Ok, being sick this weekend has ben a joy. But one good thing to come of it, I’ve been going through my pinned posts from Bloglines and cleaning things up a bit. During one brief period of consciousnous early this morning I came back across the following sites that let you play around with photos.

wanokoto – this Japanese site (with a bit of off kilter English translation) takes your photo and ages it to look like it was taken back in the 40’s or something. The interface is bout as simple as you can get, you browse for a local file or plug in the url of a picture that’s already online and click the “convert” button. Here I took a panoramic shot of the Capital from my recent DC trip, and here’s how it turned out. To save the converted photo you need to right-click and save the image.

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I am a bit of a geek. Yea, big shock there. I bought my first digital camera over seven years ago, a camera from before they even measured the quality in mega-pixels. I have a few shots of when my niece and nephew were first born using that camera.There were better ones out there, and it was not long before I upgraded to an 2 mega-pixel HP camera. A camera the same niece and nephew now use as a toy.

I am on my fourth digital camera, an 8 mega-pixel Kodak. Over the last 7-8 years I have taken thousands of photos. Many of which I still have, despite loosing way too many to a hard-drive crash a few years back.

For at least a few years now, I have been looking for an online gallery to use to show off my photos, and in the process Of course being the geek that I am, I want to host my own gallery, not rely on a third party like Flickr. I have looked at dozens and actually tried out about a dozen. I finally have found the one I am sticking with.

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We’ve all seen them, even if you don’t realize what they are – favicon’s. They are the icon that replaces the generic document image in the address bar or on the tab title when viewing a site, and are used as the icon image when you save a bookmark or link to a site.

I wandered across a fairly new site, genfavicon.com that lets you create your own custom favicon file in minutes. I used the logo image from my site here and created the favicon.ico file in about three minutes. It is a pretty slick, very easy to use, straight-forward site. Just one page, that is all it needs and that is all it gives you.
You have two option to get your image in to their web-based editor – link to an existing image (that you have the right to use) online, or upload from your computer. In my case, I right-clicked on my logo image, selected Copy Image Location and posted it in the URL box under Step 1.

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I hope everything is working fine, so that when you enter localhost in the address bar of your browser you are taken to the splash screen, from there you click on your language option and go to the XAMPP for Linux control panel. If you click on the Security option on the menu you will see a bunch of stuff with red UNSECURE tags on the end of them.
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The Ubuntu forums has a great thread for setting up your XAMPP environment in Ubuntu, but it can be a hassle to read through the entire thread at to get to what you need to get up and running.

This is going to be Part 1, Getting XAMPP installed and running. In the next part or two, I’ll touch on tweeking some things to make it easier to work with.

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I can’t remember where I first found this… maybe Lifehacker?

VectorMagic is an online utility that lets you upload a bitmap image and it will convert it to a vector image. In plain speak, bitmaps pictures made using dots, like a newspaper. Vector images are basically formulas that make a line, including curves, like we learned in high school match. Since the curves adjust no mater what size, you don’t get the jagged edges when you zoom in on an image.

Here’s a copy of the edubuntu logo, the original clipped from the website was 90pixels by 90pixels. See how it looks jagged when I scale it to be 250×250? The last image is what I got after running it through VectorMagic, a free, online utility that turns bitmaps to vector images. The final product was 90×90, but when scaled up to 250×250, it still looks the same.

On the left is the original logo – PNG format 90×90. It looks pretty good, right? But if I take that same image, and blow it up, either in my graphics program or by changing the HTML code, like I did with the image on the right, you get an image that is all blurry looking.

And here’s what it looks like after being run through VectorMagic. Now, this specific image is saved as a PNG, same as the others, but I also have it saved as an SVG type, which can be edited in my graphics program and made any size, without effecting the quality of it. I saved it as PNG because most browsers do not display SVG images properly.

This is handy for… well, lots of stuff. And while it is more geared towards things like logos, try it with a photograph, you may get some interesting results.

VectorMagic [Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]