An easy way to make photos look less good

If your photos don't look as shabby as you'd like, there is new software that will wreck them for you.

That's not a bad thing if you are a devotee of the "lo-fi" photography movement, which considers the effects achieved by toy cameras, pinhole cameras and other crude photo devices to be artful.

The software, from a studio within the high-end photo software shop Alien Skin, is appropriately called Lo-Fi.

Unlike most software filters, Lo-Fi, which works on Windows PCs and Macs, doesn't require Photoshop or a similar product to work. Just start it up, and drag and drop photos to alter them.

The gimmicky part is that you drag your photos to what looks like a camera. The camera's buttons work the filters and features.

You can control color and saturation, mimic different kinds of lenses, change the border of the photo and add dirt and creases.

Lo-Fi also has a button to post your creation directly to Facebook or Flickr, or just save it to your computer.

The TerreStar Genus is a hybrid mobile-satellite phone, a single device that can connect either to a terrestrial cellular network or to a satellite when in remote locations. It is available through AT&T for $1,070.

Unlike other sat phones, the Genus isn't a brick-sized ruggedized monster; it will remind you more of an overweight BlackBerry.

When in satellite mode, it can take minutes to find a signal and a couple of seconds between when you speak and when the person on the other end hears you, but this is common to sat phones.

Battery life also takes a beating in satellite mode: Expect four hours of standby time and 1.3 hours of talk time.

Then there is the cost. There is the price of the handset plus the regular cell phone plan you choose, then on top of that $25 a month for access to the satellite plus 65 cents a minute per call, 40 cents per text message and $5 per megabyte of data.

Not the cheapest plan, but for people who regularly travel to places out of range of cell phone towers, it may be well worth it.

NEW YORK TIMES