CogBlogged Tagged ‘fotography’

flickr foto New Toyavailable on my flickr I just got this new camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT– going back to being a newbie learning a whole new interface. 8 MegaPixel SLR, wahoo! I’ve been saving up my spare change and with some help from sideline consulting, I bought a new digital camera, this Canon Digital Rebel XT. My previous 2 personal digital cameras and ones bought at work were all Olympus brands (I became enamored of their lenses with my first portable 35 mm Stylus used for many years), and had grown weary of the lag time and data writing lag of my Olympus 4040 (like the Elk cross the road in Colorado, but the time the 4040 was ready, I ended up with a photo of my rear view mirror), though it has logged unknown thousands of images. The reports on the Canon so far live up to [...]

I really need to stop finding cool stuff and get some work done! But I could not pass on the Flickr Postcard Browser which takes any flickr tags and presents a view like a collection of photos laid out on the table, e.g. hitting some of my own on the tags “strawberry flower” for flower photos at our cabin: And click any image allows you to slide around and admire them up close: Another great find via Tim Lauer! Now quit finding this stuff, Tim, I have work to do!

Mastercards with flickr uses the gazillion images found in flickr to create the familiar game of image matching. The site creator gives the nod to the version from Games For the Brain (a nice collection of stuff), but isn’t this really the old game of “Concentration”? Here is the game I played using a flickr tag of “newzealand” (“G’day to you, Richard E and friends in the Pumphouse!”) Alas, no secret messages were revealed below. In fact, there were no trumpet fan fares, bells, or prizes awarded. But it is more neat stuff with flickr. Peeking at the flickr tags, it took the most recent images from the tag set. More flickr fun.

More exclamations of “holy flickr” emitting from my room. The flickr montager generates a mosaic image based on tags of a word from flickr. I played a bit with it, tried my own montage on the tag “dog”. It randomly chose some image of a pocket puppy type dog (or as my friend Donna refers to ‘em, as “barking slippers”) and generated a montage image of it base don other flickr photos tagged with “dog”. Digging in deeper, I tried to think of a tag that would pull up my own photos, so I used “Mickey” for my former Labrador (and logo for my sites) where I have a bunch tagged. The image chosen to display was of a cake with Mickey Mouse. Sigh. But hovering over the icon images that form the larger one, I found a few of my own photos. Imagine th fun when I realized that [...]

To learn, do. So to better understand how flickr groups work (sidenote- something on the net has “arrived” when I do not have to hyperlink its mention, when I write “flickr” it hardly seems necessary to lin k it to http://flickr.com/, see also Google) I decided to create a new flickr group. Flickr groups allow members to post images from their individual collections to the group pool, and create discussions about the images or topics. Why? The groups are another lesser known social layer of flickr. Are teachers using them? Is there some lesser than obvious way to use groups as a learning tool? I have no answers, but questions, so it calls for exploring. So first off all, like many things in flickr, it is bonehead easy to create a new flickr group. You go to the groups page (a top navigation link on all pages) and… click on [...]

Holy _____. Flickr has done it again, rolling some cool interface features. First of all, great news for folks like Stephen, flickr photos are no longer rendered in Flash, but in DHTML; see From Flash to DHTML (on some pages!). Also, they have expanded the in-page editing to the Blog This and Send button functionalities. This is in my “steal this interface” pile of things to do as the editing of Flickr titles and captions are cleverly done in the display page, and not requiring a 1990s web editing notion of clicking to another web page, filling out a form, clicking a submit, and then clicking back to see your results. In-page editing rocks. But the biggest thing IMHO, is that now Flickr notes, the hotspots one can add to images, now can take hyperlinks in the note, so think about a whole hyperlink series of flickry things! See Emerging [...]

The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a cool way to surf and cross surf related tags within the vast flickr photo-empire. Flickr Related Tag Browser lets you surf Flickr’s ‘tag space’. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Each tag has a list of ‘related’ tags, based on clustered usage analysis. Thanks to the Flickr team for their great API. Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. I could not agree more with that last sentence. Is there a lesson out there as to what can happen when you let folks loose on data via an open API? That more people will enter a site through these more or less freely franchised outlets? It seems like the antithesis to rigid corporate portals. But enough of that let’s walk through how it works (Geez, I wish I was set up for screencasting!)…

I whimsically, and falsely, wrote My Dentist Has an RSS Feed (there was a point, but that post has scrolled away…). However, he is rather wired for his work. Today, at his new office, they used a digital xray machine that takes the photos of your teeth, but they insert a mini sensor card in your mouth, that is read almost instantly into a computer and projected on a flat screen in the office for him to examine and show me (no plasma screen yet). Apparently the cost savings (on supplies, film, chemicals) are significant, the images sharper and saved to an electronic record, and also since the coverage is larger, I am exposed to less x-rays. It’s one of those subtle things I like to notice where technology slips into ordinary activities, and is useful. At other doctor’s offices, I see reams of paper, paper notes, large bukly files, [...]

Regarding the recently blogged More Frivolous Fun: Spelling with Flickr, there is a new feature that you can use a small chunk of cut and paste JavaScript to put in the source of your web page, and have it dynamically create a different set of flickr-ed letters on every page reload… think of it as a dynamic logo. As noted in the comment from Eric the site creator, you can now use his script to generate a logo dynamically in a page via JavaScript: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://metaatem.net/spell.php?picsize=s&string=CogDogBlog"> </script> I like it! I like randomness, mixing up content, etc. Thanks Eric!

More fun with dynamic graphics, of no certain putpose. Spell With Flickr rummages through the vast supply of flickr photos of letters so you can create a dynamic generate spelled out version of any word, e.g here might be my new logo: If you do not like the looks of any letter, just click on it and you get a substitute. And guess what Stephen, this one will work on your Flash-less computer! A generous tip of the blog hat to Tim Lauer, who is always finding cool stuff I follow. Update! As noted in the comment below from Eric the site creator, you can now use his script to generate a logo dynamically in a page via JavaScript: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://metaatem.net/spell.php?picsize=s&string=CogDogBlog"> </script>