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

RT @om: Unseen is what fuels the imagination #newphotoset #blog #leica #B&W #monochromes

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

Lennon Bus Launches 6th Annual Come Together NYC Residency

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.

The hip hop stars landed a major fashion campaign.

She covers the new issue of Garage magazine.

Within the academic aviation world, good textbooks can be hard to come by. Not only do few aviation textbook publishers exist, but the aviation industry is constantly changing. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's latest Impacts on Practice brief, ACRP in the Classroom: Reimagining the Textbook at the University of North Dakota Department of Aviation , details how Dr. Kim Kenville uses ACRP Research Report 16, Second Edition: Guidebook for Managing Small Airports , in her classes. “This publica...

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.

[Image: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1818).] It would be interesting to look at locations of the American popular imagination, as seen in movies and TV, mapped against regional tax breaks for the film industry. There was a brief span of time, for example, when rural Pennsylvania stood in for … Continue reading "Tax Incentives and the Human Imagination"

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.

Can you imagine the clipshow?



View Comic!

Meredith McIver is the speech writer who took responsibility for Melania Trump's plagiarism (you may have heard about it?). But people aren't convinced that Meredith is even real, leading to the internet's new favorite conspiracy theory. Is Meredith McIver a fake persona created by Trump? Let's examine the evidence.

And if you'd like some appetizer Trump memes before you get started, now would be the time.

It's been a fun week for political memes. While Donald Trump's friend "Jim" has been the subject of skepticism since as early as 2016, the marvelous mystery has once again been thrust into the spotlight by the Associated Press. Their July 13th piece, "Trump in Paris: The curious case of his friend Jim" was covered by outlets such as HuffPo and the AV Club, and inspired a healthy number of Twitter jokes. We've put together the most noteworthy Jim jokes from the past year, for your convenient viewing pleasure. 

When: Fri Nov 20, 2015

Who: Social Services Events, brought to you by IRISS
Where: Hilton Hotel, 1 William Street, Glasgow
Event Status: confirmed
Event Description: National Care Home Conference and Exhibition http://www.scottishcare.org/news/scottish-care-national-care-home-conference-exhibition-amp-care-awards-2015/

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

At The Nation, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has a provocative piece that imagines how future historians may come to write the story of the Covid-19 pandemic. The speculative history takes the form of a “best-case” scenario that serves as both a challenge and a salve, an inspirational fantasy to help balance out the more easily imagined […]

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"

Ultra white modern farmhouses are trending, but they can also be cold. See how bestselling "Red Queen" author Victoria Aveyard and designer Christine Markatos Lowe transformed a colorless Cape Cod-style home into a feminine and youthful California beach house.

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.

Country music star Kacey Musgraves released a new version of her song "Oh, What a World" in honor of Earth Day and "heroes on the front lines" of COVID-19.

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.

Treating a sold-out crowd to hit songs in bunches, Imagine Dragons deliver a memorable spectacle on Indianapolis date of the "Evolve" tour.

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.