A Pilbara man is granted bail after allegedly being found with more than 40,000 child exploitation images following a sting by authorities in the United States.

An Adelaide paedophile will spend at least two years behind bars for masturbating in a store window and for using the social media site Pinterest to view images of young boys.

Inmates at four South Australian prisons will be confronted with the faces of cold case murder victims in what authorities hope will be a "conscious jogger" for people to come forward with information.

An ominous drone photo of sharks circling a whale beached near Albany in WA snaps top prize at this year's Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year awards, with the photographer saying the scene was "unreal".

Underwater statues and submerged hotels are some of the latest attractions on the Great Barrier Reef, concerning an old-school dive operator.

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority will be investigated over its release of satellite images appearing to show dams filling with water, which David Littleproud labelled "premature" and "incorrect".

The head of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority apologises for mistakenly publishing a report that identified farms via satellite imagery, which is now subject to investigation.

Almost all of the world's cruise ships have formed ghost fleets with their crews trapped aboard

The Canadian Pharmacy Spammers are at it again, or should we say still at it again.

Alyson McClaran had no idea she'd end up capturing some of the most powerful moments of the Colorado protest: two people who appeared to be health care workers, dressed in aquamarine scrubs and medical-grade face masks, standing in a crosswalk silently obstructing the path of shouting, car-bound protesters.

The network gets recognized for its outstanding series.

The NAACP Image Awards celebrated the 8-year-old.

Just released first images from the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope reveal unprecedented detail of the Sun's surface and preview the world-class products to come from this preeminent 4-meter solar telescope. NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope, on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, in Hawai'i, will enable a new era of solar science and a leap forward in understanding the Sun and its impacts on our planet.

As any Common Lisp coder knows, a REPL is an incredibly useful tool. It can be used not just for development, but for running all sorts of tasks. Personally, I don't bother making my Lisp tools into executable scripts and just run them directly from SLIME. As such, any operation that requires leaving the REPL is quite inconvenient. For me, one such operation was viewing image files, for example in conjunction with my match-client:match tool. So lately I've been researching various methods to incorporate this functionality into the normal REPL workflow. Below, I present 3 methods that can be used to achieve this.

Open in external program

This one's easy. When you want to view a file, launch an external process with your favorite image viewer. On Windows a shell command consisting of the image filename would launch the associated application, on Linux it's necessary to provide the name of the image viewer.

(defvar *image-app* nil) ;; set it to '("eog") or something

(defun view-file-native (file)
  (let ((ns (uiop:native-namestring file)))
    (uiop:launch-program (if *image-app*
                             (append *image-app* (list ns))
                             (uiop:escape-shell-token ns)))))

Note that uiop:launch-program is used instead of uiop:run-program. The difference is that launch- is non-blocking - you can continue to work in your REPL while the image is displayed, whereas run- will not return until you close the image viewer.

Also note that when the first argument to run/launch-program is a string, it is not escaped, so I have to do it manually. And if the first argument is a list, it must be a program and a list of its arguments, so merely using (list ns) wouldn’t work on Windows.

Inline image in REPL

The disadvantage of the previous method is that the external program might steal focus, appear on top of your REPL and disrupt your workflow. And it's well known that Emacs can do everything, including viewing images, so why not use that?

In fact, SLIME has a plugin specifically for displaying images in REPL, slime-media. However it’s difficult to find any information on how to use it. Eventually I figured out that SWANK (SLIME’s CL backend) needs to send an event :write-image with appropriate arguments and slime-media's handler will display it right in the REPL. The easiest way is to just send the file path. The second argument is the resulting image's string value. If you copy-paste (sorry, "kill-yank") it in the repl, it would act just like if you typed this string.

(swank::send-to-emacs '(:write-image "/path/to/test.png" "test"))

You can even send raw image data using this method. I don't have anything on hand to generate raw image data so here's some code that reads from a file, converts it to a base64 string and sends it over SWANK.

(with-open-file (in "/path/to/test.png" :direction :input  :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))
                (let* ((arr (make-array (file-length in) :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8)))
                       (b64 (progn (read-sequence arr in) (cl-base64:usb8-array-to-base64-string arr))))
                  (swank::send-to-emacs `(:write-image ((:data ,b64 :type swank-io-package::png)) "12345"))))

Note that the first argument to :write-image must be a list with a single element, which is itself a plist containing :data and :type keys. :data must be a base64-encoded raw image data. :type must be a symbol in swank-io-package. It’s not exactly convenient, so if you’re going to use this functionality a helper function/macro might be necessary.

Image in a SLIME popup buffer

Inline images are not always convenient. They can’t be resized, and will take up as much space as is necessary to display them. Meanwhile EMACS itself has a built-in image viewer (image-mode) which can fit images to width or height of a buffer. And SLIME has a concept of a “popup buffer” which is for example used by macroexpander (C-c C-m) to display the result of a macro expansion in a separate window.

Interestingly, slime-media.el defines an event :popup-buffer but it seems impossible to trigger it from SWANK. It is however a useful code reference for how to create the popup buffer in ELisp. This time we won’t bother with “events” and just straight up execute some ELisp code using swank::eval-in-emacs. However by default, this feature is disabled on Emacs-side, so you’ll have to set Emacs variable slime-enable-evaluate-in-emacs to t in order for this method to work.

Also Emacs must be compiled with ImageMagick for the resizing functionality to work.

Anyway, the code to view file in the popup buffer looks like this:

(defun view-file-slime (file &key (bufname "*image-viewer*"))
  (let ((ns (namestring file)))
    (swank::eval-in-emacs
     `(progn
        (slime-with-popup-buffer (,bufname :connection t :package t)
          (insert-image (create-image ,ns))
          (image-mode)
          (setf buffer-file-name ,ns)
          (not-modified)
          (image-toggle-display-image))
        ;; try to resize the image after the buffer is displayed
        (with-current-buffer ,bufname (image-toggle-display-image))))))
    ))

Arriving to this solution has required reading image-mode’s source code to understand what exactly makes image-mode behave just like if the image file was opened in Emacs via C-x C-f. First off, image-mode can be a major and a minor mode - and the minor mode is not nearly as useful. slime-with-popup-buffer has a :mode keyword argument but it would cause image-mode to be set before the image is inserted, and it will be a minor mode in this case! Therefore (image-mode) must be called after insert-image.

Next, the buffer must satisfy several conditions in order to get image data from the filename and not from the buffer itself. Technically it shouldn’t be necessary, but I couldn’t get auto resizing to work when data-p is true. So I set buffer-file-name to image’s filename and set not-modified flag on.

Next, image-toggle-display-image is called to possibly resize the image according to image-mode settings. It's called outside of slime-with-popup-buffer for the following reason: the buffer might not yet be visible and have any specific dimensions assigned to it, and therefore resizing will do nothing.

Here’s an example of how calling this function looks in Emacs.

The position of the popup buffer depends on whether the original Emacs window is wide enough or not. I think it looks better when it’s divided vertically. Use M-x image-transform-fit-to-height or M-x image-transform-fit-to-width to set up the auto-resizing method (it gets remembered for future images). Unfortunately there’s no way to fit both height and width, at least with vanilla Emacs. I prefer fit-to-width because in case the image is too tall, it is possible to scroll the image vertically with M-PgDn and M-PgUp from the other buffer. Unlike other image-mode buffers, this buffer supports a shortcut q to close itself, as well as various SLIME shortcuts, for example C-c C-z to return to the REPL.

That's it for now, hope you enjoyed this overview and if you happen to know a better way to display images in Emacs, I would be interested to hear about it.

An astronaut on board the International Space Station captured almost all of Mexico in a single shot while photographing planet Earth from inside the station's Cupola observatory.

Microsoft has patched a worm-like vulnerability in its Teams workplace video chat and collaboration platform that could have allowed attackers to take over an organization's entire roster of Teams accounts just by sending participants a malicious link to an innocent-looking image. The flaw, impacting both desktop and web versions of the app, was discovered by cybersecurity researchers at

This article deals with how you can use BlueGriffon to stretch a picture that is used as the backdrop of a web page, so that it fills the entire page, column or section.

In response to a visitor's query, this article deals with how you can turn an image on its side when a web page is viewed on a mobile phone.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

Accelerating ice melt in the Himalayas may imperil up to a billion people in South Asia who rely on glacier runoff for drinking water and more.

Light from nearby galaxies illuminated the web’s ‘threads,’ making them directly visible to telescopes on Earth.

Lakers star LeBron James was overwhelmingly voted as the favorite local athlete in a new survey, only a year after he was booed in Staples Center.

The White House says in a statement that it wants to make sure "NCAA student athletes are treated fairly without harming the integrity of college sports."

For years, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has been asking people to pay to use the image of the Hollywood sign — which it doesn't own or control.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

The claim seeks damages in connection with the release of cellphone pictures taken by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies at the scene of the Jan. 26 tragedy in Calabasas.

Yaro tutored the actor who played Animal, the rumpled photographer on "Lou Grant"

It's our visual prompt to stay away, but stay-at-home orders have given new purpose to caution tape.

The Seth Rogen Jewish immigrant pickle movie is still happening, and we now have some striking photo evidence.

ALIEN hunters believe they have spotted a fleet of UFOs zooming past the Moon in images from the 1969 Apollo 9 mission.

KIM JONG-UN is building a massive facility outside the capital Pyongyang, satellite images have shown, suggesting he is planning to beef up his stockpile of nuclear weapons.

On February 10, 2020, Express.co.uk published an article headlined "Coronavirus satellite image: Does THIS image show REAL scale of virus cremations?".

POSH still doesn't get it. Two weeks ago, when she announced she was furloughing 30 staff at her ailing fashion label, there was a public outcry.

A lawyer who served as legal counsel for Mother Teresa told Republican Chuck Dietzen to stop using Mother Teresa's name and image in ads.

Nasa says major decreases in nitrogen dioxide levels are "at least partly" linked to the outbreak.

The Hawaii-based Gemini telescope produces a super-sharp picture of the gas giant in the infrared.

oscon: Beginner's Guide to Computer Vision - 2D/3D image fundamentals, OpenCV, OpenNI Library + more http://t.co/ph2dKrC9W4 #oscon #tutorial

The internet is a scary enough place as it is, and now with the added misinformation and panic surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, it's even scarier. Thanks to the United Nations and dozens of artists, however, the internet just got a little more beautiful. 

In late March, the UN put a call out to artists to help combat the spread of COVID-19. They sought creatives to create content around six areas of WHO and UN priority actions: personal hygiene, social distancing, knowing the symptoms, spreading kindness, myth-busting, and doing more/donating. Tens of thousands of artists answered the call in two weeks, and now the COVID-19 Response Creative Content Hub is available for browsing.  Read more...

7 May 2020 , Volume 96, Number 3