Experiment removing brown toilet bowl stains with various acids

[Danny D.]

Agreed. That is a stellar presentation. Very nice.

I've used both MS Paint & IrfanView on Windows; but, I must suggest that everyone try texting and arrowing with Paint.NET before you conclude anything about any other program. Circle drawing is just OK with Paint.NET.

Those three things are really what decides what freeware is "best" for basic editing of DIY-style screenshots & photos:

- Texting (there should never be a need to draw a box!)

- Arrows (they should be drawn in a single point-&-click sequence!)

- Circles (they should be easy to point-and-click create)

Given those three extremely common requirements, it's sad (and surprising), that almost all freeware editing programs fall flat on their faces, when it comes to these three simple tasks.

You'll NEVER find another program that does curved arrows better and easier than does Paint.NET (whether solid or dashed) - and - you'll also find that the texting in MS Paint is exactly like it should be (i.e., no need to estimate the size & shape to sweep out a box!). The drawing of circles is pretty easy but nothing special.

Unfortunately, the best I could find on Linux for the same extremely common tasks are atrocious in comparison. In Kolourpaint, you have to estimate & sweep out a box to text; and in Kolourpaint you have to manually draw the arrows, then curve then, then create your own arrowheads from scratch ... and ... you can just forget about making dashed arrows. As with Paint.NET on Windows, Kolourpaint on Linux drawing of circles is pretty easy but nothing special.

As always, if there WAS a freeware editing program that did all three of those extremely common tasks well, that would be the program I'd consider best - and certainly - it would be the program I'd use and recommend.

[dadiOH]

Thanks. ____________

I did d/l it a day or two ago and look forward to trying it. ______________

I find the box useful inasmuch as I can then center words and lines within a given area.

[Danny D.]

That was a great writeup on how bleach worked, and how lye works.

One question: Why did the 100% cotton towel disintegrate from the bleach?

[Danny D.]

You might like the panorama command in Irfanview:

[nestork]

Remember that lone oxygen atoms will preferentially react with large organic molecules which tend to be less stable than other molecules?

Well, cotton is almost 100% cellulose, and cellulose is what wood is mostly made of. So, cellulose is a large organic molecule too. Lone oxygen atoms will break cellulose molecules apart just as aggressively as they break dye molecules apart.

You can prove to yourself that it's not just cotton that will be attacked by bleach. Leave a cellulose sponge soaking in bleach overnight, and the cellulose molecules in the sponge will get broken to pieces too. In the morning, it will still look like the same sponge, but will have no strength any more. If you pull it out of the bleach and squeeze it, it'll crush to form a mush in your hand similar to wet bread.

PS: You don't need to know the rest:

Water from the roots, CO2 from the air and sunlight combine together in a tree's leaves to produce glucose; the simplest form of all the different kinds of sugar molecules. (lactose, maltose, dextrose, fructose, etc.)

However, there are two different forms of glucose molecules; alpha glucose and beta glucose:

[image:

It turns out that if you stack alpha glucose molecules up like bricks in a wall, you get something called "starch", which is what rice, potatos and bread are made of.

If you stack beta glucose molecules up like bricks in a wall, you get cellulose, which is what cotton, paper and wood (mostly) are made of.

Every chemical you find in a plant, whether it's the lignin holding the wood cells together in the tree trunk, the tannins in the plant's leaves or the extracts that native people's used to treat medical conditions, were all made by the plant out of the water and nutrients gathered by the roots and the glucose produced by the leaves.

Right now we're using enzymes to break starch molecules down into their constituent sugar molecules, and then fermenting that sugar to make ethanol to sell as an automotive fuel. And, the big thing in bio-fuels research right now is to be able to do the same thing with cellulose.

Then, everything grown on a farm could be sold. Corn farmers, for example could sell their corn cobs as food, and most of the rest of the plant as cellulose to make ethanol out of. And, old t-shirts, old books and old furniture, all made of cellulose, would suddenly have worth because they too could be made into ethanol. Cows, termites and wood rot fungi have the enzymes in them to do that, but getting those enzymes to survive and work outside of those living organisms is the challenge.

[dadiOH]

Looks like we all should become termite huggers :)

[dadiOH]

In Irfanview? Draw a box then Ctrl + T

[Robert Macy]

my workaround for text is to open with irfanview and save as .bmp open in PAINT and add text, marks, etc save. open again in Irfanview and save as .jpg

It's a workaround.

[Danny D.]

I would NOT add text with Irfanview. Use Paint.NET. Muuuuuch easier & more intuitive.

[Poutnik]

Danny D. posted Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:58:17 +0000 (UTC)

To defend IV, it is rather viewer with added simple editing capabilities.

[Danny D.]

I do agree that IrfanView is absolutely fantastic as the best picture "viewer" on the PC, bar none. Mainly it's fast. Really really really fast. Twice as fast as most programs, and ten times faster than a lot of them.

Even though IrfanView is only a "viewer", we all know IV also does CROPPING wonderfully (click, click, crop). It converts to various formats nicely (e.g., JPEG -> GIF); and IrfanView is great with batch renamin and resizing operations (which aren't so easy on the Windows operating system elsewise).

However, when it comes to TEXTING, drawing CIRCLES, and especially curved ARROWs, IrfanView stinks. For that, I'd suggest Paint.NET ...

The funny thing is that TEXTING is done wrong on almost all picture editing programs in that they force you to choose the area BEFORE you type a single character!

What's inexplicable about that is there is no need for that. With Paint.NET, you simply type. No need to choose any area whatsoever.

Likewise, arrows are almost atrocious how they're handled on most picture-editing programs. With most, all you can do is manually draw a curve and then manually draw an arrowhead and you can just about forget doing dashed lines.

With Paint.NET, it's all done for you. You just draw the arrow point 1, and then point 2, and it's done for you. (You've pre-selected the type of arrow, direction, arrowhead, dashes, color, etc., as the default.)

On the other hand, drawing circles and boxes around things is relatively easy in most programs, but heaven forbid trying to do it in something powerful like The Gimp. You'll go crazy. Sure, it 'can' be done; but you'd die trying.

Irfanview isn't too bad with drawing circles, but, since you NEED paint.net for the arrows and text, you may as well draw the circles there.

In summary, IrfanView is a fantastic picture-viewing program, which is fast and simple and powerful ... but it stinks for the basic annotation of DIY-style photos. For for that, Paint.NET is the best (although others will work too).

Note: This is all on Windows. For Linux, the corresponding best DIY-photo editing program is the combination of ImageMagick for batch operations, and Kolourpaint for the manual texting, arrowing, and circling of objects.

[Danny D.]

For the record, today I needed to reproduce a firefox bug on both WinXP and on Linux, so, I created essentially the same screenshot on each platform:

Windows:

Linux:

OBSERVATION: I haven't been on Windows for a while, so, I had forgotten what a fantastic dream Paint.net was in terms of usability (as compared to what exists on Linux) in performing the three basic screenshot annotation tasks of: (a) texting (you just click & type ... that's it!) (b) circling (you just click & sweep ... that's it!) (c) arrowing (you just click & click ... that's it!)

In comparison the critical annotation triad on Linux was kludgey at best. (a) texting (you have to pre-select the text area ... yuck) (b) circling (you just click and sweep ... so this is good) (c) arrowing (all manual ... especially dashes, curves & heads)

Note: It's amazing that, on Linux, there isn't a single decent freeware program for these three simple tasks that even comes close to comparing to what exists on Windows - and - on Windows, it's amazing that only one program does all three tasks correctly (i.e., efficiently).

[Alan Browne]

Please stop x-posting your adventures to rec.photo.digital. At worst take this to a graphics/design NG. But it really has no place here.

[Danny D.]

I am too. I 'wish' Linux had as good a tool as Paint.NET for annotating DIY photos!

Alas, the best I can find on Linux is KolourPaint.

Here's a summary collage of how to remove brownish deposits (made with KolourPaint):

[Danny D.]

One interesting result I should mention is that I've repeated the acid test on a few toilet bowls since opening this thread, and, one thing that is clear about the 'brown' deposits is that the pool acid dissolves them - but - the pool bleach merely turns them white.

So, I think they're mineral deposits which have, for whatever reason, taken on a brown hue.