Andrej's notes

LED binary watch is a one of the most common geek gadgets available. The only problem with binary watch is that while it’s done to be ‘cool’ and unusual, it’s also not very convenient to use even for geeks, at least in my opinion. I think so because it fundamentally breaks the way people use watch usually. Correct me if I am wrong, but in my opinion the exact numbers don’t have any real meaning for everyone who uses watch. What’s important is which part of some interval of time is now: morning, evening, noon or midnight, and a fraction which tells us how far we are from one important point in time or from another. The same applies to shorter time intervals: usually an hour’s divided into quarters or 5-minute intervals.

How often do you need to do something with extra-large images? Usually, I don’t need to, but recently I’ve received one such an image, and really needed to crop it. That image was 21 MiB 16 Kpixel×12 KPixel aerial image in a JPEG file. As anybody knows, JPEG files can be converted without decoding the whole image in the memory, you can read why on the Wikipedia. You just need to go through all image blocks sequentially and write them in the new format. If the image is progressive JPEG, this is even easier. The same with cropping: you can just skip some image blocks without decoding them.