p2pnet special: “I’m a 29 year old married guy from Nova Scotia. I do mostly website programming (LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for a living and, sadly enough, for fun. I’ve been a computer geek since I got my first Vic 20 when I was 12 or so.”

And ——————-

“I live in The Netherlands, am 20 years old and go to college. Designing websites has become a hobby of mine. At first I started hetemeel.com with no idea of what to put on it. I just wanted to have a site to try some stuff with.”

Neither of these quotes are mine. Rather, they’re from two very talented guys with similar interests and similar beginnings. Yet they live thousands of miles apart. They’re Shawn Wilson (that’s him in the WANTED poster) of GlassGiant.com and “Hetemeel” of Hetemeel.com, respectively.

I’ve recently started creating and contributing pictures to p2pnet to accompany stories, and quite a lot of my attention has been centered around the SONY DRM debacle, as well as p2p in general. And since I can’t be expected to think of everything, I went looking for people who do.

The Einstein http://hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php and Uncle Sam picture generators are two of my favorites. It was invented by Hetemeel. “A while ago I saw people using the same pictures with different text on them on some forums. I then decided to make these scripts to make it easier for them (and myself) to do that. I made the Einstein picture because I thought the original image was just perfect for the job. The same with the Uncle Sam image.”

Besides those, he also has a Dumbledore generator, a dictionary page generator (where you can upload a picture of a friend or - enemy – with your own definition), and a strange picture of a Quaker called “Ha! Ha!” where you can also add your own text.

Shawn’s funny “Wanted” poster generator http://www.glassgiantweb.com/misc_wanted_poster.php caught my eye, too, and p2pnet recently used it to accompany a couple of SONY articles. He also has generators for “Law & Order”, “Family Guy”, neon signs, a ‘pumpkinizer’ (put your face on a pumpkin), and lots of other free games and generators.

“I got a call from a guy who sells vinyl graphics for boats. He wanted people to be able to preview their sign online. That got me deeper into programmatically altering images. The Pumpkinizer followed, then more recently the wanted posters, law and order, neon sign, Family Guy”, says Shawn. “At any given time, I’ve got 5 or 10 projects at least half done. I tend to get bored of them once the difficult coding is done, though, and move onto something else.”

And on the other side of the world, Hetemeel, a student, also has higher aspirations. “I have a lot of ideas for new image generators, but not a lot of time at the moment. I’ll keep making new ones, but it just takes a while.

I explained to the guys that what they do is way above my head, but that I’m sure a lot of p2pnet’s readers will know exactly what they’re talking about. 

The subjects of p2p, copyright infringement and DRM were raised. Because these guys are self-proclaimed geeks, I wanted to hear what the real experts had to say. Although they each don’t have much experience with filesharing, they did have some thoughts on DRM.

Hetemeel: “Copyright protections that make original CD’s unplayable are really ridiculous. Also, there’s a tax in The Netherlands on cassettes, DVD’s and soon also on MP3 players. This money is supposed to be a compensation for the artists for the loss of sales due to home made copies with these storage types, but I doubt they ever see a penny from it.”

(True, as proven by recent court cases against SONY and others for not paying royalties.)

Shawn on SONY’s rootkit: “I found it scary, not only the security issues they introduced with the sloppy coding, but the fact that they apparently felt they could change the way their clients’ computers work at a basic level. Agreeing to a vaguely worded EULA can hardly be considered permission for something so drastic.”

(And as an experienced programmer, he should know.)

Since I found these generators (plus several others listed below), they’ve inspired me to do more pictures for p2pnet articles. I’ve created a collage of some of my pictures (left), together with images created with Hetemeel’s and Shawn’s scripts. Some of them have already been used here, others will be used in the future.

So check out the work these talented people do and have some fun creating funny e-cards, posters and pictures. Both Shawn and Hetemeel are working on new generators, so keep checking their pages for updates.

LINKS

GlassGiant.com http://glassgiant.com
Hetemeel.com http://hetemeel.com
Tombstone generator http://www.jjchandler.com/tombstone
Windows Error message generator http://atom.smasher.org/error
Wal-Mart sign http://www.sparesomechange.com/funny/walmart.asp
Image generator links http://www.sparesomechange.com/funny/links.htm
Image and Sign generators Blog http://generator.blog-city.com

catflap - p2pnet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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