Wait... what's ffya?

Been meaning to start up something like this for a while. A place for my insane ramblings that no one wants to read or hear about.

Used to keep the crap confined to a private forum, but they got tired of the bullshit I think. Me always asking for advice then conveniently neglecting to follow through on it, bringing myself further down the road to despair. Not that you'll be seeing any of that here. I can expose my vulnerability and emotional troubles in a private forum, but no way in fuck would I broadcast it so indiscriminately.

So this seems like a better way of pulling it off perhaps. I think I'll start this off with a rehash from the last thing I posted on the private forum. An overzealous tirade about a little something I recently discovered called Seam Carving. Because I'm lazy as fuck, I will just be copy pasting. Hopefully Chardish won't ban me for leaking ffya material:

It was Lifehacker.com this time. Something called SEAMonster. If you've heard of it, yes, I know, it's old. I don't care. This thing amazed the hell out of me just now and I feel I have to make sure others are aware of it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archi...mentation.aspx

Basically, it's awesome and allows for free resizing of an image without destroying the quality of the "important" information in the picture. Something called "seam carving". Here's a video about it: http://www.seamcarving.com/

With the software, it can automatically detect what is "important" based on the contrast difference between adjacent pixels or you can select specifically what is important or unimportant.

The examples they showed involved reframing wide pictures into more square-like sizes, reframing skinny images into wide ones, and hey, removing individual persons automatically and seemingly seamlessly. This is freaking amazing all-around. While watching that video, my mouth was serious agape the entire time. It seemed to have a hard time identifying information to maintain the correct appearance of people (especially their face), but if you tell it what parts are important, it maintains them well.

Apparently the recent build of Photoshop has this thing built right in (although they call it "Content Aware Scaling"). Now, lately I've not been one for interweb piracy, so I don't think I could do that, but I also don't much feel like dropping hundreds of dollars on that piece of junk software either. Ah well. I suppose I'll just wait for the open source community to put something similar together.