Geekblok

All these advanced image-tricks to convert or alter your Flickr-pics are awesome, but good old ASCII-art is still something not to forget about.
To make life easier in creating this kind of rather complex imagery, there is Photo2text.
Let’s take the below logo of Phetch and run it trough the web-interface. The final result can be found here. Take some distance from the screen for a slight improvement of the effect.
Pretty neat, eh?

A Firefox extension is coming, but still resides in the sandbox…

Joffie recently showed me the ESP Game (he’ll probably post about that game someday ). The ESP Game however showed me a link to Phetch.

The game is simple and addictive (yes, now I have warned you!). You describe a picture you see and the others (who you don’t know) will try to find it. The better you describe it, the faster people can find it. Then it’s the seeker’s turn and you’ll have to hunt down the image. Speed is of essence here. Highly addictive and fun!

Tagging your photos on Flickr can help you to describe the photo. By tagging them, you can search for that specific photo with ease. Smark helps you with this tagging process in quite an elegant way.

After selecting the set(s) you want to review (and tag), you see the photos individually and suggested as well as recently used tags are shown beneath the images. Simply add tags and navigate to the next image (note: you can use your cursor keys to navigate, woohoo!).

It’s working rather nice and the author of the website is open to suggestion. The changes requested by me were implemented within a day. If you have suggestions, dump them in the Flickr group

Last, but not least, “smark contains no additives or preservatives”.

You’ve probably heard about storing secret messages in JPEGs by means of steganography. But what if you have entire documents that you’d like to hide? As proof of concept, I showed this example to my coworkers.

We start out with a random JPEG, taken from my Flickr account:

Now we create a simple zip file with a text document in it:

$ zip test.zip test.txt

And we cat the two files together:

$ cat fotobok.jpg test.zip > fotobok-test.jpg

File indeed recognizes this as an image:

$ file fotobok-test.jpg
fotobok-test.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01

And you can see it here too:

The only difference now is that we can unzip the file aswell:

$ unzip fotobok-test.jpg
Archive: fotobok-test.jpg

warning [fotobok-test.jpg]: 19881 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile

(attempting to process anyway)

extracting: test.txt

Tada! Our highly secret test.txt is back!

Web2.0 is all about reflections and rounded corners, or so it seems. We’ve seen how to make reflections online before, so now it’s time to get rounded corners without Photoshop or GIMP.

The website RoundPic does this for you, and does it quite fast too! First you upload an image, or give them an URI to download and and click later, you have rounded corners. Woohoo!.

Let’s see the results. I gave them a photo of the Insomnium concert I recently attended and within a few seconds, the metal band was a little less frightening, with rounded corners.