Losslessly Joining JPEGs with JPEGTran

The Introduction

On occasion, you may find that you need to join – or tile – two or more JPEG images into a single image and that you need to do so without the usual JPEG degradation that comes from saving an edited JPEG again and again and again. Fortunately, under some circumstances, there is a solution – JPEGTran from the Independent JPEG Group.

The Images

Our sample images are two tiles taken from The Map Project – in this case map Yorkshire Sheet CLXXIV.SW, a 1950s map of south-west York in the United Kingdom.

‘Image_A.jpeg’
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Dot Zip Domains Considered Harmful

So… it appears that Google, in their infinite wisdom stupidity, has bought and launched the top level domain ‘zip’ and thus introduced such wonderful domains as ‘https://details.zip’, ‘http://taxforms.zip’ or, as you can see below, ‘https://financialstatement.zip‘. And thus possibly confusing everyone, for ever, all of the time.

But Google is not alone in partaking in this stupidity. ICANN, who should have been on the ball and who already had rules about homophones in UTF domains, seem to have let this slip though without a single thought.

The damned fools.

Random Acts of Top of the Pops: #4 – February 24th, 1994

Episode Number: 1564
First Shown: 7.00pm on February 24th, 1994
Presenter(s): Bruno Brookes
Official Top 40: @The Official Charts
Studio: BBC Elstree Centre
iPlayer: Top of the Pops – February 24th, 1994
BBC Genome: Here!

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Disabling Windows XP Ballon Tips

And it’s time for an aide-mémoire for a fact that seems to be disappearing into the ether.

Windows XP bubble tips can be disabled by:

  • Opening Regedit
  • Navigating to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
  • Creating a new String value of ‘EnableBubbleTips’.
  • Setting this value to ‘0’.
  • Restarting Windows.