G R A F I C A O B S C U R A
O U T P O S T
This is a little outpost away from GRAFICA Obscura Why not try something random?
Travels in Digital Photography
The Ricoh RDC-2 digital camera stores pictures either in the camera or on optional memory cards. Three image qualities are available - images are compressed to 48kB, 96kB or 192kB. Audio and image sequences can also be saved.
This is one of the only digital cameras available that allows you to focus as close as 1cm. A collection of images is shown here.
A Visual Language
"I'm so happy you are pregnant!!"
Elephant's Memory is a magical project by Timothy Ingen Housz in France, to create a visual way of representing language. This would make beautiful graffiti wouldn't it? For more information on Timothy's marvelous work see his Elephant's Memory site.
An Exploration of Symmetry
How do you sum the angels around a vertex? Find out.
FIAT LUX Conference
From August 3rd through August 9th 1997 we ran an alternative conference in Los Angeles. Background on the meeting and the evolving proceedings are presented here.
A Low Bandwidth View of the Web
If you're connected to the internet on a slow line or even a fast modem, you may like to try this. QuickDoc synthesizes 1 bit deep images on the fly for arbitrary web documents. The URL of the page you want to view is passed to a .cgi program (quickdoc.cgi) that appends all the image URLs with another .cgi program (quickimg.cgi) that gets the image from the site and converts it to 1 bit deep dithered image.
A General Transclusion Facility
This note describes a CGI program that lets people easily quote parts of other HTML documents. This can be used to implement transclusion of sections of HTML from any number of different sources. This powerful technology can be both used and abused!
WYSIWYG HTML
This proposal explores the idea to adding a single tag to HTML to allow designers to position graphic elements exactly. I think it is a good alternative to the Cascading Style Sheet proposal. If you have comments on this please send them to me.
WebFonts Proposal
There are problems with the recent font proposals from Adobe/Microsoft/Netcape. "Does PDF mean 'Public Domain Fonts'" discusses the problems of font embedding from the viewpoint of an independent font foundry. As an alternative to embedding outlines, here's a WebFonts Proposal. This suggests a way of downloading bitmap typefaces into Web browsers to improve the display of documents. WebFonts can help graphic designers get type to look the way they want. Webfonts can also be used to support international typefaces. If you have time, see how animated bitmap fonts can be used to create moving typography. Try that with an outline font!
Quite simply, pixels rule!
The JAVA Stuff
I've stopped doing any JAVA development until the support for JAVA developers by SUN and Netscape improves. I've written a little rant on the subject.
There are two JAVA demos available here. The first is The Impressionist, an application for making painted representations of images.
The second application renders a 3D surface using the painters algorithm. Give these a try if you have a JAVA enabled browser like Netscape version 2.0!
The OTHER Stuff
I just finished carefully sorting through 6000 Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji characters to locate the ones that look the most like the letters A-Z. This Kanji/Roman alphabet can be seen here.
I know this is boring, but the SGI Image file format has to be documented somewhere!
An experiment with backlink browsing.
FrameFree Netscape
Here's a little page for folks that are tired of that unsightly Netscape feature called Frames. It tells how to update your Netscape browser to make it FrameFree!
paulhaeberli@yahoo.com