ASCII Diagrams / ASCII Photoshop

WARNING : SUPERGEEKS ONLY.

Ever wish you could put some diagrams in your source code?  JavE is your friend.  Think "powerpoint diagrams using ASCII".  Here is one I made recently :

There are numerous tools for creating ASCII art from images.  But this is the only tool I've found that caters towards diagram creation in ASCII.  It supports a subset of powerpoint type operations:

* lines, boxes, elipses, bezier curves, arcs, text boxes
* equations (simplified LaTeX-style syntax)
* function plotter, fractal plotter, 3D renderer (seriously!!!)
* photoshop type tools : brush, eraser, fill, clone

One feature I wish it had would be to maintain the 3d-ness of objects after you "place" them.  That is, when you create a text box, you can move it around on the canvas, but once you place it, it becomes part of the background and to move it again, you need to select it as "raw pixels".

Still this is a fantastic tool when you just want to put a diagram somewhere in a text file.

Upload Full Size Images in Picasa

You probably think you know what this post is about.  I doubt it. :-)

Picasa allows you to upload with "Slowest Upload, Largest Size". You might want to do this if you intend to share your photos with friends that might really, really want the full sized images. However, you might have noticed that this doesn't always work. Why not?

The problem could be that you have unsaved edits [1]. When you upload, Picasa assumes you want to upload the edited version, which is probably what you wanted. So it creates a temporary edited file WITH COMPRESSION which it then uploads. Unfortunately, you don't have control over how much compression this temporary file has. So even if you choose "least compression" in the upload dialog, you'll still end up with more compression than if you uploaded the original. The work around is to Export the (edited) photos you want to upload.  You specify the compression applied in the export process.  Then upload the exported photos.

References:

[1] Post by Don Lind