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.
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.
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
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.
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 $3USD range last year in this same period.
Clearly an industry that is in need of regulation (and also clearly not something that will happen with the current administration).
So
I am sure you've had this same thought while looking for the ever-misplaced remote control — “I wish I had a homing device for the #$@! thing”. Well now you can. Using Loc8tor you can tag and locate items up to 600 feet (183 meters) away.
You might remember the old optical illusion that could be seen as either the profile of a face or the silhouette of a vase or urn. Now there is a company called Turn Your Head that is offering you the real word equivalent of this illusion:
At Turn Your Head, we fill the space between two opposing profiles of your face. By spinning that space into a three dimensional “visage” that follows the outlined silhouettes of your two profiles, we create the “Pirolette”.
Place the “Pirolette” to your face and it will match your profile. Locate it near a wall and the shadow of the “Pirolette” will be your silhouette.
All you need to do is provide an appropriately composed photo of the subject and fork over some cash and your own personal pirolette can be yours.
The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.
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