Pictures of the Hacker

       Here are some pictures I managed to scan-in at a friend's parents' office. Thanx Michael.

Experts' stuff

       If you would like to know what I had to do to make these pics available online, here you can. First I scanned them in. (What a surprise.) I used a scanner named UMAX Astra 1220S and the scanning software VistaScan. Then I removed the white borders using Corel PhotoPaint and took the pictures home. After installing Paint Shop Pro 5.03 I had to correct the colors. I don't know if the gamma of my monitor is bad, or if the pictures were really that red, but they looked awful. So I changed the RGB values of them, reduced the red and a bit of the green, to make them look normal. Then I had to do something with the size. They were about 4.5 megabytes each as BMPs. So I tried my favorite picture format, PNG, but to my disappointment they were compressed only to about 2.5 megabytes. That was still far too much. I had to cut the size radically. So though I hate JPGs, I tried it. JPG compression is lossy. That means, that you lose the precise image. If you have a part on it, where there are dark blue parts and white parts close together, it changes them to bright blue. Instead of two colors, you have one and the size of the file is 50% smaller. Of course this is a very harsh example, but to understand how lossy compression works, it should be enough. You can define how much the picture will be changed, but as you can think, the better the quality (in this case, quality means showing/having little difference to the original picture), the larger the file. But back to the pics. I tried it, but they were still too large when using an acceptable quality. So I had to resize them. I made them 75% smaller, meaning I resized both the horizontal and the vertical sides to 50%. Now the BMPs were about 1 megabyte large. I tried PNG again, but the 200 kilobytes are still just too large for fast access, so I had to make them JPGs. I used progressive compression, using a quality of 85%, only one pic I have compressed using 90%, because it looked terrible with 85. Then I created the thumbnails, 1% of the original size, meaning I resized them to one tenth times one tenth. The work was finished.
       I have the original pictures at home, so if anyone is interested in seeing the pictures in the best quality, or original size, contact me.

The pictures...

       Here I am, sometime around October 1998, just before going to dance school. The photo was taken in our living-room. I look great, don't I ?  :-)  BTW: My friend said we have some kind of crooked appartment... I assure all of you, it is just the way the picture has been taken, we build normal houses here in Slovakia !

       This photo was taken on my birthday, April 13^th, 1999. Actually, it was my sixteenth birthday, not that you think... :-)  That's our living-room, too, and our sofa. :-)

       This is Christmas '98. Again, our living room, with the dining table. With me, you can also see my brother and his girlfriend.

       Christmas '98 once more, same actors. God I look awful here. I wanted to remove the right part of the picture, but I wanted to see if you can bear the reality. ;-)  BTW: This is the pic compressed using 90% quality, for those who read the Expert's stuff above.

       From left: my mom, my dad and a friend of mom's. This was taken on a trip to the castle. You can see the top of the tower of St. Martin's Cathedral on the right.

       A close-up scan of me, from the birthday pic. I hope you like this one.

       Same as above, just using a nice effect. It is called "vineta" in the Czech version of PhotoPaint and I have no idea what it's called in English. I thought it was nice, so I included it here. You might want to print it out and hang above your bed...who knows. ;-)

       This picture was taken in summer '98 and scanned-in in the same year. You can see our new car, my parents and me.

Legal stuff

       The picture on the top of this page is probably copyright Hypnovista software. Just to be legal.