Milburn

Father’s day was celebrated here in the UK last Sunday. I decided that I’d rise to the occasion and make something special. I can’t say that I’m a whiz with Photoshop because I don’t actually own a copy of it, instead I rely on a rather old version of Paint Shop Pro.

Paint Shop Pro is a nice application. It lacks some of the more advanced canvas and brush features of Photoshop which means that it lacks the creative edge. Also I have yet to find a way to convert Photoshop brushes and documents to Paint Shop Pro documents.

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Steganography is what I would call the less powerful and less well known brother of cryptography. Whereas cryptography is encoding something so it can’t be read without a key, steganography is hiding something so it can’t be found without directions. Since cryptography offers a greater level of security for less effort it has often been used as opposed to steganography.

Think of cryptography as the lock to a safe. You need a key to open the safe. Steganography is hiding the safe somewhere where it can’t be found easily such as behind the painting on the wall. To find the safe you need directions. So how is steganography useful in the modern world. It can actually be used in several ways. A secret file can be hidden on your computer so it looks like an ordinary file. I’m going to show you today how to hide an MP3 file inside a JPEG or GIF image.

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I created some stereographic pairs yesterday and used some online software to create an anaglyph for viewers with red and cyan glasses. Creating anaglyphs is in fact a really easy task. All that has to be done is to separate the red layer from the left image and the green and blue layers from the right image. Finally the three layers are combined to create a colour anaglyph. Simple.

Having a little experience with PHP, I decided to create a simple script to create anaglyphs. First I needed to plan out how the script was going to work. The GD library has no native image filters except in PHP5. My plan works like so.

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Phoenix landed on Mars on the 25^th of May. I was quite interested in the landing as I am part of a local astronomy group. I was also very excited when I saw some of the photos which came back from the probe.

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This is my new blog which I have got up and running. The style stills needs a little touching up here and there but it is all working. Watch this space for more interesting stuff!