Recently websites across the internet have been going apoplectic over this video and article on "Content-Aware Image Sizing".



Basically it's a complicated academic process that tries to automatically figure out where non-rectangular chunks of an image can be automatically identified and removed to resize the image to a target size while preserving the "important parts" of the image.

Look, this is a wonderful academic subject, but it falls firmly into the designation of things that can be done better, faster, cleaner, more reliably, and more elegantly with a much simpler process.

As fun as this is, you'll never see this technology in real use -- it's just a clever hack that's not going to yield good results on normal images in a practical way.

Trying to automate this is going to result in some very ugly images with very obvious seams and unpleasant artifacts.

Sometimes the simpler approach is the better approach.

If you want to be smart about resizing images to fit them into different dimensions, the answer is very simple:

• Create an image format that allows the author to easily and optionally indicate multiple preferred crop regions or multiple actual different images of different sizes and have a server or client display script that chooses the best crop regions to use given the available display space, with some minimal resizing to do final tweaks.

Such an approach would also let the client zoom or move around the image if they wanted.  Folks, this isn't rocket science, you're over-complicating things when a simpler approach would work better and could be implemented tomorrow.

Hi all,
I like to do as much as possible with my mouse, and would like to hear your suggestions.

I currently use:
1- StrokeIt (gestures)
2- Volumouse
3- MouseZoom extension to control fontsize in Firefox
4- Autohotkey script to copy/paste with RightButton (hold/dblclick) (I prefer this to TXmouse or Dragking)
5- LaunchonFly last free version (actually I could without by mapping a launch menu hotkey to a mouse button)

Any suggestions? thanks

I have a laptop with a widescreen that often gets used with projectors.  Some projectors don't support the widescreen, so it's necessary to change the screen resolution so the projector won't have a problem with it.  Is that software out there that can quickly save and restore these resolution settings easily, without having to go through all the display properties and stuff?  Thanks.

I had a funny idea today, and although i can't for the life of me think of a real use for this, it might be a fun project for someone looking to mess around with speech synthesis libraries.

Idea is a small program that just starts counting out loud like:
one, two, three, ..., five thousand and fifty four, ...
and so on until you stop it.

Might be interesting to put it on while you are trying to get to sleep.  I think for something like this it would be nice to use a quality voice library or maybe even custom recordings of the numbers (such a limited vocabulary so it should be possible).

Nice piece by member (and friend) alex3f, talking about group dynamics in decision making.  Alex has done a lot of work in this field and it's always interesting to hear his take on some of these studies..

Collective problem solving involves iterated innovation and selection of solutions. In his experiment, Matt decoupled the two by ensuring that the right solution was injected into the pool of solutions that group considered and yet he repeatedly observed that the group rejected the right solution. Apparently, the group evaluation of ideas was seriously biased towards accepting the inferior ideas of the senior members at the expense of other ideas, i.e. the senior status of the idea source overweighted the intrinsic merits of the idea. This is an example of subjective selectionist bias. Another common type of bias is temporal bias. For example, solutions proposed earlier can be preferred to solutions proposed later (or the other way around).

We can see these sources of bias working in many “collective intelligence” web 2.0 platforms, where people are supposed to select the fittest among several versions of the content based on the merit of the content. However, in reality, the selection is heavily biased by other factors that has little to do with the quality of the content.

http://3form.org/blog/?p=37

I don't know about some of these things but I used to make my own beer quite regularly.. great stuff.  Only the cat used to love to steal the fermentation lock thing that bubbles on top of the fermenting beer quite a lot.  And one of the items here is making your soap, which reminds me of michelle's favorite laugh line, which is when i tell here how i bought one of those science kits to "make soap your own soap" and realized half way in that the ingredients were basically already soap.. i.e. i was making soap out of soap..

Convenience is certainly…well…convenient. Take a trip to just about any type of store and notice how everything is packaged and prepared. It seems the more we advance, the more stuff is done for us. I don’t mind letting someone else do all the work for me, the problem is of course, that convenience is expensive and we’re getting really lazy. I started thinking about all the things we can make ourselves if we put forth a little effort and found lots of cool instructions online.

http://www.simplythr...u-can-make-yourself/