
The Rasterbator - Create huge, rasterized images from any picture. - bearwithclaws
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/
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pmichaud
This is sort of confusing. Any picture you can upload to that service is
already a "raster" picture (as opposed to a vector picture). I think what they
mean is that they just blow up really huge?

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calambrac
Where does it say you can't upload vector images? And, really, we're dinging
someone for coming up with a product name that isn't perfectly descriptive
now?

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pmichaud
I made this great new device called the "Automatic gasoline car to electric
car converter." It takes your gasoline car and cleans the outside of it with
soap and water! It shines when it comes out the other side!

What do you mean the name is misleading? Are you really dinging me for coming
up with a product name that isn't perfectly descriptive??

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calambrac
You should email 37Signals about your profound disappointment at how
ineffective their "Campfire" product is for making S'mores.

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pmichaud
Campfire is a metaphor for collaboration, that's different. He's named his
product something specific that's materially incorrect.

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calambrac
Oh, my bad, I should have realized that, when you called out failing to
capture the technical difference between rasterization and half-toning in a
whimsical name for a service used to make dorm room posters by saying it was
the same thing as describing a carwash as a magical engine conversion machine,
we had entered the realm of literal equivalency.

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rriepe
Pretty neat- used to do this with a b&w copier when I was on the newspaper
staff back in high school. We had stuff like giant pictures of David Letterman
up on the wall. None of it really made sense but it was funny to us. Gonna try
it with my printer.

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mkyc
When this first came out, I recall bypassing print quotas at my then-campus by
finding the ip of and connecting directly to one of the many printers. May I
be forgiven, the printer rolled on for what seemed like a half-hour, deposited
100 pages. I took them in a stack to the campus print shop and asked them to
cut off the white edges. I'm sure they flipped through - 100 whole pages of
dots - and wondered what the hell I was doing, though they didn't ask. A fun
time ensued, me carefully taping the whole thing together across the corners.
Went ceiling to floor, with a row or two to spare. I later sent the picture
in, and was pleased to see it marked "cool" - last time I checked it was in
the page 40's.

My friend, she had sent me a picture of Natalie Portman in these sweet retro
headphones the day before. I didn't really think far ahead, since I could
always print another off. I never did, though. After I put it up, and the
sense of accomplishment wore off, I realized I wasn't the sort to put lone
wall-high posters of girls up in my room, even with dashing headphones. Not
that I didn't think she was very pretty. It should have been Vonnegut, Derek
Parfit, Schopenhauer (it's his hair I admire most), David Hume, Licklider,
though I didn't know most of them then (not that I truly do now). Natalie
remains in one of my boxes of papers, folded into an immaculate stack.

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zokier
Imho it produces cool results with large dot size and relatively small number
of sheets, with some space between sheets. Here's one example:
<http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/1267/rasterbationdt5.png>

And if you do this, use some sturdy material to print on. Standard copier
paper as it just looks crappy.

edit: Thinking of it, maybe canvas prints would be cool. 10in square prints,
maybe 1in apart...

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PostOnce
I found this a while ago when I was looking for something to break up a map
into one-page segments so I could have a giant map. Never did find an ideal
solution.

Anyone know another tool like this that doesn't convert the image to half-
tone? I want to use one of those blank world maps from Wikipedia to print out
as a giant tiled map to assemble on the wall.

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tezza
mpage on unix

I believe some of the more recent Photoshops have that functionality

Failing that: Illustrator can open pdf, and you can scale the output to the
desired dimensions and carefully segment them yourself.

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andyleclair
I just introduced my office to this by creating a larger-than-life copy of The
Dude. Kittens were next. I fear for our productivity.

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baseonmars
i did a 50 A4 sheet picture with this of grandmaster flash. i used a tiny
source picture (less than vga). I took the time to trim the edges and tape all
the sheets together first. this made sticking it to the wall a simpler task.

if i could have done anything differently i'd have used a printer that could
do borderless printing. it looked awesome, would def recommend.

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Pistos2
Technical merits aside, my opinion is that the name and theme (see the FAQ
page) are crude, and a turn off, bordering on offensive. That their nature
would be glossed over, ignored, or even not noticed certainly speaks about our
industry and times.

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kungfooey
This has been around for a while, but it's still pretty cool. I have a poster-
size printout of "Enter The Dragon" that I printed out about five years ago,
and it still looks great.

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bearwithclaws
Guys, you got to try this. It works perfectly. Just upload a really huge
photo, 'rasterize', then print it.

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axod
This seems like complete spam to me :/ Am I missing something here?

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calambrac
How is it any spammier than any of the umpteen million other links to one-off
idea websites that we get around here? Because the submitter didn't call it
their "startup"?

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riffic
This has been around for a while and isn't really spammy, people have been
using it to plaster blown up art on their dorm walls

