Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’m sure that you’ve seen ASCII art similar to the image pictured above. It’s where someone takes a photo and arranges characters in a precise way to accurately represent the original image. Take our logo for example, in the above image a bunch of characters and spaces were placed next to each other until they created something that looked right.

Doing this can be a painstaking process, and frankly it is something that I would never want to do myself. The logo that I created above was done using a service called Photo2Text, where all you have to do is input an image and it will spit out a text file for you to download. You just open that file up in Notepad (with wordwrap turned off) and you’ll see a masterpiece.

I was actually having some fun with this after downloading the Firefox extension, which lets you right-click on any image on the Internet and have it converted to ASCII art. I found a few images to convert and here are the results:

Note: I reduced the font size to 4 so that the images could easily be seen. The larger the font size you pick in Notepad the further away you’ll need to be to recognize the image.

Eiffel Tower:

2009 Camaro:

Michael Jordan:

See how easy it was for me to become an ASCII art pro? Go ahead and grab some photos to do this with and head on over to the Photo2Text site. You’ll be impressing your friends in no time, and if you find yourself using it more than you thought it might be beneficial to install the Firefox extension.

Source: Firefox Facts

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The DSLR market just seems to keep on speeding up, and it looks like Olympus might be lagging back toward the caboose a bit with its latest full-body DSLR, the E-5. It’s the successor to the E-3, jumping to 12.3 megapixels and adding 720p recording with full exposure controls, plus a handy swiveling LCD. But, according to reviews, it just doesn’t quite compare to something like a much cheaper Nikon D7000. PhotographyBlog liked the improved image quality and the rugged build, but not the ugly rolling shutter effect in video recording and the poor high ISO performance. Similarly DigitalCameraReview says this $1,699 beast “feels like a modest update to the E-3,” a sentiment shared by Pocket-Lint as well. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Olympus E-5 DSLR reviewed: solid upgrade for E-3 owners, not much appeal for anyone else originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When you round up the usual suspects for the highest-tech, price-be-damned top 10 cars, the most usual suspect is the German or Japanese automaker who most recently shipped a full-size luxury sport sedan. Time matters when technology surges forward. This year, the car with the most technology and the most unique technology is the months-old 2011 Audi A8, with a console touchpad and character recognition augmenting the MMI controller; torque vectoring; and outstanding (for two-ton cars) fuel economy. The touchpad sits just ahead of the shift lever (a horizontal bar) and you use it as a wrist rest while entering communications, phone, or infotainment commands. An nVidia processor controls the navigation system and LCD display.

“This is a Buick?” Yes, indeed, thanks to a Buick DNA that now includes good looks, reasonable handling, and the right technology features (some standard, some optional). The full-size Buick LaCrosse sedan (see review) is helping move Buick demographics from Social Security to social, outgoing, and secure. It even gets as much as 30 mpg highway albeit with an entry, life’s-too-short-for-this, four-cylinder engine in a $27,500 base LaCrosse CX. The tech features you want will be more readily had on the mid-range CXL or top-line CXS.

With Honda’s third iteration of the minivan (four if you count a late-’90s tall wagon bearing the name), the new 2011 Honda Odyssey combines a fuel-efficient drivetrain with enough cockpit infotainment wizardry to satisfy all eight passengers, four of whom can be adults riding in supreme comfort. The V6 engine further improves its variable cylinder shutdown technology, the transmission finally has six gears (upper range models), and the Odyssey gets up to 28 mpg on the highway. Active noise cancellation continues from the previous generation to cut back some of the road noise. Can your SUV do that?