Liquid Rescaling – Very Cool.

Saw this excellent and interesting demo of something dubbed ‘Liquid Rescaling’. In essence it allows you to stretch or compress an image but keeps some semblance of proportion for the objects within the image. It’s hard to describe but imagine you had a 4×6 image, but there was an ugly garbage can on the right hand side. With this tool, you could crop off the right 2 inches (leaving you with a 4×4 image) but then stretch it back to 4×6 *without* fattening up the people in the picture.

It uses algorithms to detect areas in the photo where it can stretch while minimizing distortion. It’s really quite neat. Even neater is the fact that there is a plugin for the GIMP which uses the tool. If you watch the demo you will be amazed at what you can achieve.

I also believe that there is no equivalent tool in the beloved Photoshop that does this. 😉

Blogged with Flock

Young Engineers

This was very very cool and not what I expected….

Nice Idea – For more funny movies, click here

Blogged with Flock

A very cool low-tech site – and it’s Post 500!!

Bill Westerman’s utilware site is cool. There is no RSS feed. The layout is simple, clean and interesting. The site is different than a lot of others because while it’s modern and unique, he hasn’t used any flash (I think). It’s navigation is kind of book-like in that you can flip through page by page if you like, or refer to his table of contents – and it’s in a horizontal layout. There is nothing ‘below the fold’, since there is no ‘fold’.

He’s got some interesting writing there on a variety of tech-bent topics. He’s developed a GSD (Getting Shit Done) methodology which is ‘brutally simple’ and ‘doesn’t require a lot of forethought or planning’. Right up my alley. Lately he’s into pen and paper, something I can definitely relate to.

Anyway, it would be nice to have him in my RSS reader, but then again, I’d miss the wonderful-ness of his site if he had a feed. It’s definitely worth a visit.

On another, unrelated note, this is my 500th post here on Renaissance Man. I was thinking of doing up a full-on well thought out meaty post on some heady topic, and then realized this would break with tradition! 🙂 – and likely jarr my few regular readers.

In any case, if you are one of my few regular readers, a truly heartfelt thanks for your patronage and be happy in the fact that there’s simply nowhere for this blog to go but up! 🙂

Cheers.