The Animated Gif Resurgence

Technology comes and goes and many internet trends have died out in the last 20 years. One internet fad that still seems to endure, as antiquated as it is, is the animated gif. Instead of seeing less of these infinitely looped moments of time, we are seeing more.  Forum users and blog readers are using them with reckless abandon in threads as a means of expressing themselves without being verbose. Gifs used in this way are called Reaction Gifs and new  reactions are popping up every day. So if you are looking for a way to spice up an email, text, or online reply. Consider using a gif.

PBS has an interesting video covering the subject of GIFs.

Superimpose Your Face into Other Photos

You don’t need to know how to use Photoshop to have some superimposing fun with your pics. FaceInHole is a fun web app that lets you upload your pics and put them in various funny settings, such as a Van Gogh painting, a movie poster, or a sexy photo. There are many many other settings as well.  The app allows you to rotate and size your picture to fit the hole.  You can also adjust the color, contrast, and saturation to get a good seamless match.  Check it out. http://www.faceinhole.com/

Top Celebrity Look-alike Generator

In my last Celebrity Look-alike Generator Shoot Out there were three contenders in the celebrity look alike arena.  What is the best doppelganger finder now?

Thom Yorke as a test image

My Heritage Face Recognition is the only tool for finding your celebrity doppelganger  for now. I tested a few others and they all failed miserably.  Unfortunately, My Heritage now requires you to install a toolbar. Urg. I found this intrusive and was reluctant to continue the test since I hate installing anything spammy that might contain  adware, spyware and the like.  I installed it anyway, and this is what I found.

When installing the toolbar in firefox and IE there are a couple of additional bundled toolbars they try to sneak on your system. I suggest unchecking the additional toolbars.  After doing my tests I was able to both disable, and uninstall the toolbar with no problems in  IE and Firefox.  So, if you are worried about installing the toolbar, don’t sweat it,  just disable or uninstall it when you’re done playing with the software.

On to the test: Not bad! They got that it was Thom Yorke and the other matches share some characteristics.

Cool Pattern Generator

Repper, the pattern generator is a cool tool for creating patterned tiles for website backgrounds. Simply upload your image and the site provides an interface to experiment with mirrored patterns much like a kaleidoscope. Once you have a pattern you are happy with, Repper lets you save the resulting image tile to your computer where you can use it as a background for myspace or any other site you can use a tiled background picture on.

Laguna Goat

Check it out and create your own awesome backgrounds.