Anthony Volodkin is fascinated

"The last thing we need to do is encourage our customers to stare at their phones."

Mark Cuban on apps that augment sports events.  Same can be easily said about concerts. Sorry, startups. (via Ian)

KBP->TXL

burtondurand:

More @Horse_eBooks comics inspired by tweets. I asked my Twitter followers to suggest some to draw out, and these were the ones selected!

sharingtime:

Holy crap.

HOLY CRAP.

How does Errol Morris blow my mind every single time?

Then I read this follow-up from Salon.com and the last paragraph made my jaw drop some more.

Wow.

This was the craziest thing I’ve watched in months, fantastic

This CooperUnion.biz site is excellent

I propose a new standard ajax loading indicator

Вареники (step 5)

Вареники (step 4)

Вареники (step 3)

Вареники (step 2)

Вареники (step 1)

Nm, watching Dresden Dolls Australian live stream, you?

Gray winter is gray (but the army barracks turned apartment buildings are cool)

Тройной Одеколон (“Triple Cologne”), a soviet classic. Enterprising people were able to successfully convert this into a “drinkable” beverage

gdal2tiles.py semi-transparent border issue

It turns out that if you try to use gdal2tiles.py (and other utilities that are based on it, like MapTiler) to make Google Maps-compatible tiles out of an image, the software arbitrarily adds a border to certain sides of your generated map.

This happens because while interpolating your tiles, gdal2tiles gets confused by missing data around the edges of your input image.  There are bugs open about this, and some solutions have suggested using a “-r antialias” flag to render the tiles, however we could not get that rendering feature to work at all (and sounds like it’s not super-likely to correct this issue).

Instead, it turned out that your best bet is to make sure your input image will perfectly fit the zoom levels you desire.  This won’t require any processing to fill in missing data, and so no border will be generated.  For example, if you want your image to fit perfectly at zoom levels 5 4 3 and 2, it must be 6144 x 6144 (24 x 24, 256x256 pixel tiles at native zoom level 5).  This will allow, 24 tiles to become, 12, 6 & 3 at levels 4, 3 and 2 respectively. You will still have a border at level 1, since that doesn’t divide into complete tiles, but that one is so small it can sometimes be ignored.  For extra points, you can, of course, start making non-standard sized tiles (200x200, for ex), that are easier to work with, but harder to generate.

This concludes our session on amateur map making.