Burnt Paper plugin for GIMP February 16th, 2010
Patrick Stein

Yesterday, I decided to make the images in my article look like they were on old, burnt paper. I did this manually in the GIMP.

I liked the effect, but I didn’t want the tedium of having to do all n steps manually next time I go to use it. So, I wrote a GIMP plugin script to do it.

Here is an example of the plugin script in action. As you can see, I started with a text layer and a selection that was bigger than the text layer. The plugin uses the selection size as original edge of the paper (original, as in before the paper was burned).

And, here is the resulting image:

Here is the Burnt Paper plugin script. Plop this in a directory that’s in your script search path and refresh GIMP’s scripting and then you’ll find it in the Filters > Decor menu. [You can see the script search path by going to Edit > Preferences and selecting Scripts under Folders in the left sidebar. And, you can refresh the scripts by going to Filters > Script-Fu > Refresh Scripts.]

Spelling Toy iPhone App Released February 9th, 2010
Patrick Stein

I am pleased to announce, that my Spelling Toy for Kids is now available on the iTunes Store.

The first five respondents to this article will receive a Promotional Code to download the app for free! (Edit: all promo codes dished out… if you really want one and will publicly review my app in your blog, I’ll dig up another promo code for you.)

Features

  • Kid-friendly interface! Just pick the letters you want!
  • Guides your child to the proper spelling of each word.
  • Adapts to your child! Cards that consistently give your child trouble show up more often.
  • Support for English, Spanish, and French! (German and Japanese Kana coming soon)
  • Lots of words to learn (with more coming soon).
  • Three different skill levels to challenge your kid!
  • Exercise some or all of the categories: Numbers, Colors, Foods (with more coming soon).

Public Domain Fourier Transform Library for Common Lisp October 7th, 2009
Patrick Stein

In response to my recent post about genetically selecting cosine waves for image approximation, several reddit commentors said that I should just have taken the Fourier transform, kept the largest 100 coefficients and did the inverse Fourier transform. [I haven’t run the RMS calculation on the result yet, but visually, it looks pretty nice with my test image. More details on that in a later post.]

The Lisp code that I used in that article didn’t actually use Fast Fourier Transforms. To test the commentors’ claims, I needed an FFT library in Lisp. I searched around a bit and found an FFI (Foreign Function Interface) wrapper around the FFTW library. After fiddling with that library and the wrapper for about two hours, I bailed on it and wrote my own Fast Fourier Transform library entirely in Lisp.

More information as well as links to getting the code are here: nklein / Software / CL-FFT.

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