Shirley Lev – Judaica & Design is a boutique studio managed by the talented Shirley Lev, A graduate of the “Bezalel” Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, she also studied Jewish Philosophy at the Tel-Aviv University. Inspired by both spiritual elements and contemporary concepts, Shirley Lev combines high-tech techniques with traditional silversmithing.Lev designs and manufactures her creations by means of a unique combination of digital media and traditional silversmith’s techniques.

Until recently these items where only available on selected shops as the Israel National Museum shop, The Tel-Aviv Museum shop and a few high-end e-commerce site like uncommongoods.com, as of april 2011 Shirley Lev is launching her new website which will function as an online catalog for her latest work and a boutique Judaica shop.

“I photograph the images that will appear on the designed object, process the imagery and use photochemical etching to imprint the images on the metal.”
This technique enables the designer to achieve very high levels of accuracy on miniature, intricate designs. These can then be rendered on very thin metal surfaces creating a texture similar to lace. The result is both contemporary and exclusive in appearance.
Beneath the metal design, Lev integrates colored surfaces that emphasize the texture and lend a vivid quality to the ornaments. The end result has a delicate colorfulness, elegance and warmth.

Pixel bender comes with a pixelate filter sample from Adobe which is written very carelessly to say the least.
I’ve tried creating a better version of that shader using a smarter sampling algorithm.
The filter can be downloaded here

demo:

A lot of my clients are using “google apps” as their mail service, and outlook as their mail client.
I just got a call from one of them saying outlook 2007 was giving “Enter Network Password” prompt no matter what he did.

we tried everything, reinstalled the Outlook account, changed the password, disable/enabled POP and IMAP, but no… the solution is doing some google voodoo on this page: https://www.google.com/a/[your domain].com/UnlockCaptcha. (change [your domain] to… the domain you’re using for google apps)

you can read the entire help section at:  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14257

good luck, and don’t forget to uninstall Outlook after this.