Freaky Amazing Details

I picked up this Photoshop sharpening technique from these sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV9u0Wu8L0M
http://fstoppers.com/sharpening-with-blur-bring-back-insane-detail-with-this-quick-technique

And because no one on the web seems capable of putting together a simple step-by-step tutorial:

1. Make 2 copies of the original image (3 layers total)
2. Group the top two layers
3. Change the group's blending mode to Overlay
4. With regards to the group's top layer:
1. Blending mode to Vivid Light
2. Invert the layer
3. Apply a Surface Blur filter (better yet, change it to a smart object with the filter)

Seems like a radius=8 and threshold=10 is a good place to start for the layer.

Capturing mouse coordinates on touchmove events

I'm testing a relatively recent version of Android, iOS, and Chrome to capture mouse coordinates during a move event. I was having trouble with Android, surprisingly, and found this to solve it:

on Chrome and iOS off the jquery event object passed to the touchmove event listener, simply event.pageX and event.pageY returned coordinates as expected. However, Android always returned zero.

You can find a bunch of posts about needing to preventDefault to get the touchmove event to trigger in the first place....

But to get the coordinates, this object seems to work:

window.event.touches[0]

 So I'm using something along these lines ...

if (window.event.touches) event = window.event.touches[0];

Then I use event.pageX and event.pageY as expected...

Data Cache on Excel Pivot Tables

I'm just starting to get more familiar with Excel's pivot tables and their functions. I've noticed that changing the grouping on one table affects the grouping on another table, even though they are completely separate pivot tables.

Turns out this is Excel's "data caching" in order to save memory and disk space. Great, I'm very happy Excel's saving disk space on my whopping 300 records of data, but this reminds me of Office's warnings of having a "large amount" of data left on the clipboard.

Um, hello, Office dev team, it's 2014. Let's raise that bar of what a "large amount" of data really is.

Tangent. Back to pivot table grouping.

See here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/unshare-a-data-cache-between-pivottable-reports-HA010226675.aspx