A Wits' End Slideshow

Van Gogh on Dark Water Animation

I've done marbleizing for printing before, but I've never done anything as awesome as this.

Making homemade veggie crumbles and seitan.

I had the items that I needed for the crumbles (which mimic ground beef), but it was slightly hard to locate the vital wheat gluten to make the seitan. If there is any interest, I'll explain what I did to make them.

Veggie crumbles after being dried in the dehydrator.

Vacuum packed veggie crumbles.

Homemade seitan ready to be dried a little in the dehydrator.

Face2Face - real time digital manipulation of videos

I really don't have much to add. Mr. Brin says it all.

As Michael O'Reilly points out in David Brin's original post, even the time stamped refutations can be falsified. If guess you'd need to stream to some sort of tamper evident write once device or service.

Well, color me embarrassed.

Suva, Fiji, mid-80's. 

My icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10), had just pulled in to port in Suva, on the island of Viti Levu in Fiji. 

It was a beautiful austral summer day, and we were welcoming visitors from the local community aboard for tours of the cutter. Many of these visitors were local dignitaries and politicians.

I was on duty, standing watch on the Quarterdeck, welcoming everyone aboard the ship. Most of the people were speaking perfect English (naturally enough, since Fiji was a British Crown Colony and is a member of the Commonwealth) and I'm enjoying answering questions about the United States, the Coast Guard, Antarctica, and the Polar Star; and also asking them about Fiji.  It's important to remember that I have serious social issues, and it's difficult for me to interact with people face-to-face, but in this instance, I was having a good time.

Suddenly, with the Quarterdeck - and the rest of the ship - packed with excited english speaking visitors, the Executive Officer comes over the 1MC (think of a public address system broadcast throughout the entire ship, interior and exterior) advising us all to be careful and use condoms, because 70%* of the adult population has sexually transmitted diseases. I almost died of embarrassment.

* 70% isn't the precise percentage given, but it was in that general area.

A quick way to clean up screenshot compression artifacts in the GIMP

People love sharing things online. Screen captures from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and a multitude of other sites are regularly saved, edited, resized and resaved.  A lot of the time, this is done to files that use lossy compression - such as JPEGs.

Multiple saves of files with lossy compression can lead to compression artifacting. Compression artifacting creates a serious distortion of all sorts of different types of digital media that uses lossy compression; however, I'm referring to images right now - and more specifically screenshots of text on a white background. This is illustrated in the image to the right, which someone shared on Facebook (I do not have permission from Cloyd Rivers to use this, but it is all over the place, so I'm looking at this as educational fair use).

The compression artifacting in that image is quite distinct.  I want to clean it up some, in as simple a manner as possible, using the GIMP.  There are actually a number of ways to do it, but I'm going to show one that generally works pretty well for me.

Using the original JPEG, and a couple/few duplicate layers with different modes, I can clean it up significantly without having to fiddle around with selections and drawing tools.

The process is remarkably simple.  You open the original file that has the artifacting, in this case, I changed the color space to sRGB.

 Now, just make two or three duplicates of the layer, the first one or two layers should use the mode "Screen", and the final layer should use the mode "Hard light" (give "Darken only" or "Multiply" modes a try also, to see if they give a better effect than "Hard light").

This is how my final image comes out. I can actually clean it up even more without too much effort, but it's much more pleasant to the eye even as it is.

I then export the image as a PNG, to avoid the whole lossy compression issue.

Pretty simple huh?

The lack of interaction is too damn high.

A long downward spiral

It started out pretty well

I have been online since the early days of personal computing. My 8-bit Atari computers and my 300 baud acoustically coupled Atari 830 modem spent way too many nights and weekends linked up to The Source, Dow Jones Information Service, and assorted early BBS systems. I later progressed to CompuServe and GEnie, and NNTP newsgroups.  Eventually, I ended up on the web in the early 90s. These were the good years, where I actually had fun most of the time that I was online, and contributed to the fun being had by others - with my own work, not just sharing something funny that had been posted elsewhere.

I realize that it is me

I have had social issues for a long time.  They were exacerbated by my time in the Coast Guard, and really came to a head during my tours onboard polar icebreakers, where I'd be cooped up with people for many months in the Arctic

USCGC Polar Star - from Wikipedia

and Antarctic, with no way to escape. However, in the eighties, I was still attempting to look normal.  Once the nineties arrived I'd pretty much given up all pretense of being normal socially, and most of my interaction with other people came through various online outlets.

This was reflected in my online life, I think.

The 1980s

In the eighties, everything was pretty carefree all over the place. Lots of jokes and discussions about everything under the sun.  As I mentioned earlier, these were the 'good' years. Computers and online communications were new to all of us. We could carry on conversations for months, sometimes after not having seen the other person for weeks. There was very little trolling that wasn't obviously meant as fun, and everything was good natured and laid back. 

The 1990s

The nineties were still pretty busy. Nowhere near as much in the way of lighthearted banter though.  This was the Clinton era, and the 2000 Presidential campaign.  There was a lot of communication with other people, but it was generally pretty serious, if not downright acrimonious. 

Democratic Underground

The 2000s

The Bush administration, 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still a lot of back and forth, but I was noticing changes. I was on a lot of online forums, since the newsgroups were dying down.  Things were OK, but I noticed big changes even then.  As the years progressed, it was harder to get actual responses to posts on places like Democratic Underground. Other people had great 'fan clubs' - they'd routinely get hundreds of replies to their posts, and people wondered where they had gone to when they were offline for a while.  I might get three to fifteen replies to my posts, and when I was gone and then came back, I'd be lucky to get an "Oh, I think I remember you." - even though I'd been a member since 2001 - almost the beginning. I pretty much stopped posting to all forums around 2007 through 2008.

The 2010s

Most of my attempts to deal with people, other than going to the store and having someone ask me a question, are done through various online avenues. I have this blog, and the one I use for my online store, The Wits' End. There is Facebook, of course.  I have to admit that I've never really liked Facebook very much and only hang

The Wits' End

around there because that's where my wife and kids (along with a family member or two on the wife's side) hang out. There are also members of the local Atheist group, and some retro computer related groups that I enjoy.  But I only have about 70-80 'friends' on Facebook, after having been on it for many, many years.

Social networks like Google+ and Twitter

Google+ and Twitter are different matters. I have two different Twitter accounts.  One for me personally, and one for The Wits End. Each of the two accounts have approximately 1,500 followers. My Google+ profile shows me that I currently have 1,732 followers. This sounds pretty good I suppose, but it's not really as impressive as a person would think. I have run tests on Twitter over the years, asking questions, saying controversial things, asking for help with something, replying to conversations being conducted and more.  I have never received a reply to one of my own posts that didn't involve a link to a page from someone else. I have had a few comments from a couple of individuals relating to the atheist related items in my online store and Etsy shop, so there is that I suppose.  I do; however, get loads of likes (well, favorites now) and the occasional retweet, so I do know that people are seeing things.

Google+ is a little better.  I do, in general get a little more interaction.  Nothing spectacular, but I enjoy it because it's the place where I actually feel like a human being that someone wants to communicate with.  My original posts look pretty sad compared to other people - there are a number of people I interact that have a quarter of the number of followers and yet they have five to six times the number of views on their posts.  About 20 percent of my posts probably get a reply.  On the average, those that do get a reply, get about one to three of them.  I look at the streams of friends and see that they're getting three or more replies on almost all of their posts. 

The blogs

Then there are the blogs. I've had this one for many years - July of 2008 was my first post. The other one, which is for my  online store - The Wits' End since July of 2015. While I will be the first to admit that I am not exactly a great blogger, it always seems strange to me that I don't get any sort of interaction on them at all, even when some of the posts might get fifty views in a day, and many hundreds of views overall. If I remember correctly, when you don't count the comments that originate on Google+ (and there have only been three instances of those), I've only had one comment on my blogs, and that was a SPAM comment.

The stores

Between my Etsy shop and the online store, I have receive many tens of thousands of likes, retweets, pluses and favorites on the items that I make and sell; these would be through Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Those thousands of assorted likes and retweets in a month result in about ten to fifteen sales for that month, but that's a different matter.

So why am I posting this?

That's a good question. I don't really know, to be honest.  Judging from the very things that I have been talking about, I am unlikely to get any sort of reply. However, even with that knowledge, I'm hoping to buck the odds and get some insight from people into what I might be doing wrong, and what steps I can take to change direction.