The Blog That Goes Ping

There’s now a nice, interactive graphical interface for the “enfuse” exposure fusion tool. It’s called ImageFuser.

Exposure fusion has similar effects to creating an HDR image and tonemapping it, but it works directly from the series of normal images and creates another normal image — there’s no actual HDR image created at any point. Also the final image is created entirely using pixels from the original image series, so the effect is naturalistic — none of the surreal colors or funky halos that you get in some of the more exotic HDR jobs.

It’s got a built-in automagical image alignment tool too, so if your shots are slightly off it can shuffle them together for you.

I grabbed a stack of nine images I’d taken of the Indiana Repertory Theater in Indianapolis back in August… I used three of them, I think, 3 stops apart, to create this beastie via exposure fusion. I’d done an HDR of it before, and that was pretty sweet, but this is much more naturalistic looking.

While I’m at it, here’s a more recent, winter scene, of a snowy parking lot. This was 7 shots, 2 stops apart.

(apparently I happened to catch the Death Star in this shot, accidentally)

Anyway, ImageFuser kicks butt. The only thing I’d add to it would be a means of aligning the images by hand, for those occasions where the automatic alignment fails to do its thing right.

I didn’t know about this till yesterday, when I was browsing around the firefox add-ons…  Apparently the Flash player stores things called Locally Shared Objects on your computer, and they can be used for cookie-like purposes — persistent state, and of course identification and tracking.

So if you think you keep your cookies clean but you use Flash, you’re wrong.

I installed the BetterPrivacy extension, and was amazed at the number of LSO’s sitting on my computer, in the flash preferences folder.  Blew ‘em away.

What will those crazy corporations think of next?

It’s a story as old as time.  Somebody ignorantly bashes Linux on the basis of ridiculous misconceptions, then the Linux dude responds, and he’s such a complete dick you find yourself wanting to go buy a dozen copies of Microsoft Office just to spite him.

UPDATE: Shocked at the reaction the rant on his (formerly) obscure blog has generated, and having learned a lot actually talking to the teacher in question, the dude issues a sincere and thorough apology and a retraction of all the more clueless things he said.  Kudos to him!  Good man.

Release notes here.  Raisins is way cooler and more powerful than the last stable release.  The OS X version is based on Cocoa libraries, not Carbon, which gives it much stability and much less buggy weirdness.

Via MetaFilter, Webmonkey shows you that certain Youtube videos are available at not just high resolution but INSANE resolution (1280×720).  Sweet gravy.

I haven’t actually found any yet, besides the example they gave, the where the hell is matt video.  But that one is pretty sweet in 1280×720!