Happy Pi Day!

Today is Pi Day. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I’d like to share the pi image that I created above.

The ascii art image is composed of the first 333 digits of π. I used the following to count the digits for me…
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/charcount.shtml

Like everything I create, the ascii pi has been set free from any copyrights by using the CC0 waiver. Feel free to use it however you please.

Here are various formats of the ascii pi that you can download from archive.org…
- ascii
- svg
- png

Here’s a way to recreate the ascii pi…

1. Get an image of pi from wikipedia…
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pi-symbol.svg
2. Use GIMP to convert the svg into a flattened png
3. Use the png with this ascii art generator….
   http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/
4. Copy and paste the result into a text editor
5. Replace the characters from the generator with the first 333 digits of pi…
   http://www.eveandersson.com/pi/digits/

You should now have an ascii pi image created from the first 333 digits of pi. You can copy and paste that into Inkscape to make a svg or png version.

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- Set Free

Patient: Adobe Photoshop CS4

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UPDATE on 02/11/2009 @ 2:45pm:
The Little Snitch method is not reliable. See this comment for a workaround.

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A friend of mine recently got into photography. She went to Amazon, searched for the bestselling photography book, and purchased The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby. After starting to read the book, she asked me if I had Adobe Photoshop CS4 for her Mac.

I personally haven’t used Photoshop in a long time, so I didn’t have version CS4 in hand. I suggested two other readily available alternatives. One was GIMP which is an open source image editing program. The other was Aviary Phoenix which is a browser based online image editing service. She said she just wanted to use Adobe Photoshop CS4 since the tutorials in her book were based on it.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 costs $639.99 to buy, however, one can easily get it for free via piracy. I decided to go the piracy route, and here’s how I did it.

I went to Mininova and browsed the most popular torrents in the Mac category.

I saw one at the top that says Adobe CS4 Master Collection which includes Photoshop. The description said the torrent download comes with a serial number. I read the comments and someone named brumarug suggested to install Little Snitch to prevent the software from phoning home and invalidating the serial number.

I used Little Snitch before, and I remember you had to pay to get the full version. I searched for a free altnernative to Little Snitch, but the results didn’t return any good alternatives. I didn’t want to pay for Little Snitch, so Mininova to the rescue again.

I did a search for Little Snitch on Mininova and chose the most popular one. Fortunately, I didn’t have to download the Little Snitch torrent since someone named cino posted the serial in the comments. I got the actual program instead by downloading the Little Snitch demo from the developers site. I used the serial number from the comments to unlock the full version.

The Adobe CS4 Master Collection took about 16 hours to download using Transmission. I only installed Photoshop and unchecked all the other programs it came with. When Photoshop tried to phone home, Little Snitch popped up, and I chose to deny any connection forever.

Everything seems to be working great. Now, she can move forward with her tutorials and photography.

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- Alpha Mesh
- Arrr! Prepare to be boarded.

Polyphasic Eye Candy

I recently checked up on the Polyphasic Sleep article on Wikipedia. I saw that a user named Harshey88 added a cool diagram, and that inspired me to add some diagrams as well.

Using the handy dandy Polyphasic Pie Chart Creator and modifying the results a little with the help of the Google Chart API guide, I was able to create these…

Hordaland, a fellow Wikipedian, soon after seeing them in the article asked me if I could create a biphasic one too. So I added this one to the mix.

You can see the charts in all their glory on the polyphasic sleep wikipedia article here.

The colors of the charts were inspired by a blog post called, “Inspiration by Super Heroes Color Schemes“. The post shows different color schemes of popular super heroes. I chose Batman’s color scheme because I believe the character was a polyphasic sleeper.

If you’re interested, the hex codes for Batman’s colors are 586F8E, 7D858F, and 000000. With the hex codes, you too can use Batman’s colors on the web. To get the hex code, I downloaded the image from the blog post I mentioned, opened up the image in GIMP, and used the color picker tool.

I’m starting to really enjoy contributing to the Wikipedia project. You can check out more Wikipedia articles I’ve worked on here…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jorel314

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Adventures in Polyphasic Sleeping