HDR of a tree

Here's an HDR I took the other day:

This was made in Qtpfsgui.

Qtpfsgui

Qtpfsgui looks like a bunch of random letters, but it's actually the name of a free HDR creation program. I just found out about it today as I was reading the latest popular science magazine. Here's a sample of what can be made with it. For more HDRs made with Qtpfsgui, you can go over to the flickr group.

2 billion photos

Congrats to flickr on their 2,000,000,000th photo!

DHTML image page

After my last post I made a DHTML page that switches between the two images (from the last post) depending on where the mouse is. It works by putting the two images on top of each other, and switching the order.

Picture of pencils

This is an image I took the other day of some color pencils I had lying around.
I started with the picture on the left (see below), and edited it to what you see above. How I made the change is as follows:
I duplicated the image layer, and set layer mode to value (that way the color stays the same, just the luminosity is affected). Then I increased the contrast of the new layer with the levels tool, and merged the layer down. Then I lowered the saturation, and duplicated the layer (I now have two layers). On the new layer, I did a 5PX gaussian blur, set the layer mode to overlay, set the opacity to 20%, and did a merge down. Finnaly that I applied an unsharpen mask with a radius of 5PX.
(If you click on the image you can more clearly see the difference between the two)

What is this?

I took this picture the other day. Try to guess what this is:


Give up? Select --> A compact florecent blub <-- this text

Must watch video: Internet people

Sorry, but this video was just too good to pass up posting. The sad thing it, I've seen most of the videos it makes reference to.

Internet People - Watch more free videos

Interesting Links Roundup 1

This is the first installment of Interesting Links Roundup.
To start off, we have Hiding an Airplane Factory.
An amazing feet of ingenuity, hiding such a massive building.

Then we have Images of extreme Rich/Poor lines.
Incredible contrast between the buildings on one side of a city and the other.

From OhGizmo! comes a silly picture of an ESC key, escaping.
I didn't say it was useful...

I found a story on digg about a CPU a professor created that's 100 times faster than the current best. It's actually 64 processors on one chip.

And finally, from OhGizmo again, there's a story about super image resizing. Trust me, it only sounds boring. It's hard to explain what it does and why it is special here, but the video there will make it all clear to you.

And that's it folks! Tune in next time.

Why not to start a startup

After my last post, it would be good to mention an article I came across while going through my del.icio.us bookmarks. It's called Why not to start a startup, and it talks about the reasons people have for not trying to start their own business. Apparently the writer is affiliated with a program that helps create startups by means of grants.

Making money from blogs

If you have spent any significant time on the web, then you know that many people make money from blogs. One of those people's blog is about making money from blogs. He makes money off of a blog that tells people how to make money... I wish I could think of something clever to say about that.
Anyway, his blog is called Problogger. It's the old faithful of blogs about making money from blogs, and one of my favorites.