+ Insider’s Guide.

Awesome!

Creating Your Own Custom Bokeh Adapter – Photo Premium.

Personally I’ve never quite put my finger on why I never liked Facebook. Maybe it was the company policy of automatically opting users in to sharing all their content publicly, or maybe the common user behavior of vague whining or passive aggressive updates, but I think this infographic nails why I consider FB a necessary evil.

“..Those checking the site “always,” it’s making them over-aware of themselves, which can cause stress and anxiety, the infographic reveals.”

via Infographic: Frequent Facebook users are hurting their self-esteem | Articles.

Ok, this isn’t a “real” cheat sheet item, but it needs to be shared. Let’s call it a tip on how to raise productive, emotionally healthy children.

Photo Source

I’ve been saying this for years. It is just common sense, of course real life and all the tedious drudgery of hard work or quiet alone time is underwhelming for kids raised on overstimulating games.  Yes, they are a great babysitter but what are they doing to developing brains?

“In fact, a child’s ability to stay focused on a screen, though not anywhere else, is actually characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There are complex behavioral and neurological connections linking screens and attention, and many experts believe that these children do spend more time playing video games and watching television than their peers.

 

But is a child’s fascination with the screen a cause or an effect of attention problems — or both? It’s a complicated question that researchers are still struggling to tease out.

 

The kind of concentration that children bring to video games and television is not the kind they need to thrive in school or elsewhere in real life, according to Dr. Christopher Lucas, associate professor of child psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. “It’s not sustained attention in the absence of rewards,” he said. “It’s sustained attention with frequent intermittent rewards.

 

”The child may be playing for points accumulated, or levels achieved, but the brain’s reward may be the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Children with A.D.H.D. may find video games even more gratifying than other children do because their dopamine reward circuitry may be otherwise deficient.Indeed, at least one study has found that when children with A.D.H.D. were treated with methylphenidate Ritalin, which increases dopamine activity in the brain, they played video games less. The authors suggested that video games might serve as a kind of self-medication for these children.

 

So increased screen time may be a consequence of A.D.H.D., but some researchers fear it may be a cause, as well. Some studies have found that children who spend more time in front of the screen are more likely to develop attention problems later on.

 

In a 2010 study in the journal Pediatrics, viewing more television and playing more video games were associated with subsequent attention problems in both schoolchildren and college undergraduates.

 

The stimulation that video games provide “is really about the pacing, how fast the scene changes per minute,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis , a pediatrician at the University of Washington School of Medicine who studies children and media. If a child’s brain gets habituated to that pace and to the extreme alertness needed to keep responding and winning, he said, the child ultimately may “find the realities of the world underwhelming, understimulating.”

via Screen Fixation and A.D.H.D. – NYTimes.com.

Serious yum.

via Chili Cheese Corn Recipe | Taste of Home Recipes.

The cutest little thing ever! This dwarf peach tree could fit just about anywhere and you can grow it in a container. Apparently there are dwarf variations of lots of fruiting trees.  I’m in love.

Via Daley’s Fruit Tree Nursery