got no replies on this the first time I posted it.. maybe it was missed,
maybe no one gave a damn:
"Seam Carving" for content-aware image resizing

(Wednesday, 22 August 2007  06:10 GMT)
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0708/07082201seamcarvingimageresizing.asp

and a demo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns

or

<http://www.news.com/Photos+Camera+makers+bring+niches+into+focus/2300-1041
_3-6208134.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703>

some new, some old.. some simple adaptations but maybe more of interest,
some *ideas* for people

k

new display tech

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19337/?a=f

"Photonic crystals are being used by a Toronto startup to create commercial
devices that offer better color and resolution than other flexible
displays.
Scientists in Canada have used photonic crystals to create a novel type of
flexible electronic-paper display. Unlike other such devices, the
photonic-crystal display is the first with pixels that can be individually
tuned to any color.

"You get much brighter and more-intense colors," says André Arsenault, a
chemist at the University of Toronto and cofounder of Opalux, a
Toronto-based company commercializing the photonic-crystal technology,
called P-Ink.

With P-Ink, it's a different story. "We can get 100 percent of the area to
be red," Arsenault says. This is because each pixel can be tuned to create
any color in the visible spectrum. "That's a three-times increase in the
brightness of colors," he says. "It makes a huge difference."

"It's a spectacular innovation," says Edzer Huitema, chief technology
officer of the Dutch firm Polymer Vision, based in Eindhoven. Even
traditional screens, such as cathode-ray tubes, LCDs, and plasma displays,
use three or even four differently colored pixels to generate color. "It's
a major limitation for all color-display technologies," Huitema says. When
the color of each pixel is controlled, not only does the color quality
increase, but the resolution should also improve by a factor of three.

Arsenault predicts that Opalux will have the first products on the market
within two years, probably in the form of advertising displays. But, he
says, it will be a long while before P-Ink will be in a position to
completely replace traditional displays. "The caveat is that we are not at
video speeds," Arsenault says.

this one looks like a keeper! :)

Even if they don't achieve high refresh rates, colour display that can be
manufactured to huge sizes, use little power (and at times NONE) and can
reproduce colours like this - the benefits to photographers editing images
would be awesome!

Maybe not at the editing stage, I'd hate to have to wait a second to see
where my dragged mouse would appear, but on a second 'preview' monitor it
would be great.

bluetooth wireless camera synching:
http://news.com.com/2300-1039_3-6196585-1.html?tag=ne.gall.pg

well those are my contributions for today..

k

well my posts of the past re freeware go unnoticed most of the time,

pointers to things like the 95,000 fps digicam ignored..

tech articles about cd/dvd media scoffed

well lets give it a go then.

caching is bad

I was looking at hard drive space and my file allocation table today and
thought since we're all using computers, and computers are a part of
digital imageing, and digital imaging is a part of photography then this
may be relevant (and possibly useful info ;).

I have a Windows 98 box for *most* of my main computing and from time to
time I run a little low on space before I copy the bigger files off to
another drive, but I decided to see how much free space I could gain if I
cleared off the *little* files.

why 98?  coz I know it.  Still learning win2k, learned pre 80 on punchcards,
learned basic, learned and programmed in unix on the plato network in 82,
abandoned PC's for a bit, came back to win 3.11 and do, learned 95, 95b, 98
and SE and really, I've had enough and am happy to stick to 98se and 2k..
but on with the story

What got me going on this was an awareness that FAT32, the particular file
allocation table (FAT) structure win98 uses has some features which waste
space.  you see, each cluster on a hard drive formatted to fat 32 can
contain only *one* file.  A table at the beginning of a drive records where
each file is, or if a file is bigger than 32kb, which clusters the file is
spread across.

from the microsoft site:
"The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file
system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for
the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of
approximately 8 terabytes (TB). "

so what is the problem?  well a 1kb file is going to put on your hard drive
and it will occupy 32kb of space.  Not an issue if your PC never chats to
the internet, but unfortunately, the net has a habit of scattering all
manner of dribble across a computer, not all of which is cleared out even
when you ask a computer to clear it.

I thought I'd do a quick check to see how much space I was wasting and so
did a search for those horrid 1 x 1 pixel gifs we know as web bugs,
starting the search for *.gif 'at most' 1kb in size

I found 2261 of them.  that's 72 mb of hard drive real estate being hogged
by a mere 2Mb of data!  70 mb wasted!

I continued my search and found 168 jpegs under 1kb and 2625 text files
(search *.txt) under 1mb

then I did a search in temporary internet folder in windows AFTER clearing
it using the tool provided and the search maxed out at 10,000, most of them
Ca(xxxxxx) files which contained little or nothing at all so I searched for
them (search Ca*) and came up with 10,000 (the quantity limit of my search)
so they got deleted and I searched again
another 10,000
..and another 10,000*
delete another 10,000
9632 remaining..
delete them

searched some more and found a whole raft of files named in brackets like
this [46] so I
searched for [*.*

3108 files (deleted)

find another 900 by searching C:

search C: *.gif under 1kb (another 275)
2010 cookies under 1kb deleted..

how much space have I freed?  well I've deleted over 61,000 files that were
a mere 61 mb of 'data' but which occupied almost 2Gb of space on my hard
drive!  And none of those files were critical in any way, shape or form..

more on FAT32 - if you have a small hard drive, your clusters will be
smaller, bigger drives = bigger clusters

Cluster size Partition Size
2 KB         < 260 MB
4 KB         260 MB - 8 GB
8 KB         8 GB - 16 GB
16 KB        16 GB - 32 GB
32 KB        32 GB<

Apples using OSX as far as I can tell use a file allocation structure
similar to FAT32 or the older windows equivalent FAT16 (with 16kb clusters)
more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_File_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

NTFS (windows 2000, XP and later) have a cluster size of 4kb, so a lot less
is wasted when there is lots of small files.

Of course the problem is not simply limited to teeny files but also files
which creep slightly over the cluster size - a 33kb file will occupy the
default 32kb cluster PLUS another cluster for the missing 1kb.  a waste..

Solution?  ZIP!~ :)

Any files not used regularly can be shackled together and compressed,
turning them into one big file and eliminating the wasted space - free
tools for this include 7zip (which has very high compression rates and can
write all manner of algorithms AND mac/unix users can use it) from
www.7zip.org

and if you find it's images you're zipping but feel that will cause
problems later when you want to view them, CDisplay
<http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay> which can view images while
they are zipped, is free!
(Loads JPEG, PNG and static GIF images which are automatically ordered and
presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time. The images may be in
a zip, rar, ace or tar archive file - no need to decompress before
reading.)

just doing a search now for files under 4kb is size

"The number of files found exceeds the maximum allowed(10,000), please
refine your search"

sigh

k