Alchemist

Don’t use mod_pagespeed (with the default settings! see below for more info) or Smush it if you care at all about how your pictures look.

So, in looking around at some nifty solutions to speed up page rendering and web serving in general, I came across mod_pagespeed and smush.it, both claiming to provide all sorts of wonderful optimizations, specifically, losslessly compressing images. All of their other claims aside, the particular claim regarding lossless image optimization is a lie. A damned lie. The “optimized” images look like washed out crap, at least using the default optimization settings for both systems.

Smush.it claims it’s optimization is lossless, which is clearly not true. Mod_pagespeed lists lossy compression as a risk in their documentation. Points off for me for failing to RTFM.

Mouse over the images below to see just how bad the optimized versions are.

from mod_pagespeed

From Smush It:

Update from @jmarantz: Try ‘ModPagespeedDisableFilters rewrite_images’ or ‘ModPagespeedDisallow *.jp*g’ to turn off lossy compression.

Will do. Thanks for the note.

I’m an ardent futurist. I believe that prodigious improvements that technology has provided humanity over the course of our existence will continue indefinitely into the future, much like the inevitability of evolution and entropy.

That said, I’m a pragmatist as well. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” are wise words to live by.

So, when I see an old standard, the preferred method of long distance locomotion for billions of human beings supplanted by new technology I start to take notice.

For the past year, after having moved out to brooklyn, I’ve noticed a trend among the deliverymen of our neighborhood: one by one they are moving to electric bicycles. At first, I thought it was a fad. Someone figured out that by spending a little bit more on their bike, they wouldn’t have to peddle all night long. I thought, surely this new technology, when faced with the rigors of delivery service would soon succumb to the more robust traditional human powered bike, with it’s easily repaired mechanical systems. But the fleet of electric bikes has only grown and surprisingly one model seems to have won out the in the selection of the fittest: the green power classic bike, which can be purchased for something on the order of 4 to 5 times the street value of a huffy.

Essentially, the benefits of an electric bike outweigh the total costs of ownership for delivering food, perhaps the most rigorous use case for a bike. This is a watershed moment for electric personal transportation revolution.

Here they are, in action:

NAVI – Navigational Aids for the Visually Impaired: Hacking together the Kinect, a vibrotactile waist belt, and a blue helmet to help blind people navigate. Also Vibrotactile is my new favorite word.

If popular culture and movies are to believed, in the future we will all sport funky makeup and hairdos, especially those of us on the fringes of society. A simple google image search for “futuristic makeup” will provide a number of examples of the trope.

However, as we start to approach what may reasonably be called a futuristic society — where everyone carries a pocket computer that can call and navigate anywhere, translate text in real time, instantly look up any piece of information and a whole host of other previously inconceivable capabilities, among many other technological wonders at our fingertips — I think it’s amazing that some of the purely artistic interpretations of the future could actually become highly utilitarian, particularly for the types of people so often depicted in pop culture as wearing “crazy futuristic” makeup and hairstyles.

What kind of utility could such outlandish stylistic choices provide? Fooling facial recognition software, of course! Enter cvdazzle.com, a project by Adam Harvey that takes inspiration from the dazzle camouflage of WWI naval ships. The dazzle camouflage went out of style for the navy when radar became common, and I wonder if the cvdazzle makeup might suffer similarly due to 3d cameras such as the Kinect. In any event, next time I watch blade runner, I won’t think that Pris’ makeup is weird. It isn’t: It’s urban camouflage in the computer vision age.