Tweeting the Mona Lisa

Craft & Design Technology
Tweeting the Mona Lisa
monaTweet.jpg

This crazy bugger is trying to tweet the Mona Lisa. He writes:

Preliminary result of a little competition with the goal to write an image encoder/decoder that allows to send an image in a tweet. The image on the left is what I currently manage to send in 140 characters via twitter.

He’s doing it in Chinese characters because UTF-8 encoding allows him to send 210 bytes of data in the Twitter 140 characters.

MonaTweeta II [Thanks, @mashable!]

12 thoughts on “Tweeting the Mona Lisa

  1. Anonymous says:

    Dumb.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Awesome.

  3. Been done says:

    ____o88%88.
    ___8′-____-:88b
    __8’________888
    _d8.-=._,==-.:88b
    _>8_`~`_:`~’_d88
    _88_____,___888
    __88b._`-~__’:888
    ___8b_~==~_.:88
    ___888o–:’:::88
    _`888|_:::’_888b
    _888^^’____888b
    d88_______,%888b

  4. muhtehkuh says:

    Nice!

    You should ditch the coordinates all together and put 70 cellular automata centers in a raster on the image, each having a color, a range (iterations) and a rule.
    Thats 3 bytes each, giving 210 bytes for 70.
    You would have star-like patterns growing over the surface and interfering with each other, giving a cooler picture ^^

  5. Wilson! says:

    @Been done: 195 > 140
    @muhtehkuh: 210 > 140

    Tweets are 140 chars or less, meaning 140 bytes, unless you figure out a way to encode more than one byte per character.

  6. mrmeval says:

    Or some shell tools in Linux. :)

    It’s not hard. Rescaled to tiny in Gimp.

    base64 < monaTweet.jpg > hi
    wc -m hi
    4284
    4284/160 = ~27 tweets

    :-P

    Now. It is possible to stuff this into tiny URL.com and tweet that but it’s cheating. :)

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Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.

View more articles by Gareth Branwyn

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