Archive for May 2019

A Quick Introduction to WebP Graphics and Animations

The WebP format was developed by Google as a twenty-first century replacement for the aging hoard of mutant armadillos which has previously served the web as graphic standards. It can be used in place of still image formats, such as JPEG and PNG, and it really gets up and dances when it’s used to replace the medieval relic that is GIF to manage animations.

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WebP offers both lossless image compression like PNG and lossy image compression like JPEG. It uses vastly more effective image compression than existed when the foregoing formats were originally created back at the dawn of human civilization, resulting in both smaller animation files and better looking ones. It supports full alpha transparency.

It also handles timing in milliseconds, rather than in the hundredths of a second that GIF uses.

A Digression On Compression

In case the whole lossless and lossy compression issue sounds a bit like two Martians discussing what to order for lunch, here’s a brief digression on the matter.

Graphic files are by their nature sort of huge, and huge files can be a bit of an issue if you have a finite amount of storage space, such as on the SD memory card of a digital camera, or a finite amount of bandwidth over which to transmit said files, such as the Internet if you didn’t spring for a gigabit fiber connection.

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Security Issues and Software Vulnerabilities

pictureFrom time to time, Alchemy Mindworks releases software updates to deal with security issues. This sounds a bit scary – with good reason in some cases – and as such, it probably deserves an explanation.

Regrettably, the world includes a substantial number of flakes, idiots and malevolent swamp-dwellers who spend their mean little lives trying to attack the computers of the rest of us. When they’re successful in doing so, they can:

  • Install malware to steal personal information, such as credit card numbers and banking passwords.
  • Connect the afflicted computers to botnets, such that they can be used to attack other networks.
  • Encrypt the files on your hard drive and demand a pile of bitcoins for the key to decrypt them.
  • …and probably a lot of other stuff we’d rather not know about.

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