Portent

Something a little different. You are shown image after image and have to rate them for life likeness, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is most like a face like and 0 isn’t anything like a face.

I suspect this is some variation of a genetic algorithm. This is a way of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t lend itself to normal computation by using a process akin to genetic selection. Interesting.

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This is an interesting site, it’s collecting public domain symbols to create a universal pictorial language. They all have to be free, easy to understand and cross culture.

You see similar symbols at airports, ports, anywhere that the public visits. This is expanding on the set that’s currently in use. If you’re interested in symbols then symbols.com is another interesting place to visit.

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Not so long ago, several key cables were accidentally cut and India/Asia lost a lot of connectivity. This picture lets you see why. Ok, so i like this kind of stuff; infrastructure etc! Doesn’t make me a bad guy!

Click the link (or the picture above) and it will take you to the Guardians website and the full size image.

Link to picture on Guardian website

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Don’t recognise the face? That’ Bill Heine, the man who put Headington on the map with his shark through the roof.

MagMyPic is an excellently implemented generator of magazine covers. Just upload a photo, select a magazine- there’s 14 to pick from Vogue, Time, National Geographic and many more and the results are plain to see.

The man pictured is responsible for increased reporting of sharks (not the legal ones!) in the Oxford area. See the previous story!

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Imgfave is a free service (registration required) that lets you save a copy of any image you find on the web so you can get it later. Technicall it’s an image bookmarking service.

To make it easy to use they provide a bookmarklet, a small piece of JavaScript that you save on a toolbar. On a page with an image just click the bookmarklet and drag the image and it will be saved. Quite a neat idea although it possibly breaks copyright…

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On the linked page the dancer figure is rotating. If you perceive her as rotating clockwise then you are a right brain persona and anti-clockwise implies left brain person. IE a person whose actions are dominated by that particular part of the brain.

Left brain are apparently more logical, whereas right brain are more intuitive and feeling. I come out as right brain.

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I like this but that’s probably because I got 17 out of 20 correct. It’s on the BBC’s website. You are shown 20 short video clips of people smiling. All you have to do is say which is a fake and which is genuine.

Easy? Well I didn’t do too bad. It isn’t that easy to fake a genuine smile.

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If you write comments on blogs or forums, you’ll often see Avatars. Gravatar, a globally recognized avatar lets you upload or link an Avatar image that is associated to you email address.

Quoting Wikipedia again (I’m getting lazy!) “Although blog comment pages can sometimes act like Internet forums, there is no single way to provide avatar support on blogs. One solution is the “gravatar”, an avatar called from a centralized server at site.gravatar.com and linked to one’s e-mail address. Gravatars are centrally moderated, which allows them to be filtered for family friendliness.”

The image shows me uploading a (pretty rubbish!) icon- I’ll get a better one. You can se it in action on the earlier story about the Click and Point puzzle where I have added a comment. Yes Portent is now gravatar enabled.

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Sometimes you need Post-It notes. And if you want to have a little fun, you can easily create them online using this generator.

Then you could be really sad by printing it out on a colour printer, cutting it out and super-gluing it to someone’s computer! Prank #1928 from “the Boys Book of really nasty pranks”. Just imagine the look on their face when they try to remove it! Won’t you be popular!!

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I have no idea what this is about but it’s colourful if rather badly wrong!

It’s just a map of the USA, seemingly as the Japanese (well those who can’t read an Atlas or view Google Maps) perceive the USA.

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I really like this. Shove in a load of words and it will generate a word cloud- there are loads of parameters, fonts, colour schemes to try.

I used the text from all the previous stories on Portent though you need no more than 150. You can then decide whether to have them horizontal, vertical or a bit of both as well as other parameters and create a picture which you own. Excellent stuff.

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Ever see a font you liked but had no clue as to what it was? What The Font is a free Font Matcher. Save a screen dump of the font (the bigger- the better) and upload it, or pass them a link. The words ‘A test’ are in Frutiger 65 and I uploaded this image to them. It correctly identified every letter and had five guesses, of which the first three were all Frutiger 65. Clever Stuff!

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This site combines two concepts. The first is helping to correct poorly scanned in books. Machines can’t always correctly scan and convert to text images of text. Humans are much better at it. And identifying humans to stop scripts being used say to create free email accounts is often done by using a captcha. You are shown an image and asked to type in the text or numbers. Captcha is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart .

This site serves captcha images to websites and email anti-spam using text images from badly scanned books. The correct results are then used to update the scanned book image. Quite clever though I do wonder how they know an answer is correct without doing the donkey work in the first place!

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It’s a bit gimmicky! Thanks to an add-in in WordPress, all the images show the bottom bit inverted as in a reflection in water.

I’ve seen of these before but this one looks good and is pretty well featured. It doesn’t do text but I imagine that that will come along some time. It handles multiple Windows and lets you do custom brushes which is pretty good.

My all-time favourite image editor (from over 15 years ago) was dPaint and anything that could replicate that would be excellent- I’d say this is 70-80% there. These days the comparison is more likely to be against fireworks or Photoshop but that is an unrealistic and unfair comparison. Both are way more complicated and this isn’t aiming to be either of them.

Thats a screen dump of a browser looking at Portent that i messed up. Pixlr is a very nice bit of Flash programming.
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