Tech tips

[TV-VCR 14]

Post some tech tips (software or hardware) that you know of. Also includes applications you recommend.

Tired of your .JPG/.JPEG images looking like rubbish, even when you save them at max quality? Disable Color Subsampling. If your image editing program of choice doesn't allow to disable color subsampling when saving, you can just save the image as a .PNG, open it up in Irfanview, and go from there.

Enabled:

Disabled:

[Duke87 1,070]

Interesting tip.

Worth noting, though, that if you do that, the filesize becomes substantially larger.

Compare the dithered 6.69 kb to the full 11.8 kb.

Now here's the fun part: take that 11.8 kb version and put it through PNGOut. Bam!  Now it's 9.58 kb.

Conclusion? A fully optimized png will have a smaller filesize, so color subsampling disabled jpegs aren't worth it.

Well, unless you're allergic to png and absolutely must have it in jpeg format, anyway.

[TV-VCR 14]

Originally posted by: Duke87 Interesting tip.

Worth noting, though, that if you do that, the filesize becomes substantially larger.

Compare the dithered 6.69 kb to the full 11.8 kb.

Now here's the fun part: take that 11.8 kb version and put it through PNGOut. Bam!  Now it's 9.58 kb.

Conclusion? A fully optimized png will have a smaller filesize, so color subsampling disabled jpegs aren't worth it.

Well, unless you're allergic to png and absolutely must have it in jpeg format, anyway.quote>

I didn't mean use that technique in all situations. But there are still quite a few occasions where this tip will come in handy. I've already used it about 30 times now, one of them being my ST avatar. The original version of it was PNG; even if I used a PNG compressor, ST doesn't allow PNGs anyway.

[screamingman12 30]

HDD tip:

SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, will tell you when/if your HDD is about to fail. It can (and should be) be enabled on most recent systems, and can be helpful for backing up/recovering data. A thrid party tool is needed to use it, as Windows (XP) doesn't include a monitor, the one I use is called SpeedFan, and also reads temperature sensors from the HDD and processor (very useful on a laptop), plus its free!