One of the most interesting restrictions the Shizaru setup at www.circumlunar.space imposes, IMHO, is the 32KiB file restriction on all non-text files - including images.
This restriction was partially inspired by the aesthetically interesting dithered photographs used at Low-Tech Magazine's solar powered website, to minimise bandwidth usage and therefore power consumption for their lean and mean server.
What sort of a visual experience can be afforded on this very meager budget?
I have made some very rudimentary experiments in this direction, not doing much more than idly playing around in Gimp, or copying some ImageMagick commands from Low-Tech Magazine. I think it would be neat to see other sundogs play with this idea. But for now, here are some altered versions of a wonderful photo of the late Jobst Brandt cycling through the Alps. Each of them is less than 32KiB, and hence servable by shizaru - the fact that you can see them here proves it!
Here's one of my own photos (the full-sized original is available via gopher, and you'd better believe I enjoy the irony of that!), which has been subject to the same treatment as the final Brandt photo above. I think it works even better in this case. It was converted from the original via:
convert -quality 20 -geometry 800x600 original-filename.jpg output-filename.jpg
(convert is part of ImageMagick). The quality parameter can range from 0 to 100, and you can set it to the largest value that results in a size below 32KiB. If you're still not happy with that quality, try droping the geometry down to 640x480 to give yourself more range. You can always give your img tag HTML attributes to display it larger in a page. Normally this is avoided because the resizing adds distortion, but with quality this low the effect is far less pronounced!
