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Posts for 2008/12
Avatars are important. They are everywhere and there is virtually no community driven website out there, where you can’t upload an image of yourself or what you want to be associated with. These images help us to immediately recognize our friends without even having to look at their names.
We don’t care too much about what is depicted, but how it looks: the overall color and shapes. Yet, all the default avatars of our beloved Web 2.0 sites look exactly the same. And while Twitter’s default Avatar can at least be considered cute, most others are dull and unimaginative.
Why not create a unique image, based on the users name, on the fly? This avatar could be temporarily used till the user can be bothered with uploading one by himself. This would give even the laziest user a chance to be instantly recognized by his friends.
My InstantAvatar PHP class does exactly this: it generates (more or less) unique avatars on the fly. Here are some examples of what it can do:
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As of today, Picturelicious – the PHP Script that drives lowbird.com – is now for sale. This is the first time I’m really trying to sell some of my stuff as software, so let’s see how this works out.
Packaging up something for a public release always means work, lots and lots of work. Asaph was no different and I was not even selling it. This time I had to be even more thorough. $700 is a lot of money, so I made sure I’d have a proper readme, all configuration variables are documented, the code is cleaned up and the script is really worth what you’re paying for.
I implemented a Paypal button to receive payments for Picturelicious; it really made me wish for an App Store. I do have the feeling that I will complain a lot about the App Store once I try to sell Yuckfu for the iPhone, but for now, Paypal sucks. It’s unbelievably complicated for the vendor and the customer. It tries to please everyone, but ultimately only confuses with too many options. Luckily, the software I’m selling only appeals to people who probably know how to use Paypal. But let’s not blame Paypal; let’s blame the W3C or whoever was to lazy to work out how the 402 HTTP status could be put to use.
Almost seven month ago I wrote about my experiments of “compressing” a whole movie into one single picture. A screenshot of the movie is taken every second and the screenshots are then combined into one big image. 60 frames per row, one row for each minute of film.
I tried this technique with a lot of different movies, but the one that looked most interesting turned out to be Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now I’ve finally got it printed, glued onto a frame and hanging on my wall. I’m very pleased how the print turned out. Every single image is only 11mm wide, but you can still make out a lot of details.
I don’t know what the legal situation here is, but I found that “someone” already uploaded a “similar” image as a PNG file (11367x16232 pixels; 140mb): 2001-13-36-final.png on Rapidshare
Read on for a short tutorial to make your own movie poster like this.
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