Photo2Text.com

Today's FamilyFirst site is a curious but irresistible mix of old and new.

When old goats like me were first trying out the WWW on 14,400 modems back about the time Windows 95 was released, ascii art was a hot commodity. In fact, a site I picked for a WorldVillage Bald Guy Pick was a museum of pictures created with plain old ascii characters. The site owner even honored me by painstakingly creating a bald guy!

Well, times have changed in the last twelve years. Most of us are connected to the web via broadband speeds at least as fast as leased T-1's that cost hundreds of dollars per month. And those of us still stuck with dialup may see broadband available soon.

Bandwidth has become cheap, and many web designers who, in an earlier era, may have been concerned with keeping graphics to a minimum now flaunt big images of a megabyte or more.

In the meantime, technology has also advanced in programming. And today's FamilyFirst pick takes advantage of some pretty impressive programmer smarts to offer you . . . (drum roll) . . . ASCII ART INSTANTLY CREATED FROM YOUR GRAPHICAL IMAGE!

What you do is upload a file (200k maximum), preferably one with lots of contrast, and you instantly are presented with a text file version of your picture!

I uploaded one of my favorite pics of my schnauzer, Dugie, and was presented with one cool piece of ascii art.

You can play with the lightness/darkness of the image (equally cool. Ascii characters are swapped in and out!) and also change which characters you would like to have used in rendering the image.

Bookmark this one, friends. You'll find yourself framing photo opportunities based on how well they might look in ascii art!

http://photo2text.com/

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