My Personal Infocloud
So
> The academics from University College London found there are now only a quarter as many Cocks in Britain as would be expected, a third as many Smellies, and half as many Dafts and Shufflebottoms. The numbers of Piggs, Nutters and Bottoms has declined by around one third.
Read the rest at the New Zealand Herald.
So
Today Flickr added the ability to geo-tag photos via the flash-based organizr tool. This is a great addition and one of the big features I really liked about zooomr.
Basically, within organizr you drag and drop photos onto an embedded Yahoo Maps screen. You then have the ability to further edit tags, tweak security and location information. The first time you use the map function you are asked to set a default view permission for photos that you geo-tag (this can be overridden on an individual picture or batch setting).
It's no surprise that Flickr is using Yahoo Maps for this function (instead of the vastly superior Google Maps), the huge downside of this is that there is little or no street level information available in Europe and Asia — even trying to switch to the satellite view doesn't help much as you frequently get a blank screen if you are at a low enough altitude. This made trying to geo-tag some of my recent vacation photos from Spain basically impossible.
You can use the Explore –> Photos on a map drop down to see what other photos have been added to a given map. You can search for a location by name or just by dragging around on the map. I was surprised to see that another photographer in my area had uploaded/tagged close to 50 photos already.
I have gotten one error in Organizr trying to use this function — it looked like the database was not available. The text of the error message was hard to make out as it was written over my photostream in a light gray font. Hitting the refresh button appeared to make everything right again.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.
technorati tags: yahoomaps, flickr, photography, geotag, maps
So
I am always trying to learn more about photography so when I came across the Cambridge In Color site, I was pleased to find some clearly written, detail discussion about photographic concepts and techniques. It was refreshing to have this information presented in a largely vendor neutral manner unlike many of the other 'tutorial' sites that are really just click-whoring advert sites.
There is a good range of material there covering fundamentals like bit depth, image noise, histograms; a tour through some of the image manipulation that can be accomplished with photoshop and advanced topics like HDR, panoramas and hight photography. Good stuff.
technorati tags: photography, tutorial, cameras
So
Some interesting stats were collected by using the Flickr API against ~10,000 recently uploaded photos per day that show the 100 most popular cameras used on Flickr. The top ten is made up of 5 Canons, 4 Nikons and a Sony.
What the stats don't necessarily reflect is any true diversity of people using the cameras. By that I mean, if one person uploads 2000 shots from their camera while others are uploading only a few the numbers become skewed. Otherwise, what you are measuring is how often owners of a certain camera model upload pictures versus the actual popularity of the camera. Flickr also provides the option of not making EXIF data available, so I'm not sure how those would be recorded (or if they would be). Dunno, maybe the stats factor that in.
technorati tags: photography, cameras, flickr, exif
So
I came across this fantastic essay titled Climbing Mountains or Looking for Lakes that resonated with me quite a bit:
I’m a lake seeker, not a mountain climber. I’m looking for beauty and satisfaction, not prestige and achievement. It’s the same in all aspects of my life, like blogging. I blog for expression, connection, and conversation, not to break into the Technorati Top 100 and not to make money. I don’t look at my hit counts or subscriber numbers, except when I can’t avoid them or when I just can’t help myself. It’s not that I’m not competitive and it’s not that those things aren’t important and useful in some contexts. It’s that I’m temperamentally wired to look for what’s beautiful, peaceful, and comforting in the world. Paying attention to that other stuff makes me unhappy.
So
The Web 2.0 Logo Creator is a nice bit of fun. Here is the web 2.0 version of this blog title: Moebius+RecursiveBETA.png)
It's the flaming logo, spinning logo of the aught-sixes!
So
Owing to my wife's uncanny ability to either destroy or lose cards of all sorts in a staggeringly short amount of time, I was happy to come across this webtool that will let you create a single club card that duplicates the bar codes of up to eight individual cards. For my purposes, it is also handy for creating duplicates of existing cards. I can only vouch for the fact that it made a perfect working copy of a Kroger card (your mileage may vary).
So
Earlier today I thought that it would be cool to try to figure out how to use the timeline widget with wordpress as a way to show blog post history.
Well, I didn't have to work too hard, just a bit of googling to discover that someone else already figured out how to — have a look at this post about creating an Archive View For Wordpress. Notice that that blog has an implementation of the widget running at the top of the page so you can get a feel for how the finished widget looks and handles.
technorati tags: blogging, timeline, widgets, webtools, wordpress
So
I predict that this well timed incident by BP will have gas prices at or near $3.25USD by the end of today in the Cincinnati area (currently gas is around $2.98USD). I further predict that big oil's goal is to have the price at the pump flirting with $4USD just in time for the Labor Day/end of summer driving push — just as they manipulated prices up to the current $3USD range last year in this same period.
Clearly an industry that is in need of regulation (and also clearly not something that will happen with the current administration).