The new feature called “content-aware image resizing” in Photoshop is amazing. There is a promotional video up on the Adobe site that’s really fun to watch. For example, they make a Volkswagen bus more “economical” (mind you, while keeping the wheels round):
The technology behind it is based on research from an Isreali research group. That group put a video up on youtube in 2007 already:
It’s a little more technical, but no less impressive, so all of you geeks who wonder how it actually works should watch this as well.
I can tell you one thing: I want this in Firefox’s page resizing code. Sadly, I assume it is strictly patented and Adobe will probably have made sure to have some sort of exclusive deal on it.
An unfortunate typo in a configuration file left this blog completely without images for a little while. Apologies to the readers who may have been confused by that.
Now, fredericiana is back in all it’s glory
On a side note, I am actually glad how nice my blog still looks with images “disabled”. Still, I am glad everything is back to normal now.
As only the most attentive readers may have noticed by now, I redesigned my blog. It’s been a while since I have done that, and the former layout started to bore me a little.
So I went ahead, got myself a template from freecsstemplates and tweaked away. It wasn’t a Wordpress template, so there was quite a lot of work to do, but I am quite pleased with the outcome.
Gone: The old design.
There are a few advantages of the old vs. the new layout. First, more room for more awesomeness: The articles used to be only 500 pixels wide (and that was already stretched from how the old layout came out of the box). This one has 575 pixels, plenty of space even for bigger pictures.
“New car” scent not included.
Second, due to the famfamfam icons I built in it should all look a little neater and be hopefully quite intuitive. Just for fun, I also added “magazine-style” quotes, just like the one you see on the right.
At last, my comments now differ visually from everybody else’s:
I hope you like it. Oh, and if you find anything out of the ordinary, let me know!
Google’s Picasa Web Album supports downloading an entire album, however, it requires the Picasa software to do so. Bummer if you are on a Mac, or don’t want to (or can’t) install Picasa on your computer.
Sadly, the Greasemonkey script in question stopped working after a recent code change on the picasa website. I was able to easily fix it, but due to the lack of an open license, I am unable to share the script with you
However, I found an alternative solution: The album’s RSS feed! Along with the aforementioned DownThemAll extension, you can easily download a complete album off Picasa Web. Here is how:
Go to the desired Album, and click the “RSS” link on the right hand side:
Firefox will show you the RSS feed in a more or less appealing way. Note that each of the pictures shown has an “attached” JPEG file underneath:
The only thing we need to do is download all of these with DownThemAll. For that, right-click, and choose “DownThemAll”. In the “links” tab, it’ll automatically grab all pictures for you:
