If you've always wondered how to draw a "ball of nodes" as featured in a variety of Mac OS X icons, wonder no more: Mike Rundle of flyosity.com has written a tutorial to show you how using Photoshop.

Rundle discusses "spheric realism," the process of understanding the materials, reflectivity, and roundness of a sphere, and how to accurately illustrate it digitally.

Clever users can easily adapt the technique for Illustrator, Acorn, or many other compositing tools that feature blur and blending mode support.

Rundle also offers a PSD file containing the artwork with no strings attached.

Thanks Todd!

All day on December 25, TUAW presents "Now What?" We've got first steps and recommendations for all the Apple gifts you (hopefully!) found under the tree today. Happy holidays!

Some good soul gifted you with a hard drive for the holidays. I can't think of a better gift! There are two ways to use that extra disk space -- the right way, which I'll get to in a moment, and the way many people do it, which is to just expand their disk space because they are running out of room.

I'm here to tell you that is the wrong thing to do with a new hard drive if you don't have a backup strategy already. Let's make a few assumptions here. The new drive has a USB 2.0 interface, or it has a Firewire 400 or 800 interface. It also is at least as large as your primary hard drive. Even better if it is bigger. Use that drive as a backup device, not for more disk space. Old hands around computers already know this, but if you are just getting started, it really is extra important to have all your files duplicated on another drive.

With any computer, stuff happens, like a sudden power surge, a drive failure, or a kid in the house who loves to see how the Mac trash can works. Can you really afford to lose all those pictures, emails, documents and CDs you lovingly ripped to iTunes? I didn't think so.

Getting a heavy duty back up is not too challenging. If you plug a brand new drive in, your Mac (assuming you have Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) will ask you if you'd like to use it as a Time Machine drive. Time Machine is Apple's built-in backup solution, and it is great for people who constantly change or update files and sometimes have a good reason to go back and get the old versions. The larger your extra drive, the further you can 'go back in time'. Time Machine allows you to restore all the data, but it can take several hours and may require your original system DVD if your machine isn't bootable.

Read on for more...

If you're one of the lucky people who got a digital camera this Christmas, congratulations and welcome to the fun and exciting world of digital photography. But now that you have your shiny new camera and are holding it in your eager hands, what's next? Fortunately, I've been in your shoes and can offer the following tips to hopefully make your new camera easier to use and more fun to play with. Let me help get you started on the road to taking some great pictures.

Memory Cards

Digital pictures can be quite large when it comes to file sizes; modern cameras can chew up plenty of megabytes with each shot. Consequently, the meager capacity of the compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD/SDHC) memory card that came with your camera just isn't going to do the trick for very long. So, one of the first things you are going to want is a larger card, or cards, to store your pictures.

I tend to stick to memory cards from Sandisk or Lexar and opt for several medium-sized cards, such as 2GB, instead of just one big one. This way, in case disaster strikes and a memory card fails, which they sometimes do, all of your not-yet-downloaded pictures are not on just one card and are instead spread across several of them.

More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips and tidbits for new Mac users.

Update: As the comments point out and Low-End Mac confirms, support for USB booting was present in the Mac OS 9 era with the introduction of dual-channel USB in 1999, available first on the slot-loading iMac and one model of the AGP PowerMac G4; however, your mileage and performance may vary when trying to get these machines to boot Mac OS X from USB devices (as has been previously reported on TUAW). Our apologies for the error!

When I wrote my post Tuesday about booting a Mac off an external USB hard drive, I was surprised how many people followed up to tell me that it wouldn't work, and that I needed a Firewire drive to externally boot a Mac.

While [much] older machines did indeed need Firewire for bootable external media, that is no longer true. Since the release of the Intel Mac computers [and well beforehand -- see update above], and with Mac OS X 10.4.5 or later, you can start up from an installed system on a USB hard disk. Here's the Apple support document that tells you how to do it.

I didn't think it was possible either, and when I bought my MacBook Pro last year, I was wishing I could boot from a USB drive because of the easy availability of inexpensive storage. A little online research revealed the obscure truth. USB booting generally works fine from a bus-powered portable drive as well as a powered USB desktop drive. In my case, I booted up just fine from a portable with no external power supply. Check the support document linked above for more details.

So have at it -- either install a clean version of Leopard or Tiger on the drive, or use your favorite bootable-backup utility to clone your existing install to the USB volume. It's a good thing to know as Apple seems to be determined to bury Firewire on the lower priced laptops it sells.

It is also possible to boot an Intel Mac from a USB flash drive. That is a bit more involved, and there are several methods. One is Das Boot, a free utility from Sub Rosa that allows you to convert original disks from DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, TechTool Pro and others to a flash drive. Let Google be your friend on this. Many people have put their favorite rescue utility on a bootable flash drive to save them from any problems in the field.

Before you ask; no, USB does not support target disk mode -- a sore point for MacBook Air and unibody MacBook owners.

Thanks to Dave and others who wrote in asking about this, and thanks to many readers who wondered about the ability of older PPC Macs to do this as well.

One of the biggest comments on the recent SimCity announcement for the iPhone, other than being able to locate the SimCity International (link goes to the U.K. iTunes store) version of the game, was complaints that the game was crashing for some people.

This is not a new issue for graphically intense games for the iPhone and one of the solutions for solving this is very easy: Before playing your new game, reboot the iPhone.

Here's how to do it.

Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, a normal shutdown/startup process, or "soft reboot," should work fine: simply hold the power button down for 3 seconds and slide to power down. The "hard reboot" described here should only be used if your iPhone isn't responding to touches or the Home button -- it is not intended as regular maintenance. Thanks to all for the feedback.

[If your phone ever becomes completely unresponsive, you may need to do the 'hard reboot process described next -- but remember this is the equivalent of pulling out the power cord on your computer.] Hold down the Home and the Sleep/Wake buttons until your screen goes black, as shown at right. After a few seconds, you should see a sliding bar for powering off the phone. Ignore it and keep pressing those buttons. After about 20 seconds or so, the screen will go completely black and the silver Apple logo appears.

Once your phone goes through the rebooting process, launch your game. You shouldn't have any further problems with it. One word of warning: Rebooting the iPhone does drain your battery somewhat, so if you're pretty low on power you may find yourself unable to use the phone until after you're recharged it.

I saw this tip posted on the App Store when I was purchasing Scrabble at the end of November and followed the advice and didn't have a single problem with Scrabble on my 1st generation iPhone. I repeated it with SimCity and, again, I'm not having any issues playing the game.

If that doesn't solve your issues, check out this list of iPhone troubleshooting tips.

With Automator, you can easily streamline common tasks. If you work with many files (i.e. pictures), then you know how easy it is to lose track because of incorrectly named files. With this Automator workflow, you'll never lose your place (or a file) again.

Building the Workflow
To create this workflow, simply add the following Automator actions (in the same order):

• Get Specified Finder Items
• Rename Finder Items

When you add the "Rename Finder Items" action to your workflow, Automator will ask if you want to copy the files so you don't mess with the originals. Choose "Don't Add."

Configuring the Workflow
In the "Rename Finder Items" action, you have almost unlimited choices for renaming schemes. To get started, select a scheme from the first drop-down box. You can choose from: Add Date or time, Add Text, Change Case, Make Sequential, Replace Text, Name Single Item.

Once you select your renaming scheme, choose the options you want based on the scheme. For instance, if you wanted the "Make Sequential" scheme, you could choose to use existing naming, or create a new name. You can also select options for where to place the numbers, which number to start counting from, and how to separate the number from the rest of the text.

Running the Workflow
Once you have your naming scheme figured out, it's time to run the workflow, and have Automator do the heavy-lifting. Drag and drop the files you want renamed onto the "Get Specified Finder Items" workflow. They will be added to the list of files to be renamed. You can then click the "Run" button in the top-right corner of the window. Your original files will be renamed, leaving you with perfectly renamed files. You can now save your workflow.

Want more Mac Automation or AppleScript tutorials? Visit TUAW's Mac Automation and AppleScript sections.

When it comes to virtualization on the Mac, it's mostly discussed in the context of running a variant of Microsoft Windows. This makes sense; the ease of getting Windows to run within OS X (on Intel hardware) is one of the key reasons many first-time Mac buyers are migrating to Apple. However, Windows is hardly the only game in town.

Although the annual proclamations of "the year of the Linux desktop" haven't really panned out, thanks to distributions like Ubuntu, more and more individuals are at least giving Linux a try. Today, Canonical made both the server and desktop versions of Ubuntu 8.10 (codenamed 'Intrepid Ibex') available for download.

Even before the Intel switch, PPC users could effectively run Linux distros on their machines, but virtualization coupled with Intel hardware has made running a VM of Ubuntu -- or any Linux distribution -- fairly painless. Using commercial software like VMware Fusion 2.0 or Parallels Desktop, or open source and free solutions like VirtualBox, you can set up an Ubuntu virtual machine much like you would with Windows.

If you have ever installed a Windows virtual machine, using Parallels, Fusion or VirtualBox, the process for installing Ubuntu is almost exactly the same. Download the Ubuntu 8.10 ISO image (a slow process today with the demand for the new release; it should speed up next week, and there are Bittorrent seeds for faster service) and then select that image for the virtual CD drive when creating your VM. The process, depending on your system, should take under 20 minutes from beginning to end.

Today, I set up a virtual machine of Ubuntu 8.10 in both VMware Fusion 2.0 and VirtualBox 2.04. Parallels Desktop works with Ubuntu, but I had problems trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed and am still reading reports of problems with 8.10. Parallels might work just fine with Ubuntu 8.10, but keep in mind that it might be kludgy.

Read on for more install options.

Yesterday, I showed you how to simulate a photograph taken with a tilt-shift lens by using Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur tool. Today, we'll do something a bit more practical: clipping out an object that's not entirely in focus.

Clipping out objects that are out of focus can be something of a chore: either you have a hard, dark edge somewhere you don't want, or you have to settle for feathering the whole thing, leaving edges that should be sharp a little too blurry.

We'll be clipping out this old book, and dropping it on a new surface.

We all know Photoshop is a powerful tool. In two tutorials, I'll take you through how to use Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur filter to do two things: today, we'll make images look like they were shot with a tilt-shift lens. Tomorrow, we'll create clipping masks for objects that aren't entirely in focus.

Lens Blur gives the effect of a narrower depth of field, so some areas of your image stay in focus, and other areas are blurred. Combined with an alpha channel that defines areas of blurriness, you have a powerful way to create masks and alter photos.

The easiest thing to do is show you first how Lens Blur works in pictures.