Here’s a preview of what my mosaic is all about! It’s still relatively low quality, cause I only have 30% of my resources gathered (ideally I want 200%, so I have some colors twice to limit repetition).
(Again, as a technical note, I started implementing a standard deviation test at the suggestion of my room mate to allow the program to automatically discard very poor quality images, where the colors vary excessively)
Recently I’ve started collecting images online (specifically off of the flickr website owned by Yahoo!). My goal is to collect roughly 65,000 images to build a mosaic out of them. I’ve only collected roughly 6000 so far.. so I don’t have nearly enough to began building a mosaic.
I have done one experiment on them, however. I’ve averaged all the pictures together (Resize them to 256×256, summed each pixel up and divided by the number of images). I obtained this:
As awesome as that is.. it appears mostly gray. You can see some hints of blues and reds in there, which I found interesting. I then took this, and simply normalized the image to obtain a more apparent version of how the colors interacted (Excuse the poor jpeg quality).
This is a much better image to describe what is going on. My [limited] explanation for what is going on is that darker colors tend to be on the bottom (floor, ground, etc), while faces and people tend to be in the middle, and sky and clouds tend to be on top.
I intend on doing more experiments with these images once I collect more of them. And once I get enough, mosaic time!
(On a more technical note, the image fetchers and processors have been programmed in python, using MySQL as a backend to keep track of the histograms of every image.. to make access time for creating a mosaic much faster).
I went camping two summer’s ago, but I just realized I never shared the panorama I made with the world. Me and a few friends spent a weekend in Crawford Notch, NH. We had some fun, but unfortunately it rained most of the time we were there.
The pano isn’t perfect.. there are some very visible flaws, i.e., one of the clouds moved while I was taking the picture. The flaws are only visible if you look for them, so don’t look too hard! 
Miro is an video feed aggregator. It’s main function is to take many RSS feeds, parse then, and extract any videos they might link to. This provides sort of a pseudo internet “TV”.
When I first downloaded it, I noticed it had hundreds of built in RSS feeds ready to use. It also had the ability to search for videos in all the feeds. So, I set it up to downloaded new movie trailers, some AdultSwim stuff (cartoons, such as Robot Chicken), and Linux.com video feeds.
So far I’m impressed with its design and its ease of use. There really is no downside to the program itself, I’m just not sure how useful it would be to me. I like the whole idea of automatically downloading new videos from the sources I specify, though, I’m not sure if this is a program I would use on a day to day basis.
The other downside, from a programming aspect, is I’ve found it has a tendency to crash from time to time, though it isn’t enough to convince me to stop using it for that single reason. It also gets clogged up during a massive video search sucking up CPU time to do the search.
So, if you are into a program to take all the videos in RSS feeds, download them, and then view them, then this program is for you. If you just watch some youtube videos from time to time, then check out the program, you may like it, or you may find that just hopping on youtube in firefox is easier than starting up this program.
So, I just got home from a lovely day at work at the deli, sit down in my nice computer chair, and hop on google. I have the nice iGoogle homepage, and I see that Intel’s next CPU is set to release at the end of this year, so I look at it. Guess what it’s name is? Core i7. Seriously, what’s with that name? I understand the ‘Core’, the “Flagship” name for their new multicore products (See Source Article).
What’s with the i7? To me, it seems like that everyone is stealing the name from the iMac, or the iPod, or maybe even the iRack (Youtube Video), but why iGoogle, or i7? It’s almost like everything is going ‘i’. Doesn’t make much sense to me.
On top of that, i7 has nothing to do with the actual product. It’s a quad core! Maybe it would make more sense if they called it the Core i4 or the Core 3 Quad. That way their name actually has some relevance in the design. Maybe they have yet to announce why it’s called the i7, something about more official specifications maybe. But for now, to me, it is a ridiculous name. The way this is going, this decade will be the ‘i’ decade, and will be remembered as such.
All I can say is that I hope the processor specs outways the stupidity of the name. If it’s anything like their previous processors, it will be a decent CPU.
ffmpeg is probably one of the most useful programs for audio/video conversion and minor linear editing. Most people doesn’t realize it exists because it only has command line functionality. Today, I watched a video on Linux Journal that introduced me to new features that I didn’t even realize ffmpeg had. It showed the user how to overlay images, do animation just using simple pictures, and other cool stuff.
You can find the video here at Video Editing with ffmpeg by Linux Journal.
Unfortunately, ffmpeg just updated itself massively, which broke some common applications including [what I thought to be unbreakable] VideoLAN. I’m hoping the software is fixed in the near future – it’s tough living without VLC.
Overall, though, ffmpeg is one program the open source community could not live without. It helps the majority of the linux user group with video viewing and editing. Ever watch a WMV file on linux? Then you probably used a version of ffmpeg to view it.
So, ya, watch the video by Linux Journal, and learn about ffmpeg! It has more functionality than I thought it did.
Gimp is a photo/image manipulation program. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. One of the best things about Gimp is that it’s easy to use, but in the right hands it can be just as powerful as photoshop. One of it’s downfalls is it lacks some of the tools photoshop has. Photoshop’s blending is far superior to that of Gimp’s. However, it is still possible to do everything that photoshop does, you may just have to use other methods. Gimp also has an extensive selection of plugins to use that come standard, including many effects that are uncommon.
Gimp is a great program. It makes it even better that it’s 100% free. It works on Linux and Windows systems. Get it and try it!
Well, I’ve been lazy the past few days. It’s been tough with working so much.
Anyhow, the program of today is dvd::rip. As you may be able to tell it rips dvd’s! The program is for linux, and makes the whole process easy. Just stick in the DVD, start up the program. Rip the DVD to your computer, and then transcode it to whatever format you’d like (mpg, avi, etc). Isn’t that easy?
I won’t go over the exact details of how to use it, but it is a pretty intuitive program for someone technically experienced in the area. Even a little experience is enough.
So, check it out, it’s the only program I use for ripping dvds.
So, I figure first I’ll start off with “What is Gnash?”. Gnash is a GPL’d flash player, simply put. It runs on linux (and maybe windows?) to provide an open source environment to play flash videos. So, I think, I’m all for open source versions of usually closed source programs. So I installed it, and then installed the plugin for it into firefox. My next step was to open it up and test it.. and what better way to test it than to point my browser’s address to youtube.
Youtube comes up, and at first I’m quite impressed. All the flash on the page loads as it should. I click onto a video and I’m faced with a blank window. So, apparently gnash is good at rendering animations, but it’s ability to stream video is very limited (being non-existent).
I then went on to their webpage to read about it’s state on video streaming, and apparently the developer’s snapshot in CVS is capable of it, and they intend to released video support to the public soon. I’m sure I’ll check it out again after they release the next version – but as far as I’m concerned, Gnash doesn’t support my primary use for flash in the first place – streaming video.
I’ll give it another few months.
Coldplay recently released their new album Viva la Vida, which has some pretty good music on it. Personally, I think the best song on the album (from which the album gets it’s name – Viva la Vida), is the best song (which makes sense..). Unfortunately, I’ve found that the song is overplayed to the point where it will probably be it’s death. Not only has itunes adapted the song in a commercial of it, but my local radio stations (primarily WBRU) are playing this song multiple times a day.
Don’t get me wrong.. it’s a great song and Coldplay did a tremendous job at desining it.. but public media will kill it by overplaying it to the point where the vast majority of people get bored of it. This also happened to their song Clocks released a few years earlier.
That said, the itunes commercial that uses the song in the background is quite captivating. You can find a high quality version of this commercial below: