web-tools 14

Mapping The Red Headed League is a fascinating reconstruction of the actual places mentioned (or hinted at) by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Red Headed League by Aman Bhargava. We cross-reference railway timetables, scrutinize Victorian newspaper reports and historical incidents, scour government records, analyze meteorological data, and, in my specific case, pore over Ordnance Survey maps to make the pieces fit. What struck me is how little London has changed, how much old data is available, and what love it takes to reconstruct such a journey! ...

In reality, a colour is a combination of light waves with frequencies between 400-700THz, just like sound is a combination of sound waves with frequencies from 20-20000Hz. Just like mixing various pure notes produces a new sound, mixing various pure colours (like from a rainbow) produces new colours (like white, which isn’t on the rainbow.) Our eyes aren’t like our ears, though. They have 3 sensors that are triggered differently by different frequencies. The sensors roughly peak around red, green and blue. Roughly. ...

This year, I’ve converted the bulk of my content into Markdown – a simple way of formatting text files in a way that can be rendered into HTML. Not out of choice, really. It was the only solution if I wanted to: Edit files on my iPad / iPhone (I’ve started doing that a lot more recently) Allow the contents to be viewable as HTML as well as text, and Allow non techies to edit the file As a bonus, it’s already the format Github and Bitbucket use for markup. ...

This is the simplest way that I’ve found to make the background colour of an image transparent. Download GIMP Open your image. I’ll pick this one: Optional: Select Image – Mode – RGB if it’s not RGB. Select Colors – Colors to Alpha… Click on the white button next to “From” and select the eye-dropper. Pick the green colour on the image, and click OK The anti-aliasing is preserved as well. ...

15 things you can do with RSS – like mix RSS scripts, convert any page to RSS, etc.

Google hacks on BuzzToolBox.com.

Garth is working on audio-blogging tools. Given the amount of poetry I see among bloggers, this might unleash a host of blog-singers.

Convert pictures to ASCII. In colour. Quite impressive.

A versatile picture search tool.

.- - .-.. .- … - a morse code translator.

Google has an image search with 150 million images. (While on the topic of Google, try this search on dead.long.live.)

Agentland is a portal for online agents – somewhat like Apps.com

Adobe lets you create PDF files on the Web without using any software.

Room102 is a search engine that previews websites.