RKNet Blog... Thing

At Typorganism there’s a fascinating little tool that will take JPEGs sized 60×50 pixels and turn them into either letter or block style ASCII art in either color or black and white.

There are five sample faces you can play with to get a feel for what the tool can do: 3 male faces, one female face and one cat face.

There is also a picture upload option. I played with this tool for a moment and of course I had the perfect sample picture to test the tool’s limits.

I found the “Generate HTML” option slightly desceptive. Selecting this option with the color and square options will open a new window with a JPEG output of the Flash-generated image. Which is great for saving, but not “true” ASCII. However, if you opt for the letters option, this tool will definitely deliver!

Forgive the display, I can’t quite make it work the way I want. Below the cut to hide my shame.
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By now you may have seen the “seam carving” image editing video, demonstrating a new, kickass way of resizing images to retain the key elements and pick out threads that are “less relevant” to retain the overall feel of the original image.

Thanks to the glory of my del.icio.us feed, I’ve found a flash tool that will resize web-hosted images in this fashion. The tool’s author is still working on some of the more advanced features discussed in the video, but right now it’s really fun to play with the vertical and horizontal resizing.

Load a few of your flickr images and play with it!

I went to bed rather early because I got up early and was a lot more active than normal.
At first I dreamt I was in a field and the stars over my head shone with a brilliance I have never seen before (not even in NM and the stars there were intense). At some point it became a stadium-like concert hall with a peculiar pattern of open roof. I sat down in a chair and continued to relax and look at the stars. I was there for a little while when I saw people coming in and sitting down. Then I realized that someone was setting up the stage area below. I thought to myself that since I was already here and no one stopped me before that I may as well stick around. At some point during all of this, I had company on either side of me, my father and a mystery person. As it turns out, the people setting up on stage were The Flaming Lips. They started to play (and it really was familiar songs, I was stunned almost in-dream by the accuracy) and it was really great but I got a little nervous because I didn’t know if I was allowed to be here or not. I turned around and looked, and there was a familiar looking young man. I asked if we’d gone to school together and he said yes. That was pretty much the end of that conversation. There were some fancy effects, one of which went wrong.

It had to do with a pattern of lasers over the crowd that would present the optical illusion represented above, and then had another image overlaid on that. (Looked sort of like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs if I recall correctly.) Of course to do all that, they needed smoke in the air. However, they couldn’t figure out how to keep the smoke from rising too quickly to the top and out of the open dome. I looked upward and saw that they attempted to “close” the dome but there was no fully closed setting and even still the ceiling was very high, causing the smoke to drift well out of laser range. I peeked through holes at the stars and longed for the way it was before. Though I was grateful to be sitting with my dad and grateful to be seeing the band perform. The nervousness of being discovered for my ignorant seat theft and the pang of longing for the peace field I had started out in were pretty overwhelming. I had gotten caught for my apparent trespass (despite having been there first) and was frantically trying to come up with some way to redeem myself. I stammered a suggestion to the large man towering above me that if they had linen sheets, lots of them, they could use it to create a canopy to blow the smoke under and contain it. I fled from the building, on a determined mission to find linen sheets. The open country had gone from field to urban while I wasn’t looking and there were a variety of stores, most of which were closed. I started out moving along by car but for some reason decided that was not the most efficient way to manage so I left the car in some parking lot and ran.
I wasn’t able to find linen sheets, so many places were closed and I returned to admit my defeat after the concert, despite the fact that I could have just run as my gut tried to tell me to. I lose the thread of the dream there. I may have woken up.
Later on, I dreamt of a video game. I believe it was called “Purple Valve: The Assisted Suicide Game”. Not sure why they called it that, other than it was remarkably easy to die. Player 1 was on a moving platform that was going down with a few other figures, but the idea was you needed to leap of and get power ups and hop from small block to small block to get the rest of the way down. After falling to my doom over and over again, I finally figured out how to grab power ups that made the fall less fatal, and finished level one. Some of those symbols made no sense. I don’t know why grabbing the baseball and then the baseball glove made an angel come and wing me part of the way down. Perhaps a manifestation of Saint Duh, the patron saint of obvious pattern recognition?
As level two began the whole dream pulled away from that. I was faced with something that was like a low budget cross between Transformers and John Carpenter’s Price of Darkness. There were these “symbiote” creatures created of wire that looked remarkably like CAT5. They informed us of their superiority and started taking people over one at a time. They did so by jabbing one of these wires down the throats of human victims. There was a lot of cautious reasoning with these monsters, trying to perhaps trick them into admitting a weakness while trying to establish the worth of the human race. This dream gets a bit hazy but I suspect that the humans did not survive. Incidentally I think Alec Baldwin was in that dream, portraying some manner of general.
And I wonder why I wake up tired.