MeFi post: Image>Adjustments>Levels = WTF?

That sounds great in theory, but I'm having trouble thinking up any interesting images one could create under the constraints of a histogram (no black above white). I mean, if you can't create pac man, how awesome can it really be?

Hold on, it's not quite that bad. Any image that can be formed from three contiguous primary coloured polygons on the sides of the image will do for a histogram of a true-colour image. The difficulty lays in creating a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by PuGZ at 6:40 AM on October 2, 2007

gnfti: Yeah, it is the same short-coming but it allows *some* wiggle-room.

In a fit of boredom during the 90 minutes since my last post, I decided to throw together a small script to do what cortex was talking about.

The script takes an arbitrary histogram (I chose to take the histogram from an existing photo rather than create one by hand, but that would work too.) It then takes a base image and modifies it until a final image is created that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by PuGZ at 8:56 AM on October 2, 2007

Thanks. I've improved it ever so slightly. (You need to flip back and forth between the old image and this one to see the difference) Most entertaining procrastination ever. =P

You're right in your assessment, I think. I'll keep playing around with it when I get back later this evening.
posted to MetaFilter by PuGZ at 7:36 PM on October 2, 2007

MeFi post: Pre-Brute Forced Password Cracking

Works scarily well for NTLM (even with SYSKEY). This is due to an insane cutting-up of passwords into 7-character chunks before encrypting the password. Very odd, very counter-productive.

(I know this because I spent two weeks of CPU time generating some NTLM tables myself! :P)
posted to MetaFilter by PuGZ at 4:50 AM on November 11, 2005