Lossless Image File Formats

This was originally a two-part post on cohost.

Recently I needed to convert a large TIFF scan of a duochrome page into something reasonable, i.e. a web-supported image format that was still lossless since it seemed a shame to ruin such a nice high-definition scan with lossy compression. In terms of lossless formats, all browsers¹ support PNG, WEBP, and AVIF, while I really hope JXL support is imminent.

I therefore wanted to see which file format would perform the best in terms of file size by converting my ~183 MiB TIFF to each of them using ImageMagick. For PNG, WEBP, and JXL, there’s an effort setting: lower effort means faster compression but larger size, while higher effort means slower compression but smaller size. I used the highest three settings for these, yielding sizes from ~50 MiB to ~20 MiB. (As a treat, I’ve also converted to JPG, WEBP, AVIF, and JXL at -quality 0, i.e. lossy with the worst settings.)

The Designation Sign Design of the MFL

This was originally posted on cohost.

On the Market–Frankford trains of SEPTA in Philadelphia, the designation signs indicating the line and the next stop are very simple 18-panel 3×5-segment displays.

MathML Cheat Sheet

UPDATE: U+237C ⍼ ⍼

Part 1: U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW
This is part 2.
Part 3: Monotype Mathematical Sorts
Part 4: U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼
Many thanks to Barbara Beeton, James David Mason, Anders Berglund, David Bolton, Andy Whyte, Claire Welford-Elkin, and Bob Richardson.

Bopomofo is inconsistent sometimes

This was originally a two-part post on cohost.

One thing that bothers me about bopomofo is that words ending in ㄛ get an extra vowel ㄨ (essentially just /w/) in the middle sometimes when spoken but it’s never written down.

Little Shops in Philadelphia

I’ve previously posted about my favourite ice cream shops in Philadelphia, but there’s a ton of other great little shops to visit. Here’s a few that I’ve really liked, sorted into two categories: used bookstores and vintage/oddities. I’ve excluded all food places, including coffeeshops, roasteries, bakeries, dessert shops, grocers, markets, food trucks, and so on, because there are just too many of them.

Investigations into French Diacritics

This was originally two posts on cohost.

What's in a GIF?

This was originally a multi-part post on cohost.

I wanted to inspect the structure of an animated GIF, so I created a 1 px × 1 px monochrome animation that switches from white to black every 1024 milliseconds in GNU IMP, exported it as an animated GIF with disposal method “combine”, and hexdumped it. Here’s the GIF below, at the center of this 1rem box so you can see it.

Ice Cream Shops in Philadelphia

When I arrived in Philadelphia, I started a Tweet thread of ice cream shops that are or aren’t as good as Rain or Shine back in Vancouver, which was the ice cream place I frequented most often since they have a location on the UBC campus. (I don’t have a thread or a list for ice cream shops in Vancouver, but you really can’t go wrong with Rain or Shine or with Earnest.)

Here I collect a list of the shops that are as good as Rain or Shine, ordered from west to east.

Thulium is Four Years Old!

Thulium, my personal server, turned four this year! Its official birthday was a few months ago on 15 April. A few more things have changed since I last posted about it, so I thought I’d update with what’s new.