I’ve just discovered a true adblock plugin for Google’s Chrome web browser. What these guys have done, is taken the Chrome sourcecode (aka Chromium), stripped out Google’s tracking features, and added in a clone of AdBlock Plus. There’s no fancy UI for it yet, but it supports real regex ad-blocking, unlike those other hacks that either require you setting your hosts file with a million lines, or some annoying proxy you have to configure, or a silly bookmark you have to click on every page.

Check it out here: SRWare’s Iron. As mentioned in the news, make sure to download adblock.ini and place it into the program directory after downloading.

Enjoy the power of Chrome, with the convenience of adblock!

I’ve been playing around with making HDR photos from only hand-held shots. Mainly because I’m too lazy to always go and get my tripod, set it up, attach the camera, etc etc. It’s a lot easier to just stand there & take a few shots at different exposures while holding the camera as steady as possible.

In the past, all the HDR processing tools required that your images were taken on a tripod and perfectly aligned, or if they weren’t aligned, it could do some simple corrections, but anything too complex would mess it up.

I’ve tried several applications, including Photomatix Pro, PTGui Pro, and Autopano Pro. I know what you’re thinking, two of those three applications are mainly for automatically stitching panoramas…but it turns out automatically aligning images for panoramas is also very useful for creating HDR images.

My very quick comparison of these HDR / panoramic image apps: Photomatix Pro appears to give the most control over the HDR generation process, and with tweaking, gives the nicest output…HOWEVER it’s not very good at handling images which are not perfectly aligned. Autopano Pro is the best at correctly aligning the images, and for creating panoramas in general, but it sucks at HDR tone mapping, having two sliders with obscure labels, that don’t really make it look very nice.
Finally, there’s PTGui Pro — it’s not the best at aligning, and it’s not the best at the HDR generation, but it’s pretty good at both, so in most cases it gives the best overall results.

Below, you can see an example of a shot I took, that would be impossible without some sort of HDR effect:
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To get a little more experience with ActionScript 3, I wrote up a very simple class which will take a rule number, and then generate a cellular automata based on that.

The movie below requires Flash 9 or above to be installed. Some rules to try out: 90, 30, 73, 110, 150. Valid numbers are 0-255, but not all produce interesting results.

Direct link to flash movie (got some people complaining the SWFObject script doesn't work under Vista)

See Wikipedia for more info, and Wolfram.com has a list of all 256 possible results
Here's the code:
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ole has taken my KVM port to Nintendo DS and added some updates. I haven't played with it much, but he lists the changes as follows.

R3: New features added by Ole:

• fixed the CLDC implementation (timer, memory size, system properties)
• added support for reading of the PNG images (code taken from the PhoneMe project)
• implemented native functions for rendering the basic graphics primitives on the screen
  (lines, rectangles, triangles, images)
• added support for accepting the JAD files in the application browser
• added the core part of the Pstros MIDP library
• added VideoTest example to show how to draw on the screen
• added '_rebuild.bat' to show how to build and preverify the class files.
  Note WTK installation is required.

This is quite interesting if it is able to run some MIDP-compliant games, but we'll need to do some testing to see how the speed compares to your average mobile phone.

UPDATE: He's made a few more updates since I originally made this post. Be sure to check out ole's site for the latest info and download links.

Just a tiny update to my homebrew mandelbrot browser for Nintendo DS. This version merely adds DLDI-support, meaning you should be able to save screenshots as .PNG from pretty much any flashcart. Check the previous post for screenshots, more info, etc. To the right is an actual image saved from the program.

Download r06 .nds