Cool Tool: Royal TS
· 41 days ago by Thijs Kroesbergen
Yesterday my attention was brought to this tool "Royal TS".
Because I often work on projects involving more than just a handful of servers I use remote desktop a lot.
At first, with not too many machines around, remote desktop just works great. But as the list of machines grows I just can't remember all server names, the usernames needed and what the server is used for.
This is where Royal TS kicks in! With this (small!) application you can manage your remote desktop sessions. It will keep a list of all the servers, you can add descriptions and it will remember usernames and password.
And when running multiple sessions your task bar won't get cluttered because all sessions can run within one application. (this is optional, you can still have a window for each session)
Of course Royal TS isn't the only tool out there. I've been using Terminals as well. This open-source project may have more features, but the feel just isn't right. (The menu bars and windows do wacky things every once in a while)
So, if you ever use remote desktop, try one of these tools. I'm sure you'll never use "Win+R -> mstsc" again ;)
PhotoSynth into the Matrix
· 86 days ago by Thijs Kroesbergen
I couldn't resist, I just had to make a Photosynth of the famous "Trinity Kick"
As source for the images I used a .avi file with DivX compression (that's why you see those mpeg artifacts, sorry about that). Using the .avi file instead of the DVD made the next step a lot easier: I used a nice tool named FastVideoIndexer to grab all frames of this particular scene. I used a 0.1 second interval and used frame numbers instead of running time for the file names. This resulted in 102 images for the entire "Jump & Rotate". Next I made a Photoshop batch job to "Auto Level" all images because the scene is very dark and Trinity doesn't stand out very much. The last (and easiest) step was to put all images through PhotoSynth.
Nice :)
PhotoSynth
· 90 days ago by Thijs Kroesbergen
I've been waiting a long time for this to be released to the public. I've seen demos of this almost two years ago. A not so long time ago SeaDragon was released under the name of "DeepZoom" and now we can enjoy PhotoSynth.
What is Photosynth?
Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.
I used a tool named FlickrDown to grab a collection of pictures from Flickr.com and then put them through PhotoSynth. The result is amazing!
How does it work?
Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.
Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.
Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.
In plain simple English: It looks at the pictures, finds the similarities and places the pictures in a 3d environment.
Cool!
Tip:
Post your cool Synths in the comments!
New hosting provider
· 124 days ago by Thijs Kroesbergen
I'm happy to announce that this site is now hosted on a decent server ;-).
The old Pentium II 450 MHz with 192mb ram can now finally retire! And I'm no longer dependant on the goodwill of the UPC DHCP-gods to keep a static IP. The pages are now served by a (shared) server that has a lot more horsepower and is located in a proper data center, with a nice uplink. W00t w00t?.
All this is thanks to Kumina, a small company run by several ex-schoolmates. They are specialized in managed operations and technical services, and I know they are the best in what they do!