Category: Tech
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Introducing Fractal Fran
Say hello to Fractal Fran, my new digital art assistant and avatar. She’ll be your guide to spellbinding digital designs and fractal art (plus, perhaps, occasional photography of a more traditional nature). Large, soulful eyes. Neon turban. Green whiskers. Small, pursed lips. These and other traits mark Fran as an emissary from the Vardax home-world. Vardax…
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Still Chasing the God Particle!
Physicists at CERN — home of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — are bracing for a fresh assault on the tantalizing Higgs boson. In 2012 they used CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to generate subatomic debris that could be interpreted as traces of a single “God particle” (as the Higgs sometimes is called). (Don’t call it that around…
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Synchronized Fireflies of the Smoky Mountains
Just saw my first summer fireflies within the past week or two. They come out, here in East Tennessee, sometime in June. Now that July has arrived, so have they, in full force. This fractal picture I drew may be stylized, but it does depict the way these beautiful insects cluster around vegetation. In the…
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Fractal Art: More from Gary Matthews
The response to my Star Gate picture, posted the other day, has thrilled me. Thumbnail at the right — or visit the original post here. Nothing, however, thrills me more than the many requests I’m getting to see more of my fractal art. There are quite a few more images, some of which strike me as sufficiently…
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The Gary Matthews Fractals
Digital art. I’ve long been a sucker for it. Lately I’ve been trying my hand at fractals, a particularly fascinating type of digital art. For me it started simply as puttering. Before I knew it, my hard drive was bursting with images. Some better than others. But all of them fun (for me, at least). Here’s a sample:…
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Google Plus: Track Posts and Comments
Youâve written a wildly popular post on Google Plus. People are talking. Lots of reshares, including some by social-media heavyweights whose followers greatly outnumber yours. You shared it first, perhaps, as a link to your blog, with a terse summary. You shared it again as a standalone article, with a great cover photo. Again with a…
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More Fancy Fonts and Special Characters
Brighten your social-media posts with fancy fonts and special characters! Like this: â±á©ïŹĄá á© â±OïŹĄâá and ÏââŻÂąážŻÎ±Ć âĐœÎ±Òα¹âΔÒáč§. As ever-more publishing migrates to social platforms like Facebook and Google Plus, the apparent lack of formatting options becomes confining indeed. On Facebook we have essentially none. Google Plus users are lucky: There we at least have boldface, italic, and…
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Google Comments Unleashed
What’s the most important new resource for bloggers and web designers, now that link images appear full-width on Google Plus? Most articles focus on increased website traffic, since these highly visible images click through to their target links. That’s indeed important. Even more important, however, in my view, is the fresh incentive this gives to…
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Google Plus displaying full-width link images
The Google Plus social network apparently has just begun displaying link images as full-width photographs — not simply as thumbnails. [UPDATE: From Saturday, March 15 through Monday, March 17 — the Ides of March through Saint Patrick’s Day — Google Plus links reverted to the old-style thumbnail images. As of today, March 18, they are…
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Facebook’s Digital Unclaimed Freight Train
What will happen, 30 years from now, to the 300 million photos we uploaded yesterday to Facebook? Image Source Here’s your answer: Facebook will have them. We (probably) won’t. Facebook will have them labeled, categorized, ranked, and documented as to where and when they were taken, what they’re of, and who’s in them. We (almost…