April 13, 2012

Friday Cat Blogging – 13 April 2012

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As promised, today’s catblogging is done entirely from my iPad, a task that’s fantastically more difficult than it should be thanks to the usual Apple attitude of walling off their products and insisting that everyone either do things the Apple way or no way at all. In particular, Apple has chosen not to expose any of the iPad file system in a standard way, which means that web browsers can’t upload files to a remote site the way they can on any other platform. So I had to figure out some other way to get my cat photos from the iPad to the MoJo server. It’s not impossible, but it sure is a major pain in the ass. Thanks, Apple!

(I like the iPad a lot. But this ubiquitous Apple attitude is the reason I consider it a starter tablet. More than likely, a year from now I’ll trade it in for an Android or Windows 8 tablet, which will allow me to decide for myself how I want to conduct my online life.)

Still, at least I could upload photos, even if the process was a muddle. The other problem with catblogging from the iPad has to do with Photoshop Touch. In a word, it sucks. On today’s photos, I attempted a grand total of three operations:

  • Resizing the images to fit the column.
  • Sharpening the reduced images.
  • Lightening Inkblot’s eyes in the photo on the right.

Every single one of these operations worked poorly. The resizing produced the pixelated whiskers that you see in both pictures. Regular Photoshop doesn’t, which means the Touch version has some kind of crappy, scaled-down resizing algorithm. Sharpening, which normally works fine, produces almost comically crude results on Touch, so I abandoned it. And lassoing an object to lighten it is tough going because fingers are crude pointing devices and Touch has a maximum zoom level of 400%, which doesn’t make small objects big enough to work on.

So maybe I should try some other photo editing tool. There’s always iPhoto, of course. Anyone have any other recommendations?

Oh yeah, and today’s theme is cats in both the foreground and the background. Not sure why. It just turned out that way.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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