Maya tip (possibly for other 3D modelers as well)

Made a 3D model that has lots of angles and or complex geometry that makes it hard to select elements?

Or you need to move around your model a lot to select the edges or vertices that you need?

Well if you have made a proper UV map, just load the UV editor window and select away. Easier to do so in there for lots of elements because of the unwrapped model.

Pictured above: Simple model of an ogre's club. The edges were selected in the UV editor; since all the teeth had their UVs overlapping each other's to save texture space, selecting the edges took a couple of clicks.

Dear weather...

...wtf was wrong with you at noon today? (or as a friend said once: "haven't gotten the memo"...)

White balance (shouldn't really be balanced.)

I'm sure that most people have seen at one point (either on the news or up close) someone holding a piece of white paper and a camera man aiming his/hers camera at it.

Their aim was to calibrate the camera's "white balance". You see, this is important because if they don't set a point of reference for what is considered white, the colors will be off depending on the lighting conditions.
Our brain does it as well, only in a much much more sophisticated and automatic way that we don't even notice it. (One way of noticing it is to stare at point with a bright color on it and then quickly look at a white wall. Colors will look funny for some time, and that is because our brain was compensating for the light conditions of the place we were staring at, and glancing at a different place, it keeps doing that compensation for some more time. This is even more noticeable if looking at an LCD screen and then looking at a wall lit by an incandescent light (or any light with a different temperature than the LCD screen).

A camera doesn't really know what it is looking at, so in order to make more sense we need that white balance, to get the colors straight. The sensor received some light spread out in a range of wavelengths and then the camera is using that "white balance" point as a reference to map that light to colors that will look normal to us.

The problem is that it will try to make white look white all the time; while things may not have looked like that when we took the picture. White balance is more of a scientific equation thing rather than how the scene made us feel when we first saw it. We tend to associate warmth with red/orange and cold with blue... A camera though will try to make the colors look as neutral as possible even though that piece of paper might have looked a bit orangey.

Setting the camera in auto white balance is ok for the most part, especially when you just want to take a snap of something to have as a reference, but when you want something to evoke a certain emotion; then it's a nice idea to change that white balance setting on your camera. Just go outside in a sunny day with no clouds, set the white balance in auto or "sunny" (so that the camera will try to set "white" according to the sunlight) and then set the white balance to "cloudy" even if it isn't just to see the difference.
You can make a winter's day have a summery vibe and vice versa.