In with PNGOUTWin

In case you didn’t already know, PNG is an image format that’s superior to GIF in just about every way. Like GIF, it supports 8-bit color depth (a 256 color palette), transparency, and interlacing. However, PNG allows for various color depths, which means it’s even good for complex artwork with gradients that have way more than 256 colors. Another useful feature is — get this — partially transparent pixels. (IE 6, however, doesn’t display them as such. Firefox does.)

Anyway, I realized in October 2004 that PNG would be also be a useful tool for archiving line drawings in bitmap format. So when I decided to rid my hard drive of some old BMPs (yes, they were MS Paint drawings) and archive them on CD, I decided to convert them to PNGs, as PNG’s lossless compression would reduce each file to a mere percentage of its former size in bytes while retaining all of the original image quality. But doing that in a program such as Photoshop wasn’t enough. Although it’s a good program, Photoshop is notorious for its poor PNG compression. I needed another tool.

That’s when I found out about PNGOUT, a command-line utility that reduces the file sizes of PNGs even further by getting rid of unnecessary data. It also converts files of other formats to equally slim PNGs. This helped me tremendously. However, it could only process one file at a time, and there was no easy way to give it a bunch of files to work on one at a time. To get around that, I had to mess with DOS-type things like batch files. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done, and rather nicely. I kept PNGOUT and still use it on every PNG file that I post on this site. Smaller files mean faster loading time for you and lower web hosting charges for me. Everyone wins.

Just today I found out about a new incarnation of PNGOUT: a shareware program for Windows called PNGOUTWin. The first thing you’d notice about this program is that it’s a GUI version of PNGOUT, making it easier to use than before. But in addition to that, it allows for batch processing of files. On each line it shows the name of the file, the progress the program has made on it, the size of the original file, the size of the optimized file, the time it took to optimize the file, the change in bytes… you get the idea. There are more options as well. You can also choose between various levels of compression and even which chunks to keep. The program can put optimized images in a specific folder or in the same folder as the original image — or you can have it overwrite the originals.

As I started the 30-day free trial of PNGOUTWin, I was eager to find out how good it was, but I was slightly annoyed because I hardly had any unoptimized PNG images for it to compress — that’s how much I rely on PNGOUT. So on a whim, I gave PNGOUTWin a file I had already compressed with PNGOUT, and it managed to trim a few bytes off that. It went from 54,004 bytes to 53,675. Then, just for giggles, I gave it a gigantic BMP — a black-and-white (2 colors, not grayscale) scan of a drawing I once made. The original file was 26,355,716 bytes, or over 25 MB. The optimized version was only 143,482 bytes — such a difference that, due to rounding, the program described it as 0% of the original size. It’s actually 0.54% of the original size. Quite a difference indeed.

I recommend downloading the free trial. Even if you don’t post GIF- or BMP-type graphics on the web, you still have nothing to lose (except a lot of space on your hard drive, which you can in turn use for other things). If you decide that you like it after 30 days, you can purchase the Personal Edition for $14.95 or the Corporate Edition for $29.95, but those are discounted prices that apparently won’t last. If you’re like me and you want to make every byte count, then PNGOUTWin is really worth it.

Just in time for Easter, it’s Peep jousting!

A site that lets you browse at work: BrowseAtWork.com. However, if your work/school is smart, they’ve probably blocked that site, so I don’t really see how it could be useful. Maybe it is if they don’t know about it yet.

One year ago: “It would be about as pointless as books on tape.”

Thanks for the good times, Jim

Last night I went bowling with Luke, Michelle, Michelle’s boyfriend Aaron, and a couple of Aaron’s friends. I was surprised that I was capable of organizing something like that — usually I’m not the one who orchestrates get-together plans — but I managed to pull the right strings and everything. I guess that’s the expression I’m looking for.

I started out pretty bad, but I sort of improved over the course of the night, even getting a strike once or twice. I was using a ball that had the name “Jim” engraved on it. Luke used it too, though he didn’t like the fact that Jim had such small fingers. And during the games, I ordered a bunch of french fries that we all (but mostly I) ate.

It turned out that when Luke had suggested going bowling, he was kidding. But, as he put it, he should kid about doing fun things more often.

Speaking of things I mentioned yesterday, I’ve working more on getting my digital multitrack recorder to work. I downloaded a firmware update for it today and reformatted the hard drive. So I needed to record something to test it out. I didn’t want to record something I’d spend three hours on just to have the file become corrupted, so I hastily improvised a bluesy number on my Epiphone Dot. To my surprise, I managed to record the song, mix it down, convert it to a WAV file, export that to the computer, and convert it to an MP3 without any serious problems. Finally, you can find out how good or bad I am at the guitar by listening to “Four Guitar Blues.”

Marla Olmstead (Flash, sound) is a critically acclaimed artist. And she’s, like, five years old. Do you feel accomplished now?

Just to warn you, the following link is pretty disgusting. In fact, it might make you want to become a vegetarian. No, it’s not a slaughterhouse gallery, but rather, a really huge burger. A burger with 100 patties and 100 slices of cheese, to be exact. Apparently you can order a burger with any number of patties at In-N-Out Burger, which must be only out west because I’ve never seen one.

One year ago: “So that was our plan: to observe the sun through blank CDs. Kids, don’t try this at home!”
Two years ago: “I went out into the hallway and kicked the girl who sits next to me in English class in the head.”

Spring. Break?

Spring break has begun, but what’s a Jordon to do? Play guitar: check. Sit around and do nothing: check. Study: not check. I don’t really have plans for spring break. I guess I’ll just be hanging out with my friends. I do need to do that studying thing, though. We’ve finished the textbook in AP European History, so it’s review time. That might be how I’ll be spending a lot of my time. Plans of going bowling tonight with a couple of AP Euro buddies are forming, so that could be cool. We should probably get together to study one of these days, too.

I’ve indeed had a lot of time to play my guitar. Yesterday I spent a few hours playing and working on songs. It’s not something I talk about much because my songs are pretty personal (that is, I’d be personally crushed if you told me how bad they were). I’ve finished three or four in the past week, which is unheard of for me. Maybe I could put some of my dumb songs on this site, but there are always concerns of bandwidth, copyright, and excessive criticism… not to mention that my uber-cool digital recorder is on the blink. (Something involving corrupted files. Good thing it’s under warranty.) If there’s a sufficient demand (and if I can get the recorder fixed), then maybe I’ll follow through with it.

Today on Skype it was Call Jordon Kalilich to Practice Your English Day. I usually get a call/chat or two on the weekends, but today I got calls from various people the Czech Republic, Lithuania, China, Poland, Israel, and Brazil. The latter (last?) of these was a group of students, many of whom I tried to have conversations with for up to several minutes. Out of all the people I’ve talked to today, some of them were interesting and had good English. Others weren’t and didn’t. But maybe in the future I won’t set my status as “Skype Me” so I can get a break from the random calls. It is interesting to speak to random people once in a while, but it’s easier if they’re fluent in the same language as me.

Here’s a height/weight chart with a bunch of photographs of people with certain heights and weights.

What happens to various cars if you drive them behind a jet with its engines at full blast? Find out (Flash video with sound).

One year ago: “I’ll see how it turns out, and maybe even get pictures!!!!!1one Squee!! Let the eclipse begin!”

The World of Stuff is 3

Three years ago today, The World of Stuff went live. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long since I put my random web pages on a common site and used the main page to keep track of updates. Originally, The World of Stuff was nothing in itself. Now the blog is the major focus of the site, and, as I’ve hoped, it’s kept some people — however few — coming back. So thank you, readers old and new, for your loyalty. I look forward to informing and entertaining you in the future.

Today Ms. Vazquez was present for the dedication of the globe in the library. There were a few assistant principals there, along with a few old alumni, but it was nothing formal. And unfortunately, Ms. Vazquez has to leave in a few days, so I won’t see her again because today was the last day of school before spring break. The break lasts all of next week, in addition to the Monday after that. How will I be spending my spring break, you ask? Well, I probably won’t be doing much, as usual. Since the AP European History exam is drawing ever closer (May 5), we have a tremendous review packet to read over the break. That should keep me busy for a while. At least it’s reading, though, and not writing or anything. When we get back to school, we’ll spend the rest of the class time reviewing things for the test. Then, after the test, I guess we’ll just relax.

Fly the Copter is a seemingly simple but actually quite challenging game. For me, anyway.

See images of TV test cards from around the world at The Test Card Gallery. And here’s more information than you would ever want to know about those colored bars you sometimes see on (American) TV.

One year ago: “Now go out and celebrate! Buy a cake or something!”
Two years ago: “I mean, I’ve learned a little bit more about making web sites, and maybe my style, spelling, and grammar have improved a little too. But I doesn’t really know four sure.”
Three years ago: “Well, it only took me about 2 months and a lot of procrastination, but I did it.”

Ms. Vazquez returns

It was a sad day when Ms. Vazquez announced that she was leaving for Puerto Rico and would cease to be our AP European History teacher. The day she left was particularly emotional, especially because she had personally assembled almost the entire class from some of her favorite students. So it was sort of a surprise to hear that she would be coming back in April. And it turns out that this week was the week she would come.

Today in AP Euro, some people had discovered somehow that Ms. Vazquez herself had come to visit and was in the library. Shortly thereafter, a few of her favorites (including myself) were called down to see her. She commented as adults do about how different we all looked, but it was she who had changed the most. She had dyed her hair blonde and was wearing makeup. Upon chatting with her, I discovered that she was actually happy living in Puerto Rico — much more so than she had ever been here. But she was definitely still her intelligent, boisterous, caring self. We filled her in on what had been going on in the class: students who had dropped out, drama between the girls (that I didn’t even know existed), what we were studying now, and the like. I also mentioned the Boys State interview incident. At this point, Kristen and Brian had gone back up to class to bring down Kelsey and Luke, respectively. Ms. Vazquez likes them too.

The question of colleges inevitably came up in our discussion, of course. Everyone discussed how they were going to spend the rest of their lives. When Ms. Vazquez asked me, I gave her my one true answer: I don’t know what career I want, and I don’t know what college I want to go to. I can imagine that she was probably a little disappointed somehow at my indecision. Everyone else, it seems, has dreams. Oh well. She did, however, offer to write me a letter of recommendation, so she told me to give her my resume tomorrow. So I had to write My First Resume™. (It’s true that I attempted to write a resume for my Boys State application, but it’s a good thing I didn’t waste my time finishing it.) It’s a pretty pitiful resume: no objective, no career goals, only one job ever, a couple of school awards here and there. It looks very blank and sad.

Ms. Vazquez had really invited us down to the library to talk about some essays we had written. Back when she was our teacher, she had asked this small group of students with good writing skills to write some essays about some things that she or someone else would need in order to send to someone to determine some thing. But the only real reason, it seems, is that she had come back was to check out the globe that some of her classes raised funds to buy last year. It’s a large globe that turns and I think lights up and stuff, and it was to be installed in the library. Today when we met Ms. Vazquez in the library, lo and behold, it was there — although the lights hadn’t been connected yet, apparently. Tomorrow, I believe, she will be there for the globe’s dedication, and so her goal of leaving her (and her classes’) mark on the school will be complete.

This isn’t really related to the above, but I have a splitting headache. Why, you ask? Yesterday and today I’ve had a substitute teacher in precalculus class. When there’s a sub, Mr. Gates just has us read and work on the next lesson. I did fine with that yesterday. But today, when I had to figure out the number of times a certain number occurred on the graph of a particular period of a trigonometric function, my brain practically exploded, and my head’s been bothering me since. In short: I was thinking too hard. The lesson here, kids, is not to think so much.

Here’s a dynamic map of surnames in the US. Enter a surname in the box in the upper-left-hand corner of the page, and the map will show a breakdown of that surname’s frequency by state.

Badmovies.org is a site about bad movies.

How popular?

Over the past school year, I’ve been hanging out with the kind of people who are inclined to read blogs, including this one. As a result, a lot of the things I say come back to me when I see them at school. It was weird at first: “How did you find out about that?” I would ask. “I read it on your web site,” would be the reply. I’ve even heard to this site referred to as “popular” or “semi-popular.” Sure, it may be popular among one of my circles of friends, but how popular is it, say, among the school as a whole? I doubt the influence extends far outside my circle, but I’m curious. If you go to Pompano High, and you’re a regular or semi-regular reader, just post a simple comment to identify yourself — or flag me down in person and let me know.

Tonight on Ask Jordon:

Sunny: What’s you middle name?

Me middle name is James.

Luke: What kinds of people are jobs for? Are you one of those people?

As you’ve told me many a time, jobs are for losers. I only wish I believed it. If it’s true, then maybe I’m not a loser.

carol: In one of your book singing you had a pear of shocking pink boots on wher did you get them.

I love helping people with their schoolwork, especially English. I’m good at English. Let’s see how I can lend my talents to this piece of writing. I offer these corrections:

• This isn’t part of your sentence, but for future reference, capitalize your name. Even E.E. Cummings did.
• It is generally considered correct to be at a book signing rather than in one.
• The word “singing” should be “signings.”
• A comma may be added after the initial prepositional phrase for clarity.
• Be careful of homophones. A pear is a fruit, while a pair is a group of two similar things. I guess they’re a tricky pair of homophones.
• I wouldn’t normally end a sentence with a preposition. You might simply say “…had on a pair of shocking pink boots.”
• This is a run-on sentence. Add a period where the first sentence ends and capitalize the next word.
• The word “where” is misspelled.
• End interrogative sentences with a question mark (?).

The result: At one of your book signings, you had on a pair of shocking pink boots. Where did you get them? Now you’re ready to send your question to whatever author you’re talking about, and they he or she won’t make fun of you.

Have a look at photos from Flat Stanley’s White House Visit. Where else could you see old photos of Bush administration officials posing with a little guy cut out of paper?

Pictures of unusual buildings around the world.

One year ago: “Life just gets more and more difficult, doesn’t it? I have a feeling I’ll never get another break.”
Two years ago: “Seeing as today is April 4, 2004, or 04-04-04, I thought it would be suitable to write a bit about 404 error messages.”

Better than ever

Early on in the site’s history, I moved from a lousy free host to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the home of pay-only-for-what-you-use web hosting. I don’t think I could have asked for (or found) a better host. They’re a small company dedicated to providing great service while saving their users money in every possible way. They’ve also used (with my permission) some images from flipacoin.net for a graph of users’ typical monthly costs. Anyway, you know that I don’t blatantly plug commercial enterprises very often, so they have to be pretty good.

NFSN keeps finding ways to save me money. First it was with the domain registration. Until very recently they had a special deal with a registrar so that they could offer domain names. The registrar would then give NFSN a small kickback from the price paid for the domain. Well, the folks at NFSN decided that that wasn’t right, so their policy was to return the kickback money to the user’s account. Their DNS service used to cost $0.02 per day, and that included optional e-mail forwarding. I used the e-mail forwarding at first, but after I turned it off for my domains, NFSN announced that DNS without domain forwarding would henceforth be free of charge. This in itself has saved me (relatively) significant amounts of money.

NFSN has just announced that they are now a registrar for domain names. As a result, domains registered with the old registrar should to be transferred to NFSN before the end of the year. I got around to doing it today. Now, this procedure would normally cost money, but the people at NFSN has come up with a great incentive for users to appreciate their new service sooner. They do charge $7 for this particular transfer, as is the standard procedure, but once the transfer is complete, they will deposit the $7 back into your account. New users won’t have to worry about this, though. If you register with NFSN now, you can buy domain names more easily and at an even lower cost than before: just $7 per year for .com, .net, and .org domains (they were previously $7 and change).

If NearlyFreeSpeech.NET sounds good to you, don’t take my word for it. I’ve told my friends about it, and they seem to love it as well. Gilbert has his personal site hosted there, and now he’s working on Andrew’s band’s site, which will also be hosted there. Luke is using NFSN to host Pompano Pulse, a new site for our school’s (new?) journalism club. I’m pretty sure they’re all pleased with it. Also, I like to consider myself responsible for BugMeNot.com‘s move to NFSN, and I know that the folks there love it. I swear no one’s paying me to say this. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET shows that free speech doesn’t have to cost a lot.

Here’s a short tutorial on making a planet-shaped amazing circle in Photoshop using a 360-degree panoramic image. Luckily I happened to have one that I took last summer, and here’s the result (my house is on top).

Note to self: make more panoramas with autostitch! Thanks to Scotto for directing me to the tutorial (and to autostitch in the first place).

Project IP lists just about everything that a web server can find out about your computer.

One year ago: “Let’s look at this cheesy graph!”

It’s no joke

Well, my family did indeed go to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood (from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?“) in their two-man improv comedy show. If you’ve never seen “Whose Line,” you may at least be familiar with Colin Mochrie as the bald(ing?), tutu-clad “Snack Fairy” from the Nabisco ads.

We left yesterday afternoon and got to Ft. Myers when it was getting to be dark. Searching for a quick bite to eat, we stopped at Fortino’s Pizza, which had an Italian buffet that was expensive but good. When we got to the theater, we discovered that the stage door was hardly hidden or out of the way. We parked right by it and went into the theater, ready for a rousing, improvised show. Inside the theater we saw Leslie (“anaerosmithchick”), whom we had previously seen after the Improv All-Stars show in Sarasota last year. She and my sister know each other because they frequent the Colin Mochrie and Greg Proops message boards. Once again, she brought her son Tony, who is a “Whose Line” fan as well.

The show was great; I was laughing nonstop throughout the whole thing. It featured some of the improv games from “Whose Line” and some that they never did on the show. An example of the latter was “Interrogation.” Brad sent Colin out of the theater (with an audience member to make sure he wasn’t listening in) and had the audience come up with an outrageous “crime” that Colin would have to confess to, with Brad giving (sometimes) subtle hints in his conversation. When Brad asked for a Native-American-sounding name for the town where the crime took place, he chose my sister from the sea of raised hands. She said “Pahokee,” a town we passed through or near on the way to the show. Brad had quite a time remembering it and getting Colin to guess it.

After the show we went toward the stage door (which was practically next to the exit). After a few minutes, someone told the small group of fans to form a line, and then Colin and Brad came out. We didn’t have time to say much to them, but I wasn’t sure what I would have said anyway. I didn’t want to say something like “zomg i <3 whose line” because I’m pretty sure that I conveyed that message well, being one of the small group of autograph seekers hanging out after the show. I told Colin that they put on a great show, and he said “Thank you.” Then, after the two of them signed some autographs for us, my sister and I posed with them for the obligatory picture. After that, in good spirits, we headed home.

As a side note, you can see why I don’t smile for pictures a lot. I end up looking like an evil woman. But I’m smiling, really. And I’m not a woman. Stop making fun of me.

Does anyone want to try cooking an egg with cell phones and a radio? I don’t know how it could work, but apparently it does. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.

Here’s a list of handy French phrases, with a pronunciation key and sorted by category.

One year ago: “I have no plans on getting into LJ or MySpace (I’d assume the abbreviation MS would be ambiguous).”
Two years ago: “I personally saw a large anarchy sign drawn on the floor in one of my classrooms and the words ‘BLAME CANADA’ scrawled over a door.”