Beans Beans, Some Like Them Photosynth'd

So it's not exactly a bowl of chili, but per popular demand* here's my very own personal photosynth!

Notes (not all about Photosynth):

• Okay so it wasn't even a request, but one of MadCookie's comments that made me think of doing this
• It's a Microsoft Live tool so you don't need to remember another password (unless, of course, you don't have a Microsoft Passport or hotmail account yet)
• Take more pictures than you think are necessary--I felt I took more than the 19 pictures in the photosynth.
• Embedding the photosynth on the blog seemed to slow down the page load
  Firebug confirmed it added about a second. But considering the whole page took 8 seconds to load, I have other issues to consider.
• I'm not sure if Photosynthing a particular brand of canned food would be a copyright or a Photosynth EULA violation. I'm not suggesting I make that particular brand of beans, nor am I trying to sell it!
• Once I decided to make this, it took 2 minutes to take the pictures (really, I checked the timestamps), and took just a few minutes more to install Photosynth. The processing took the longest, but I just walked away and did other stuff while I waited.

Ascent Stage: How to create a LEGO mosaic

Ascent Stage: How to create a LEGO mosaic

After I got done with my hammer icon, I wanted to create something for the ARCH baby blog (Christy and my initials can be arranged as ARCH and CHAR-we're "CHAR" only if we're in an evil mood, muahaha).

After drawing with Paint Shop for a little, I thought "hey, this'd be cool in Legos!"

So I started up the Lego Creator and made a few designs. Starting with a simple "ARCH" and ending up with a more arch-like design.

The legos reminded me of bitmaps, of course, so out of curiosity I googled "lego dithering." I wanted to at least consider, if not really create, how detailed a lego logo (hehe) I could make.

The search pulled up this lego mosaic blog entry. Great stuff (was that first comment ["dude, you're killing me"] an inside joke, a compliment, or one-upsmanship, I can't tell)! I searched for dithering instead of anti-aliasing because the basic lego colors aren't close enough in color tones to pull it off.

I tested it on our dog Mocha and tried a few options. I guess I'll need to get the starting plate and the legos!


Which version do you like?

Source image was this one:

Some notes about creating the bitmaps...

• The extreme close-up and crop increases the resolution for Mocha's face. Otherwise, if I did more of the picture, less detail would be seen for his features


• I had to modify the instructions (much thanks to blog Ascent State's author John Tolva for the inspiration) to Paint Shop Pro.


• Mainly Effects > Distortion Effects > Pixelate instead of Mosaic, setting block width and height ("cell size") to 10


• I wasn't sure how to make a custom pallete, so I just decreased the color depth to 6 colors and then changed it to gray scale.


• View > Grid shows the grid in Paintshop


• 
  You can get help counting the colors by using view > palletes > histogram to see the colors. Normally the historgram would be used to tell if your picture's distribution of colors or contrast was correct at a glance. In this case, we can actually count how many lego pieces we need!

Want it done professionally? Check out Brick Workz.

How to add a personalized favicon (favorite icon) to your Blogger blog

How to add a personalized favicon (favorite icon) to your Blogger blog

I'm looking to create a nice little createandbreak icon for this blog. Maybe a little hammer icon or a screw driver perhaps. I'll start with just a hammer. I tried a screw-driver crossing a hammer, but that looked too much like an icon for "tools and options." That and it's hard to manually do the anti-aliasing by hand (okay not too hard, just time-consuming).

I made the following with paint shop pro (version 8.10, mind you) just drawing around in the bitmap of a 16x16 256 colored image. I did use one of their preset gradients, but besides that, it's all me!

Not super cool just yet, but I'll keep at it. At least it's my very own icon. (You can even tell by searching for "hammer icon" and seeing the definitely more professional icons out there)

Here it is in-action in Firefox (2):


Not showing up in IE7 yet-possibly because it's the wrong format (gif instead of .ico). I set it as a favorite, but maybe it takes something else to make it work.

The fun things about bitmaps is the illusion anti-aliasing does.

Maybe I can pick better color-choices, but look at how "crude" the actual pixels look zoomed in.



I picked up this drawing "skill" back when I tried to make bitmaps of the USS Enterprise using just MS Paint. I found that filling in the corners with differing shades of grays and colors made that blending effect. So instead of jagged lines, we get nice anti-aliased diagonals and curves. Basically brightered colors seem to be bigger while darker colors seemed to make things shrink.

It kind of blew me away the first time I saw a program do such lines in real-time. If it wasn't for old school MS Paint and other basic draw programs, we'd take it for granted that angled lines just look "normal."

Photosynth

Photosynth

They got an upgrade -- you can upload your own photosynths now!

Update: Made a can of beans photosynth!