Starting a thread to keep track of the weird, wonderful, and just plain useful little sites and tools. Sort of a community knowledge bank, of sorts. A web ring of posts, if you will.
Cartoon.pho.to is a site for quickly manipulating expressions in photos. It’s been a real joy to use to quickly bash out reaction images. Found it works best with stylzed images, like my avatar.
Whenever I do a Google image search what always comes up first is a stock photo, with a watermark. I was able to find a version without it with an image search tool called Tineye. May not work all the time.
That was pretty wild - it opened a media player where the length continually updates as it’s playing, so the playbar bounced back and forth in time as if it were dancing to the music.
Even wilder, when that song ended, it immediately started playing the very last song I listened to on Youtube just a few minutes ago.
It trims out ads and other extras, but occasionally trims out most of an article because of a section break.
There used to be a handy downloadable alternative at https://grabmybooks.com/, but it seems to have disappeared, and now redirirects to a domain seller and lacks any usable archive. It allowed more options to retrieve a whole page, if necessary, and to combine pages into a single file.
There is also https://epub.press/, which is something of a middle ground, but can’t handle archive pages, or couldn’t when I switch to dot epub.
RAW Power is a bit of a jumbled mess, but it get’s the job done. I have been using this for the past few months.
ProCamera I learned about through a member’s recommendation on DPReview yesterday. Not only does it allow for manual control over focus and exposure, but it also allows you to disable the “optimization” the Apple uses by default.
I feel like I can take them seriously because A) they have been around for a few years, B) you can actually buy them instead of renting them.
Here is a demo picture I took last night. This looks more like an actual photograph to me. I have never been completely happy with the results I get through the Apple camera software. The lighting and level of detail feel more natural. Go ahead, zoom in.
I’ll give this a go and see how it fits in my workflow. A lot of the functions are in the tools I already use, but having everything in one place can be a plus, even if I’m forced to use a mouse.
I also see that more functions can be added with extensions, that’s a big positive for me.
You might not need the mouse as much as you think. I started the app with some Base64 in the clipboard and it switched to that tool and automatically decoded it