Using Generative AI in Microsoft Paint to Create Images

If you click on the Cocreator icon at the top, right side of the Paint window, if you aren't logged into a Microsoft account you will see a message that a Microsoft account is required.

Scroll down to the bottom of that message where you will find a Sign-in button, then click on it to sign into a Microsoft account.

You will then have an opportunity to describe the image you would like to create using Cocreator.

[ More Info ]

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Star Wars in ASCII

A new Star Wars movie, "The Force Awakens" is being released on Friday December 18, 2015.

The Star Wars ssaga has been told in movies, animated TV series, a comic book series, novels, games, and fan fiction. It has also been related in ASCII art .

                          -===                  ####
        What are you     ""o o                 {"o o}
          talking        _\ -/_                 { =}
           about?    #  /      \             {~~   //~}
                     \\//| __ |\\           {{~{  //}~}}
                      \/ |/  \| \\          {} {//  } {}
                         [][][]  ||         {} //   } {}
                         |\  /|  [#         {} H{{}}} {}
                         |_||_|  I]          @ H"||"} @
                         [ ][ ]  I             {"||"}
                         | || |                {"||"}
                         |_||_|                {"||"}
      __________________/__][_]________________[_][_]____________________

To view the story retold in ASCII art, use a telnet program to connect to a site in the Netherlands, towel.blinkenlights.nl. You can do so on an Apple OS X system by opening the Terminal program found in Applications/Utilities and then issuing the command telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl. You can issue the same command from a Linux system. You can stop the display by typing Ctrl-] and then typing quit at the telnet> prompt. On a Microsoft Windows system, you can use PuTTY; set the connection type to telnet rather than ssh. If you've ever created ASCII art, you can appreciate the magntitude of the effort by the following individuals:

Original Work   : Simon Jansen ( http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ )
Telnetification : Sten Spans ( http://blinkenlights.nl/ )
Terminal Tricks : Mike Edwards (pf-asciimation@mirkwood.net)

                                           /~\
                                          |oo )
                                          _\=/_
                          ___         #  /  _  \
                         / ()\        \\//|/.\|\\
                       _|_____|_       \/  \_/  ||
                      | | === | |         |\ /| ||
                      |_|  O  |_|         \_ _/  #
                       ||  O  ||          | | |
                       ||__*__||          | | |
                      |~ \___/ ~|         []|[]
                      /=\ /=\ /=\         | | |
      ________________[_]_[_]_[_]________/_]_[_\_________________________

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ASCII Art

Before today's Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), computer users were presented with an entirely text-based interface. Those old enough to remember those days may also remember ASCII art where artists constructed images entirely from the characters available to them via their keyboards, i.e., the 95 printable characters available from the 128 possible characters one could have using just 7 bits. The term "ASCII art" was used because the characters were defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963, a standard that on March 11, 1968 U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson mandated that all computers purchased by the U.S. government support.

An example of such art is the "smiling dragon" below.

                             |\_,
                             I,  \,        /|
                         ,__/______\ _____/ |
      ,___,            ,/__        \/      ,/
     //    \,          |/  \.      /     ,/          _______,
     II  @@  \,      ,/\____|          ,/      _____/      __\
     II        \____/      /'         I__ ____/          _/   \
     \\                        ___   //\_/             _/
      \_______                 'I`  //   \\_____       \
             \_________________/   //     \____.\       |
                 \_____            \\.         \_\____/\|
     ,                 \_           \\.          \_/    '
    / \    ______        \        ,/ \\.          \|
   /.. \_/      \__,_  __/      ,/   //     _______|
  /.....\          \_\v  \_    ,/   //     /       \
 /_______\,          \_\_     /    ||     /
                   _/ \\_\_  |__,  //    /       _______,
                 _/ \_   \_\_    \//     I   ___/        \_
               _/ \_       \ \_   \|_____I__/              \,
            __/ \_/     I   \  \_                           \_
   ,_______/  \__I      I    \_  \         ________           \
 _/ __/    \_____\      I      \  \_     _/        \           I
/ _/ /_//         \     /       \   \___/                      I
|/  // //\_____       _/         \_    \____                   I
`   ` |/ I\___ \_____/             \_       \__________________I
      `  I\___,                     /\___,                      \
      ,__I\____,           ,___     I  \________,               I
    _/    \_____,        _/    \____\_____   \______/           I
  ,/   .     \____/    ,/   .                    \______/   |__/
  |   /|   /| \_____/  |   /|   /|   _                 \____/
  |__/ |__/ |__/ \_____|__/ |__/ |__/ \__________________/

For anyone nostalgic for the days when online art was text-based, textfiles.com has a subdomain, Art Scene where you can peruse some of the old ASCII art.

Some of the oldest examples of ASCII art were creations from the 1960's by Kenneth Knowlton, a computer graphics pioneer and artist who worked at Bell Labs.

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Determining an Image File's Dimensions with Command Line Tools

If you are working on a Unix or Linux system and need to determine the dimensions for an image, there are a number of command line tools that may be available to you on the system. If you are including an image on a webpage, if you specify the file's dimensions, then visitor's to your website can view other information on your webpages while potentially large images are still being downloaded for viewing by the visitor's browser. If you specify the dimensions of the image files within your webpages, the browser will allocate the space needed to display the image and then display other parts of the webpage while it is still downloading large image files.

You can specify the image dimensions in pixels like this:

<img src="banana.jpg" alt="A banana" width="320" height="378">

One command line tool that can be used to determine a JPEG file's size is rdjpgcom. The utility is used to display comments that can be embedded in JPG files (you can insert comments with wrjpgcom), but you can also display the dimensions for a JPG file with the --verbose option.

$ rdjpgcom -verbose banana.jpg
JPEG image is 921w * 592h, 3 color components, 8 bits per sample
JPEG process: Baseline

If you have ImageMagick installed on the system, you can also use the identify command to determine the dimensions of an image file. Note: if you are using RedHat Linux, or another version of Linux that uses RPM to manage software on the system, you can issue the command rpm -qi ImageMagick to see whether it is installed.

$ identify banana.jpg
banana.jpg JPEG 921x592 DirectClass 8-bit 87kb 0.0u 0:01

The identify utility displays the width followed by the height.

Another command that may be available to you is imgsize.

$ imgsize banana.jpg
imgsize banana.jpg
width="921" height="592"

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