One Year Ago · 6:10am Feb 3rd, 2014
One year ago today, EoP got some big love in the form of being re-edited. Along with a plethora of new scenes and fixes, the 24 chapters were made smaller and redistributed into 52 new chapters. It was this change that enabled me to feasibly start working on an audiobook for it, of which I hit chapter 13 just yesterday.
In honor of this event, I've taken the liberty of encoding the entire story into a single easy to read image format, for those of us who prefer visual media or just like to have it on the go. So without any further adieu, here it is:
(replaced the image with a cooler one. old one was here: http://endofponies.com/eop.txt.png)
Right now you probably think that I'm kidding you, but I'm not. A text copy of the entirety of The End of Ponies is encoded into the pixels of that image.
Don't believe me? You can test it yourself: http://mwr247.com/dev/pngz/ (I Pinkie Pie Promise it's a safe website. It's mine, and on the same server as http://endofponies.com/). Just select that image to upload, tell it to decompress, and hit the button, and it'll convert it back into text format. Feel free to try compressing and decompressing other stuff too. It works with almost any type of file, and it's pretty cool (you won't get the cool watermark effect though, that took a little extra work to implant).
WARNING: EGGHEAD STUFF BELOW
This was a project I conceived a few months back and finally wrote over this last weekend (didn't do it for eop though). What it does is when you upload a file, it compresses it, then converts each character into a color value (red, green, or blue). It takes each group of color values and encodes them into each pixel, creating the image you see above. That means each pixel contains three characters each. Transparency is only used in the last line to mark the end of the file, so by using it on every line but the last I was able to add the Harmony watermark without corrupting the data.
WARNING: EGGHEAD STUFF ABOVE
All in all, just a fun little programming project of mine. Have fun, and happy birthday EoP 2013 Edition =)
- Prismic
P.S.
To add simple watermarks (like the original image I had above):
1. Compress something on the site and download the image.
2. Open image in an advanced image editing program (Photoshop, Gimp, etc). Don't use Paint.
3. Create a selection in the shape you want to watermark (don't let it effect the bottom row of pixels).
4. Cut the selection from the image and paste on a new layer (in the exact same position).
5. Set the transparency of the new layer to whatever you want.
6. Save the image as a PNG file.
Assuming you did this all right, attempt to run it through the decompressor. If you download the file and it has the data in it, then success!
To add complex watermarks (like the current image above):
- You'll have to decompose the image into RBGA layers, then recompose with the alpha layer set to a grayscale copy of the image you want to use as the watermark. That's the only clue you get =P
- EDIT: I made a script to add complex watermarks: http://mwr247.com/dev/transmark/
Just make sure to make it so the image you use as the mark is at least 1 pixel shorter than the encoded one.
I love you like candy, dog-eyes.
But sometimes... you scare me.
webspace.webring.com/people/uu/um_1370/LitMer28.jpg
You know what, this is amazing, and what's really really cool is that it reminds me of something that was in a science fiction story years ago. If you're familiar with Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, you may also know his book, Shadow of the Hegemon. Well, at one point in it, a character embeds a secret message in the pixels of an image through what I can only assume is this type of encoding sort of thing.
Anyways, this is super super cool, and I don't understand it in the slightest.
Since transparency is separate value from the text, that means that you could encode any message beneath an overlaid image to mask the fact of it being a sort of message, correct? I'm sure I'm overestimating the potential use of this sort of thing in any kind of legitimate cryptography, but I can see this sort of thing as being incredibly hard to intercept and decrypt unless you have the decoder, because there's no reason you couldn't arbitrarily scramble the key of character assignments to colors for a specific series of messages, making it that much harder for an outside eye to decode.
Anyways, I just want to say this is really cool and I absolutely want to try playing with this more in the future.
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Good. Scared is good
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Thanks Warden! =) I don't have many skills, but I love the ones that I do lol...
Really? I guess I haven't read that far in the book. I need to get back to that, but that's pretty sweet. And actually, that gives me an idea to do exactly that now... dang haha.
You're almost exactly spot on here, actually
Short of the last line (where transparency sorta matters), transparency isn't important anywhere else (I tried to use the alpha channel to hold more data, but things get hairy...). Without the decoder, you would be pretty sunk, but that's somewhat what information gathering organizations specialize in. If this concept were to ever get popular, it would be as secure as a typical zip file (but still about 20% cooler lol).
Go for it! My host is somewhat resource limited, so uploads are capped at 8MB, but I'm planning on porting it to some other languages, as well as offering features encoding data to and fro ma text box, for quick short messages. Thanks for the comments though, I appreciate it
This is sort of genius.
This is very, very cool. Well done!