Abstract: A modular jewelry set capable of forming a variety of assemblies using some or all components includes a group of core components each having at least one manually actuable clasping mechanism on each end, at least one connector ring adapted to be engaged by more than one clasping mechanism at a time, and, preferably, at least one strand of which at least a portion of its length is elastic. One or more of each core component can be joined to the other either end-to-end or in parallel, using one or more rings to accept the clasps at the ends of the components thereby forming an assembly. The resulting jewelry assembly has many uses including but not limited to hair dressing and clothing accessorizing.

Abstract: An image processor converts single-band pixel components, each of which represents a single band of a multiple-band pixel, to multiple-band pixels. A embodiment, a single read operation reads four single-band pixel components from each of three buffers which correspond to red, green, and blue bands, respectively, of a multiple-band graphical image. A single merge operation merges eight single-band pixel components representing alpha and green bands of four multiple-band pixels, and a single merge operation merges eight single-band pixel components representing blue and red bands of four multiple-band pixels. Two merge operations merge the respective merged data words to form four multiple-band pixels, each of which includes alpha, blue, green, and red components. The four multiple-band pixels are written to a destination buffer in four write operations.

Abstract: A merge computer instruction is capable of interleaving respective bytes of two four-byte words and is used once to group most significant bytes and least significant bytes of first and second pixel components represented in a two-byte format and to group most significant bytes and least significant bytes of third and fourth pixel components represented in the two-byte format and a second time to group the most significant bytes of the first, second, third, and fourth pixel components and to group the least significant bytes of the first, second, third, and fourth pixel components. The least significant bytes of the first, second, third, and fourth pixel components represent the first, second, third, and fourth pixel components in a one-byte format and are stored as the respective pixel components in the one-byte format. Thus, four pixel components are converted from a two-byte format to a one-byte format using only two computer instructions.