mostly research stuff
today, let’s talk about “rasterbation“….you see, i got this digital packrat problem…i track and archive digital images and never know quite when to purge…sometimes i’ll be researching an organization or individual (for work), and i’ll discover one hell of a gem photo online - but it will be just way too tiny …do you too dream of some cheap ass way to quickly convert little pics into giant clean images? don’t wanna drop a grand on a digital mid-format type camera either just so that you can emulate chuck close without canvas or talent?
solution? rasterbate - you won’t go blind! …this is an amazing free way to take a standard image and convert it cleanly into a giant poster size image…all you need is flashplayer 7 from macromedia (free) and the adobe reader (also free)…you submit the image, get into the queue and then voila, you are sent an adobe pdf file of your huge image to print out and tile together…i was going to apply this for work, but now i’m thinking of just making a huge picture of my…hand?
still want a technical explanation? here’s some blather from the site: “When you upload the image to the server or after it has been downloaded from the web, it is converted to a preview jpeg image. The Flash application running in the browser then loads this preview image and allows you to crop and resize the image. The Flash application then sends the coordinates, desired paper size and desired size to the server….After you have set the options and the rasterbation begins, you may end up in a queue. Rasterbation uses a lot of memory, hence this conserves server resources. When your turn begins, the server examines the original image (preview image is not used here to ensure maximum quality). The image is divided into squares. Each square maps to a dot in the output. The average brightness and color values of the origin square determine the size (and color if desired) of the output dot - bright area produces a small dot. Vector representations of the dots are written into a pdf document. When the entire image is processed, your browser is sent to a different page, which will instruct it to download the pdf file.”
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
Sean
September 15th, 2004 at 5:23 pm
Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet find!