1K Competition

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Over on BoingBoing Gadgets, Rob Beschizza lets us know that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has just shipped it’s 1 billionth drive. To commemorate the event, he asked readers to create something less then 1K:

1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide. Use your imagination. Give us a thousand of whatever you want. A 1,000 byte JPG, MP3 or textfile. Need a little extra? 1,024 will do, we’re not religious. We’re cool. Just make it 1K of awesome, k?

To demonstrate how small 1K really is in digital term, he notes that the simple seagate logo at 1,025 bytes is too big…

Well just hold on a minute Rob.

Thats a PNG. Did you remember to crunch it? I bet that it is full of unnecessary metadata. Reordering the bits would probably help a little too! Thanks to a little program called PngSlim, that image is now only 799 bytes. Thats a loss of 226 bytes or 28%. All without changing a single pixel. You could now fit 275,954,704 more of them on a 1 Terabyte drive.

  • 1,000,000,000,000 / 1,025 = 975,609,756
  • 1,000,000,000,000 / 799 = 1,251,564,460
  • 1,251,564,460 – 975,609,756 = 275,954,704

Update:

Derek Tonn, who first introduced me to PngSlim at the 2007 HighEdWeb conference, was kind enough to send this:

Just for fun, I re-ran your optimized 799 byte Seagate logo graphic through the new 1.0b1 “beta” release of PNGSlim, and it was able to shave 1 more byte off that image (798 bytes, attached). Not sure if that is worth a re-submit on your end of things or not…but I just thought I would share. :-) Keep up the good fight related to image optimization!

Thanks Derek!

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5 Responses to “1K Competition”

  1. April 22nd, 2008 at 11:44am
    Derek Tonn Says:

    Excellent work, Gabriel! Yes, PNGSlim certainly does take care of that “larger than 1,024 bytes” problem. Andrew Dent (developer of PNGSlim) will hopefully gain some good exposure for his free tool as a result…as SO much is possible when one spends the extra minute or two to run their .png files (8-bit or 24-bit) through PNGSlim.

  2. April 22nd, 2008 at 12:10pm
    gabriel mcgovern (dot com) | » 1K Tiny Mona Says:

    […] after giving Rob some guff about not optimizing his image – he was kind enough to append my comment to the original 1K […]

  3. April 25th, 2008 at 3:30pm
    tony Says:

    I randomly found this page and it’s very interesting, thanks. I have no idea what the f you guys are talking about but it’s cool.

  4. April 27th, 2008 at 12:59am
    fish Says:

    Whoa there Gabe, just a little too much fun in your @play section!!!! Your quite the party animal, with all that pngslim this and 1k byte that, man I want to party with you!!!! Damn those are some great pick up lines for the ladies. I could not have said it better than Tony ” what the f are you talking about ?” Hope all is well in the great north west, and miss you guys!!! Love mr. disgruntaled Fish.

  5. May 30th, 2016 at 10:13am
    Kyle David group Says:

    Yes, it’s Great

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