Unhandled Perception

WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality.

A WebP file consists of VP8 image data, and a container based on RIFF. Webmasters, web developers and browser developers can use the WebP format to create smaller, better looking images that can help make the web faster.

Some huge reductions in file sizes without an loss of quality.  So far I’m impressed with the new Google WebP image format.

How WebP works:

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

Sample of side-by-side comparison:
http://code.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.html

Codepad is an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool

Not too sure why you would use this as it seems a little dangerous (your code is stored on their server).  Enlighten me, why would I need this?

Link: http://codepad.org/

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

Link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

It’s amazing how easily a person can tell stories about the early days of the Internet and make it sound like they went to school in a barn using a horse-drawn carriage to get there.

It was not that long ago that CD-ROMs flooded snail-mail boxes promising 1,000 free hours, the lowest price or the fastest speed on your 56k modem.  Whatever happened to this practice, these companies, or those annoying start-up CDs?

I used to collect the AOL CD’s probably still have a bunch in a box somewhere.

Link: http://www.techknowtimes.com/…

PDF Split and Merge is a very simple, easy to use, free, open source utility to split and merge pdf files.

What you can do:

• split your pdf documents (into chapters, single pages, etc.).
• merge many pdf documents or subsections of them.
• extract sections of your document into a single pdf document.
• mix alternate pages taken from two pdf documents in straight or reverse order into a single document.
• rotate pages of the selected pdf documents.
• visually reorder pages of a selected pdf document.
• visually compose a document dragging pages from selected pdf documents.
• save and load your environment to automatize your recurrent jobs.
• manage pdfsam settings and set an environment to load at start up.

Link: http://www.pdfsam.org

When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we can’t serve our users effectively. That’s why we act every day to maximize free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…

The Google Chrome Developer Tools provide an integrated environment for debugging, optimizing, and understanding a web application, or website, running in Google Chrome. The developer tools are developed partly through the open source project, WebKit, where the tools are called Web Inspector.

Getting Started:

Link: http://www.chromium.org/devtools

The search giant has proposed charging consumers about $25 a year to store songs in the locker, from which they could access their music on an Internet-connected device by either streaming or downloading. Google’s download store would operate like a conventional digital retailer, giving the consumers the ability to purchase individual tracks and digital albums.

Link: http://www.billboard.biz/…

This is a fun site to create your own beatbox music tracks.  The interface is well laid out and makes it simple to create great sounding tracks.

One thing they need is the ability to export or save a track out as MP3.

Link: http://www.incredibox.fr/

The world’s largest online video sharing website, YouTube, started a two-day pilot project that has brought live video streaming to YouTube Channels for select accounts, set to end tomorrow. The company says it has teamed up with four current content partners, including: Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood.

Link: http://business2press.com/…

For those, who dont know how big is a yottabyte is, this infograph will definitely help you. According to this Infograph, 1 yottabyte costs 100 trillion dollars.

Link: http://en.digitalkamera.com/…

Whether you’ve just bought a new PC, upgraded to Windows 7, or reinstalled your OS, a just-installed system is a great opportunity to make some helpful changes and fixes. Here are the things we recommend anyone tackle on a minty fresh Windows.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5634978/…

This is a clone of the Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP — a PowerToy that allows you to right-click on one or more image files in Windows Explorer to resize them. It was created (by me) to extend support to non-XP and 64-bit versions of Windows (including 2000, Vista & 7).

I use this right-click image resize method to quickly and easily resize down large camera images.  Makes it simple to resize before emailing or uploading to a blog.

Link: http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

What do you think?  Do you like it?

Link: http://www.google.com/instant/

Make sure you mouseover the logo in Google today.