Recent Posts

151

Living Room / Re: Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it

« Last post by Mark0 on June 08, 2012, 11:12 AM »

I have a friend who had a bad HDD crash a couple of years back and handed it to some professional data recovery guys. He swears that the amount of data recovered was much more than the actual capacity of the hard disk.

-nosh (January 18, 2009, 11:59 PM)

I think there may be various possibiles reasons. For example, when recovering JPEG photo/images, it's possible to get larger files than the originals, or even more files than before, because overlapping sections of differents images can endup joined, depending on how they are layout on the disk, what strategy is used to detect starting and end positions, etc.
Probably the same can happens with many other file formats too.

But it's only a guess, of course.

152

General Software Discussion / Re: FORTRAN - All your problems will be solved.

« Last post by Mark0 on May 19, 2012, 06:47 PM »

I seem to recall one of the recent world championships in mental arithmetic was won by a ten year old Indian girl who, while doing some extraordinarily complex calculations in her head was simultaneously wiggling her fingers in front of her. When asked, she said that she was using an imaginary abacus to keep track of her calculations.

-oblivion (May 17, 2012, 06:04 AM)

Probably not this, but something like this:
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=LXynrhW7tKo

153

General Software Discussion / Re: BubbleRand v1.03

« Last post by Mark0 on May 16, 2012, 10:09 AM »

Released a minor update:

BubbleRand v1.03 - 16/05/12:
- Speed up the bubbling process.
- Better red/blue threshold evaluation normalizing mask.
+ Added the option to use bigger bubbles.

154

General Software Discussion / Re: BubbleRand v1.00

« Last post by Mark0 on May 12, 2012, 07:46 AM »

porn where there *is* none before. interesting possibilities.

-Gwen7 (May 12, 2012, 07:34 AM)

BWHAHAHA! 

It may come handy whenever mixing different photos, and not spending a lot of time doing a proper photo retouching job.
For example, here's a Prius + a truck:



 

The mask was just a straight red line along the mid of the image. 5 seconds job.
It's great to change a face on a photo; just a quick cut & paste, dash of red along the borders, done.

btw: your significant other? ;-)

Just a dear friend! 

155

General Software Discussion / BubbleRand v1.03

« Last post by Mark0 on May 12, 2012, 05:54 AM »

BubbleRand

This is just something that started out of playing a bit with the Python Image Library.
Nothing especially original: photo bubbling is around by about 2 years, and probably that too wasn't a new thing.

Anyway, the idea is to start from a photo and a mask, created with the preferred bitmap editor (only red & blue pixels are significant):



and auto generating something like this:



Since the generation of the bubbles is automatic, a number of frames can be created, and then an animated GIF can be assembled with a number of tools:

156

Living Room / Re: Favorite Websites...What are yours?

« Last post by Mark0 on May 10, 2012, 08:38 PM »

For tech/geek news:
reddit for the actual news
Slashdot for the comments

157

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by Mark0 on May 08, 2012, 05:58 AM »

Just started "iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It".

158

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by Mark0 on May 06, 2012, 04:00 PM »

BWHAHAHAHA! 

159

General Software Discussion / Re: free antivirus

« Last post by Mark0 on April 29, 2012, 05:32 PM »

True of course. But Chrome usually need you to explicitly confirm a download if it involve an EXE. Then there's the UAC. And so on.
And then again, one can also click on the wrong gadget when an AV turn up a window screaming about a possible virus ad asking what to do.

What can I say? I take my chances. Works for me. YMMV.
Not that I recommend it...

160

General Software Discussion / Re: free antivirus

« Last post by Mark0 on April 29, 2012, 05:16 PM »

I think if a PC (or a small network) is a one man operation, one could be reasonably confident.
If there's more than 1 person with access: hardly.

161

General Software Discussion / Re: free antivirus

« Last post by Mark0 on April 28, 2012, 05:27 PM »

Still no resident AV here. When I download something, I scan it with ClamAV or just use the VirusTotal Uploader (usually someone other have already checked it, so the results are instantaneous). If I am very suspicious of some executable, first I run it under Sandboxie and try to figure out if it's doing something fishy.
So far so good.

162

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: SNS-HDR - Mini-Review

« Last post by Mark0 on April 28, 2012, 04:45 PM »

Can you regulate how much HDR? - I'm not sure how to phrase it, I've never done anything with HDR -
I mean can you regulate how much detail is drawn out of the shadows and how much is added to the highlights? I always liked the idea of extemely subtle HDR: where you get more shadow detail & more colour in the highlight areas - but where people dont actually see that it's HDR...

-tomos (April 28, 2012, 03:41 PM)

Yes, you have control over that. In the Home & Pro versions, you have a lot of settings to play with. In the Lite edition, you can only choose from a serie of preset, like natural, interior, dramatic, etc. For the kind of subtle HDR you are referring to, I think natural is usually the way to go.

I presume the photos dont have to be taken with a tripod

Indeed. It autodetect and correct some movements between the shots, and changes in the scenes, like people or objects moving a bit. From my experience, it does a very good job at it.

Here's a sample of the results. These are the 3 shots, with -1/+1 EV braketing:



Here's the results with the "Natural" preset:



And "Dramatic":

163

Mini-Reviews by Members / SNS-HDR - Mini-Review

« Last post by Mark0 on April 27, 2012, 08:17 PM »

Basic Info

App Name	SNS-HDR
App URL	http://www.sns-hdr.com/
App Version Reviewed	4.1.19 Lite
Test System Specs	Window 7
Supported OSes	Windows >= XP + Net Framework >= 3.0
Upgrade Policy	Freeware
Trial Version Available?	Aside from the Freeware Lite version, there are trials for the Home & Pro
Pricing Scheme	Lite: Freeware - Home: 30 Euro - Pro: 85 Euro
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	none

Anyone that like to play with HDR imaging, or photo retouching in general, should give a look at this program by Sebastian Nibisz. The website is in Polish, but Google Translate does a good enough job to help understand, and the download or changelog (it's update quite often) are just a click away.



The main point is: it just works (I have heard that somewhere...), and works very well.
It basically just need to know the images to operate with, and it start crunching pixels. Being command line driven, it's possible to just drag some photos over a link to it, or use it for batch operation, call it from scripts or other applications, etc.

A simple GUI is also available, just to ease the process of launching it.



The other versions have instead a complete GUI, witch let tweaks a lot of settings like the others HDR tools around usually do. But I do like the simplicity of the Lite version.

The just run it approach is almost refreshing, compared with some other programs that often need a lot of works and tweaks to come up with a good result. The simple presets of the Lite version are very effective, and do works very well in most cases.

The hi lights of SNS-HDR are probably the accuracy of the automatic alignment & deghosting of the photos to be combined, and the quality of the natural images that it can produce (versus the over-the-top ones that often are associated with HDR).
It's also possible to get surprising good results even starting with one single exposure!

The only real annoyance I found is the speed, or lack of it. But it's not really that bad: probably is more that I had been used to the amazing speed of another similar program, Oloneo HDRengine.

In conclusion: great image quality. Super easy to use. Free.

164

General Software Discussion / Re: Fuzzy Hashing with ssdeep

« Last post by Mark0 on April 27, 2012, 02:24 PM »

A paper on the topic by the tool's author:

Identifying Almost Identical Files Using Context Triggered Piecewise Hashing (Jesse Kornblum, 2006)

165

Living Room / Re: Comparison of eReader devices

« Last post by Mark0 on April 27, 2012, 01:50 PM »

I have a 3 years old Cybook Gen 3 and love reading on it from the first day I got it. For the typical sequential reading of a novel, IMHO an ebook reader is far, far better than a paper one.

One thing I don't understand much is the appeal of the "touch" on this kind of devices (apart for dealing with manuals / references, that indeed also need a larger & faster screen): I know I definitely don't want to put my fingers on the same surface I have to read from.

166

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by Mark0 on April 27, 2012, 01:39 PM »

Hi mouser!! Thanks! Nice to be back. I definitely have to be here around more! 

Indeed it's an HDR photo. And that remind me of another software I have to post about!

167

General Software Discussion / Fuzzy Hashing with ssdeep

« Last post by Mark0 on April 27, 2012, 01:18 PM »

Hi!
Long time no post!

So, here an humble try at contributing something interesting.
I discovered ssdeep just some days ago, and already found it very useful in a couple of different situations.

Quoting from the site intro:

ssdeep is a program for computing context triggered piecewise hashes (CTPH). Also called fuzzy hashes, CTPH can match inputs that have homologies. Such inputs have sequences of identical bytes in the same order, although bytes in between these sequences may be different in both content and length.

So, point it a directory with a lot of files in, of any kind, and it can produce a list of related files: various versions of the same executable, all the documents of certain kind, and so on.
It also include a library with a few exported functions to easily take advantage of its features from other applications.

168

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by Mark0 on April 27, 2012, 12:42 PM »

Couple of days ago:


Backyard with an interesting sky by MarcoPon, on Flickr

169

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on July 01, 2011, 07:16 PM »

Facebook was always about over-exposing and basically shouting & showing in public.

-Mark0 (July 01, 2011, 04:29 PM)

But I think that's painting with an overly broad brush. I've seen a lot of good things accomplished through savvy use of Facebook.

-40hz (July 01, 2011, 06:58 PM)

You're right. I probably could have choosen better words!
In fact I wasn't meaning that in a bad way, but just pointing out that most of the time when you use FB you post a text or a pic to all; and that was by design (the whole wall concept), because FB was meant to be a tool for finding people, and in general targeted to large groups.

170

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on July 01, 2011, 04:29 PM »

Uhm... I mean: Facebook was always about over-exposing and basically shouting & showing in public. Pretty logic, considering the initial target. And it worked well for them.

G+ is more focused, seems more like group conversations / collaborations / friendly talk-abouts. And that was Wave's target, or at least part of it.
I think the similarities with FB are more skin deep than substantial: while they appears similar (mostly in the UI), I'm already finding that I'm using them in very different ways.

171

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on July 01, 2011, 02:54 PM »

I think that Google+ is definitely not "the Google's Facebook". It seems more an evolution of Wave, to me.
And that's probably a very nice thing!

172

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on June 30, 2011, 05:59 PM »

I could try to invite someone too now. Send a PM with the mail address.

173

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on June 30, 2011, 03:12 PM »

Google+ › Help articles › Invite people to join Google+

Google+ is in limited Field Trial. During this time, when you share something with people who aren't yet able to use Google+, they'll receive it via email but won't be able to comment or engage with the content like other Google+ users. They'll be able to join Google+ as we let more users in over time.

174

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on June 30, 2011, 01:30 PM »

Thx!

Maybe it's really just a delay, like they say on the website.

175

General Software Discussion / Re: Google+

« Last post by Mark0 on June 29, 2011, 08:55 AM »

And this is a difference between Google and others:

ExtremeTech - Google Takeout lets you easily export your data from Circles

If you haven’t heard of them before, the DLF is a group and a website that helps you extract your data from Google’s web services into open, easily-transferable file formats. You can then take your email or docs or RSS feeds and import them into an installed program, or Microsoft or Yahoo’s equivalent web service. Curiously enough, though, the DLF is an engineering team at Google. The idea isn’t that they want you to transfer your data away from Google — they just think it’s important that you can. It’s basically Google’s way of showing that the data it holds in its massive database is yours, and you’re free to do what you like with it; it’s the embodiment of Google’s corporate Don’t Be Evil motto, in other words.