I pity other husbands, really I do. Hands up, you married men reading this, which of you has ever had an email from your wife at 12:26, subject lined Textiles emergency, in which your spouse has instructed you to go and buy peacock feathers as a matter of not a little urgency.

Not only is the notion of a textiles emergency inherently comedy – "Quick, we need more plaid!"; "Stop that, you schlemiel; you're warping your woof and woofing your warp!"; "You don't understand: if I don't get this knitted by noon tomorrow, we'll loose the Webster account!"; etc – but the fact that I was minutes later to be seen walking down Regent Street with a fistful of peacock feathers streaming out behind me in the wind added a satisfying note of whimsy to a story that already had plenty of potential to amuse.

Oh, the reason, if anyone's still reading, for the email was that one of her students had ordered some for one of her projects but they hadn't yet turned up. John Lewis charges £2.50 per feather. I have a sneaking suspicion that its 'Never knowingly undersold' policy is founded on the corporate equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "La la la la, I'm not listening!" and that the one chap whose job it is to pricematch with other stores is based in Abergavenny's less salubrious suburbs, and is armed with one HB pencil, a pad of PostIts and a choleric pigeon.

I'm delighted to announce that Receding Hairline's first tutorial is now online. If you were impressed by my tilt-shift photography experiments – which made photographs of ordinary scenes look like they were of miniature models – you should go and read how to do it for yourself in the new Tutorial section.

I'm also delighted and embarrassed in equal measure to have edited the CSS file for this site's template to have the text shown as left-aligned Helvetica Neue (on Macs and other computers which have the font installed) rather than justified Lucida Grande. Embarrassed because I ought to have done it ages ago – I'm a technology journalist, dammit – and delighted because I really dislike fully justified text. And embarrassed (once again) because I'm so delighted.

A slimline box arrived at the office today, containing a MacBook Pro. It is a rather lovely machine, but just as pretty as the hardware itself is the polystyrene packaging protecting it. Apple does a fantastic job of fetishising the whole process of opening the box containing its hardware; it makes unwrapping your new piece of technology as much of an experience as using it.

ETA: Check out our scientific experiments with Photobooth...

Me, I suggest: "Laters, bitches and bitchettes; my limo's double parked."

More in the comments, please.

Partly just to know what the process is like for work reasons, I've just signed up with Apple as an iTunes affiliate. This means that if I suggest music on this site – or any other – I can embed a link directly to that artist, album or song which contains an affiliate code; if someone click on that link and buys the music I suggest, I get a cut of that sale.

So, let's see if this works. I've recently discovered and very much been enjoying the music of Lambchop and they have some albums on the iTMS. This is just for my amusement to see how the system works, but I do actually recommend Lambchop, so you're welcome to check them out and buy the music through that link.

Apparently, if you don't have iTunes installed, it will take you to the download page. If anyone runs into problems, please let me know.

On my NAS device there's a folder that I can't delete, no matter what I try. If I connect to it from Mac OS, I can delete it, but it pops right back a second later. From Windows or Linux it merely insists that there's no folder there even though I can see, explore and select it.

So I thought I'd break out the big guns and try using the rm command from Terminal. And it brought a smile to my face when I got this friendly warning from the Darwin layer:


The folder's still there, by the way. Neither the -f, -d or -R flags helped; Terminal also just insisted that the folder didn't exist too. Suggestions on a postcard, please. Or a comments field, which is probably easier.

I'm quickly becoming obsessed with faked tilt-shift photography. There may come a time when all my photographs – firstborn, graduations, the lot – are made to look like the subjects are on a model train set. There are a bunch of my experiments now on the Flickr album.

My lady wife has returned home after a brief soujourn in The Mother Country; on passing the border, the poor tot promptly succumbed to a cold. Evidently, she has become A Soft Southerner. Her mother responded appropriately, though, forcing tumblers of Bailey's between her parched lips, and encouraging the cat to keep her company. Not that the cat needs much encouragement – I've never met such a talkative beast. Apparently, she – the cat, the cat – has now adopted the habit of only sitting down to eat at the same time as my in-laws; regardless of the time her food is put down, she only appears when the humans pick up their cutlery.

In other news, a small area of flesh on my wrist looked like crispy bacon this morning, on account of me inadvertently – unlikely as that adverb may seem – pressing said body part against the heating elements of our grill. But worry ye not: thanks to the frankly terrifying regenerative capabilities of Elastoplast's spiffy new SilverHealing plasters, it looks much more like normal skin. I imagine it will only be in years to come that the metallic nature of the patch of bio-engineered skin on my wrist will come to light, when I inexplicably start setting off airport security systems and saving-the-world-while-wearing-my underpants-on-the-outside.

Over the last month or so, I have kept seeing all over the web examples of tilt-shift photography. Actually, that's not strictly true; tilt-shift lenses are intended to help correct the perspective effect you get when, for example, looking up at a tall building which appears to narrow as it climbs.

No, in this context, I'm talking about taking photos using the tilt-shift lenses to make pictures of everyday scenes look like they're scale models, such as the one above. Ah, but, no. The picture above is one of my own – shot from the Pierre Cardin's mansion in Cannes, no less – taken with an ordinary camera, which I've doctored in Photoshop.

Examining the tilt-shift photos I've seen prompted me to think it would be easy to fake, and indeed so it proves. It's basically just mucking about with Quick Mask and gradients, then using the Lens Blur filter, plus giving the RGB curve a blow-out bias to make everything look that little bit artificial. I'm not yet completely satisfied with the results – some more tinkering is required – but I think the effect is pretty convincing.

(A big part of creating a convincing example, I've discovered, is in the choice of original image: not only is it simplest to work with images where the perspective slopes uninterruptedly from foreground to background, but as we're used to seeing models from above, the mind seems to accept photos taken pointing downwards much more readily than those looking straight across or up.)

If there's enough interest, I'll post a quick tutorial on here, but as it's 2:37am and my wife arrives back in London tomorrow, I'd better be off to my bed.

Click on the photo above to see it side-by-side with the original.

Because sometimes, you have to cover an absent colleague's desk with bread. Serve him right for being all polite and asking us if he could perchance take a slice from the bread in the kitchen which wasn't even ours. Yeah, serve him right.