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219 days ago

The majority of this post is a copy of an Email I sent to a family friend when I was asked to "digitally restore" some faded and damaged photographs depicting family history which they had scanned for preservation. The images where quite damaged before the scan, but the Email I received containing 3 Jpegs of these images had far more corruption from the image data compression than anything else, and where stored at a resolution which could be comfortably viewed on screen without reduction. Admittedly, any higher resolution would only allow you to zoom in on the grainy scratched surface of the image. But it would have lessened the compression errors, and given me a chance to see clean areas between the scratches and grain. I hope this information will be useful to anyone trying to make digital copies of ageing images (photos, snaps, art work etc) for their preservation. The illustration above is of two identical images at a resolution of 64 pixels by 64 pixels, ...

Blue Track Mouse? Don't want not stinking Blue Track Mouse!

312 days ago

Today, I received this communication from Microsoft TechNet... where I normally only get the Newsletters, which are also becoming very boring and very Ad / Spam ish. Mouse technology has come a long way since the clunky roller ball of the 1980s. Our experience has vastly improved; first with powerful optical tracking, and then with the precision of laser. But now – in a move that T3 magazine has called 'a revolutionary step forward in mouse technology' – we've gone a step further, and combined the two: introducing BlueTrack technology. New Explorer Mouse is a force to be reckoned with. But don't take our word for it – put it to the test and be one of the first to experience its benefits. Play our Tech Timeline* game for your chance to win one of thirty Explorer Mouse and test kits. Microsoft has developed BlueTrack – the world's most advanced tracking technology – and added it to the new Explorer Mouse. Remarkably, it works on virtually any surface**. So, ...

ESTsoft Corp. ALZip 6.7 Iceows and Software Patching

379 days ago

Okay, so I'm going to recommend (somewhat unlike me) a commercial program. That is one which is neither free (as in free beer) nor free (as in free speech). Well, actually version 6.7 of ALZip is the last free beer release of this nifty little program, and I recommend you download it and give it a try right now. I don't think I'd ever be prepared to "pay" for a Zip program, and if I where to be convinced, it would have to be something like Iceows (formerly ArjFolder) but with a true integration with the desktop explorer (Windows Shell Namespace Extension) ala Zip Folders ( ZipFldr.dll ) or Cabinets ( CabView.dll ). Iceows is the closest I have seen to this (surely the most transparent) approach to archive handling in Windows. The only difference between Iceows archive folders and Zip Folders or Cabinet views is that the tool band object in the browse window is only a close facsimile of the windows explorer toolbar, not the real one. If you are any good ...

Blog Images

379 days ago

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Microsoft has fun at my expense! (RTF Specification Version 1.9.1)

481 days ago

The beauty of Rich Text files On the 19th of March 2008 Microsoft released the latest incarnation to the Rich Text Format specification 1.9.1 to go with their new Office 2007... Interesting because Office '08 is available on the Apple Mac but the document doesn't mention that, and only shows images from Word 2003 on the PC. Anyway... I'm working on a program to replace WordPad, not because I don't like WordPad but because I do, I just think that since it hasn't changed since Windows 95, and then not much from Write on Windows 3.x it could do with a little more... especially in the way of internet appliance... read and edit html, blog posts etc. So I'm writing my own, keeping the UI as much like WordPad (or Write) in it's default configuration as possible, keeping the code size small and the startup time fast, and ensuring that my replacement can do everything that the original can. Access to the Rich Edit component (richedt32.dll or richedt20.dll) is a really quick way of ...