1.May Day is called Labor Day, Labor Movement Day, International Working Class Struggle Day or May Day. It is a public holiday in Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Austria, Belgium, parts of Switzerland and many other countries.

FREE long weekend

May 1, 1994, today 26 years ago

"It was Senna!" The outcry of an Italian colleague on May 1st, 1994 at 2.17 p.m. also shocked the media representatives in the press center of the race track in Imola. The Brazilian, who was considered invulnerable, had crashed into the Tamburello curve on the wall with his Williams, and Senna was, as it turned out later, killed by the right front tire.

Ratzenberger killed in an accident

Rubens Barrichello's horror accident, which miraculously escaped with a broken nose, already frightened everyone on Friday. And less than 24 hours later, the premier class mourned another fatality twelve years after Riccardo Paletti (Montreal). The Austrian Roland Ratzenberger, after the front wing of his Simtek was broken, raced unscrupulously into the guardrails at over 300 km/h.

Senna the best ever, R.I.P

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
   

What do you say about the idea, Themes automatically switch between Day and Night design

What does your family planning look like?

Girlfriend, boyfriend ? Marry? Children, If yes, how many? Or do you have no second at all for that?

regards Tc4me

So as a few of you guys know, I used to have a chat room hosting service for Ajax Chat some number of years ago. We hosted about 600 of them on our little VPS, and it actually made enough money towards the end to break even. Doesn't sound exciting, but on a little chat room hosting service where the only ads were on the login page, it was encouraging. 

Anyway, I'm beyond happy to have the server back from the host. We unfortunately got suspended some number of years ago for apparently not having the DDOS filtering on autopay (my fault completely), but in any case, we have the files back now. I will likely never bring it back (it wouldn't be worthwhile in the age of Discord), but I'm not gonna lie, the idea seems interesting. 

Not sure what I'm gonna do with it at this point, but I might post some of the code in the coming months. We made quite a lot of very neat improvements to it (including an admin panel for settings, real nickname registration, new commands, among other improvements).

Due to popular demand, by members nominating staff members for the Member of the Month, from this point forward we will also be awarding the "Employee of the Month" award to a member on the staff team that has made lasting positive contributions on the Makestation community.

That said, I would like to announce the Makestation Employee of the Month for May 2020:

Congratulations Lain!

Please make your selection or the Member of the Month for May 2020.

This vote is to recognize members for their contributions for the previous month. In this case, a user's contributions for the month of April lead to their nomination for the May Member of the Month.

The poll is anonymous, and no one will see your vote.

Member of the Month candidates:
tc4me
Kyng

Hello Darth-Apple, my question relates to user mouseover, is there the addon with you? Greetings Tc4me

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
   

Our little son Ben speaks mainly English although we only speak German at home. He learns this from gaming devices, at 5 years he knows his way around on his smartphone, turns on you tube, watches everything in English, Spanish, etc. His autism talent is a photographic memory, everything after speaking in every language, disadvantage, he can not initiate a dialogue, he directs echilalie. that is, if you ask; Ben how are you Then he says Ben how are you. But if he wants something, he can now communicate. With words in all languages .. today the letter U has been in the head since 5 am ... he runs through the house, screams in English. U U U like an umbrella, or U U like a unicorn and that is a bit stressful for hours, because I don't always understand in which language he speaks and what he wants and then he gets overloaded and hits himself 

it hurts me as a father to see him destroy himself and I can't help him
No matter what he does, he is and remains my darling, The best and most beautiful things in the world can neither be seen nor touched. They have to be felt with the heart.

So, of course we're all aware of the JPEG compression format. One of my assignments is to actually do this process. As we know, JPEG takes a fairly large image and compresses it down to only a small fraction of the size. Often, almost native levels of quality can be perceived at 1/10 to 1/20 of the size. But, as it turns out, JPEG is a format from the early 90s, and it's still pretty inefficient. In recent years, we've figured out ways to do much better.

JPEG's secret (even in the 90s) is in how it encodes its data. In a gross simplification, it chops up the image into 8x8 blocks of pixels. It then creates a mathematical formula for these 64 pixels, trying to get a relatively similar output to the original block. With 64 pixels in each 8x8 block, you won't find a tiny formula that represents them perfectly, but you might find one that gets close.

When you increase your image quality settings, you're actually giving the encoder more room to encode a larger "formula". The encoder doesn't have to throw out as much detail to get the encoding to fit within the size constraints. This is actually done using a method called discrete cosine transformation, and is the same method used to encode Ogg Vorbis files (but the technical details here are something I'll discuss on another post). In short, there is quite a lot of science and math behind it. However, the downside is that when you're working with 8x8 chunks, there's still a lot of efficiency that's lost. 

JPEG 2000 is quite a bit better than JPEG, and it does this by using a completely different algorithm entirely. Rather than taking 8x8 blocks, it takes the entire image, chops it up into arbitrary blocks, and stores the differences between them. I'm still researching this currently. I'm not entirely sure how this works as well as it does, but the video below is all you need to get a feel for just how powerful this compression actually is. The top right is the corner you want to look at. Voodoo magic at this point. Absolutely amazing how well it does, even at ~15KB file sizes.  



Make sure you turn it on HD! Slow it down to 0.25x speed to truly get a good feel. To whoever did this video, you did it justice.

Sadly, JPEG 2000 is not widely supported. Most photo editing programs do support it, but web browsers are hit or miss. Chrome doesn't support it at all, which pretty much puts the nail in the coffin.