Fsckin.com is giving away a copy of Unreal Tournament 3 Collector’s Edition. Just make a comment on this post with a valid email address and I’ll randomly select the winner. I’ll have it to your door by Christmas.
Want to know why I’m giving it away? Keep reading….
Ok, I admit. I thrashed the Digg.com servers for a little while using an open source website mirroring tool, which I wont mention, but it’s easy to find. 🙂
About 30,000 user icons later, I present to you a product created by a couple very short and sweet command line tools.
1024×768
1280×1024
1680×1050
1900×1200
On an unrelated note, I’ll be disabling hotlinking of images shortly, so if you’re going to steal my content, please rehost these images yourself.
So how can you make your own mosaic? Simple! Download and install metapixel, if you’re running Ubuntu, it’s located in the universe repository.
Then we are just a few commands away from generating sweet photomosaics. First, we prepare the images.
metapixel-prepare -r source destination --width=48 --height=48
This copies all images from the “source” folder, (recursively) searching into every folder within, and dumps every image it finds into the “destination” folder after resizing them into 48×48 pixel images. You’ll want to modify the width and height to fit the source images. This took a LONG time for me, since my library of images was so gigantic – but once we’re done preparing the images, you don’t have to do it again. Woohoo!
Next, we actually generate the output file(s) with this one liner:
metapixel --metapixel input.jpg output.png --library destination --scale=35 --distance=500
This takes input.jpg and increases the output size by 35 times (i.e. REALLY BIG IMAGE), uses the library destination and does not repeat any images found in the library closer than 500. It’ll spit output.png after a little while. If you don’t care about repeating images, removing the distance flag will result in MUCH, MUCH faster generation times.
Here’s a another I generated, this HUGE image was scaled down from about 228 megapixels.
In related news, here’s a groovy post over at Kristen Symonds’s blog with a ton of GIMP/Photoshop brushes, check it out, good stuff. 🙂
Which images would you like to see rendered in Digg user icons? I’ve got lots more ideas but not much time to use them, since I’ve got some holiday shopping to do. 🙂
I’m back, here are some more…
Bill:
Imogen:
StumbleUpon:
Reddit:
Ok last update, promise… this is actually pretty darn fun.
Last Jedi Supper:
The original was a 460 megapixels PNG file (30720×15040 – 370MB) scaled down to 7680×3760 – only 28MP, saved as 70% quality JPEG ended up as about a 7MB file… still HUGE! The GIMP was using about 1.2GB of RAM (Thank god I upgraded last week to 4GB!) while scaling the image.
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I’ve been running Vista for about a week – because Unreal Tournament 3 hasn’t released a Linux client yet. Don’t worry, you aren’t missing very much! Since there’s no Linux server either – you end up only a few popular windows-based servers that never fill up and are pretty boring… the game is great, no doubt… but with nobody to play with, what good is it?
I’d rather be playing Team Fortress 2, and since it runs in Wine… well – I don’t have much of a reason to keep running Vista, other than the fact that it was completely free (as in beer). I guess Microsoft can’t give away their operating system, since I’m going to perform a 7-pass-wipe to make sure I completely rid my computer of Vista.
So…. except for some sweet revenge there hasn’t been much to write about. Other than some content theft (par for the course when you’re a popular website) …
Long story short, some guy decided to steal my content and images, and I sent google a DMCA request to remove their advertisements from the page, they didn’t respond in a timely manner….. so I sent them a quick note that went something like this:
“Sup Google, thanks for the check this last week, I owe you one – stop by and check out my new tattoo, it’s badass personified. Oh yeah, also I faxed you a request about providing advertising for this jerk who is stealing my content – would you cut it out?”
Google replied something like this:
“If you would like to report a copyright infringement, please send us a properly formatted request.”
I replied,
“Don’t taze me bro! I already sent it to you.”
Google replied something like this:
“If you would like to report a copyright infringement, please send us a properly formatted request.”
So I figure the DMCA request is going nowhere fast, what is a guy to do? Enlist the help of his readers….
Not you guys!
I’ll enlist the help of the folks who just happen to be reading content that’s been stolen. I deleted my old image pointing to the entirely nasty HP Vectra slimline computer that runs my network (now running IPCop 1.4.18 to test out the latest release – trust me, it’s nothing special) and replaced it with a message to the readers of websites who steal my content.
And the thing that REALLY sucks… when searching for the name of the article, the website of the content theif shows up first. I guess it’s a bad case of Google’s algorithm for determining “duplicate content” and my website has been penalized… what a pain in the neck!
For your enjoyment… I’m not providing a hyperlink, since that would be kinda silly, but I bet you’ll enjoy this stuff.
http://linuxcult.blogspot.com/2007/11/seven-different-linuxbsd-firewalls.html
http://www.dralnux.com/2007/12/03/seven-different-linuxbsd-firewalls-reviewed
It doesn’t quite fit with their website theme… but ah well, what can I do?
I feel betrayed and deceived. I’m livid with Epic Games right now. For the first time in months I’ve installed Windows, just to play a video game. There is STILL NO LINUX client!The upshot of this is that I’ll be able to compare Vista performance with Linux when it comes out… if ever.
In one of the most bizarre promotions I’ve ever run into, Sun Microsystems is offering $50 in dinner gift certificates for installing and registering Solaris 10. I know this isn’t a joke, but I really want it to be.
The picture of the woman giving food to the boy is pretty hilarious stock photography by itself… it’s definitely good for a “write a caption for this picture” contest.
Boy: An entire leg of lamb! *Supastar*
Some maintenance around here was desperately needed… the site has been upgraded, so there may be some issues here and there. I’m aware of the dozens of articles that have no category.
If you see anything strange, use the brand spanking new Contact button on the left and scroll down, fill out the form, prove you’re a human, and by the miracle of technology, I will receive your message.
A couple of other changes are afoot.
Newegg is participating in the PayPal 20% cash back (Max $50) deal for the obligatory Cyber Monday. It’s dead, Jim!
Question: What’s better than giving a computer to someone for Christmas?
Answer: A computer with Linux pre-loaded.
What are you waiting for? Get one while you still can!
ASUS Eee PC 4G Surf – Galaxy Black Intel processor 7″ Wide VGA Integrated Graphics – Retail
(aff)
The MPAA has their own flavor of Linux… if you can call a few quaint additions a new flavor.
It’s actually a decent LiveCD, since it’s based on Xubuntu. With a python script and an MPAA-branded version of ntop, the distribution actually “phones home” to check to make sure it has the latest version, but other than that, it seems like it’s pretty harmless.
So what’s the first thing a guy needs to do? Mark my territory.
Black Friday was good to me. I visited about a dozen different stores and ended up getting better deals than I had originally expected. I tend to be one of those so-called “bad customers” who leverage price matching guarantees to their fullest potential. I ended up scoring a HDTV for under a grand less than I would have paid for it the day prior, and since they had to order it, no HDTV love for two weeks.
Enter the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 USB HDTV Tuner to the rescue.
