A Whole Lotta Nothing

marble steps are pretty slippery

via www.flickr.com

I didn't post this for the laughs, it's just kind of an amazing moment captured by Tracey on Flickr.

I hope this is on a plaque somewhere at Flickr HQ

I have to remind myself of this truism every so often so I might as well write it down for the ages:

When you have an old photo in your photostream with partial nudity in it, and it gets a new favorite from a random no-user-pic user, for god sakes, don't look at their other favorites.

Bigger Better Flickr

For over six years, you’ve made Flickr the place to be for photos. Billions of photos of the places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen, and the people in your lives. It’s an amazing photographic record that continues to amaze us. So as part of our Ongoing Quest to Make Flickr More WonderfulTM, we’d like to introduce… a new photo page!

via blog.flickr.net

I've been beta testing the new Flickr for the past couple weeks and I'm delighted that they have finally unveiled it to the public (I've been counting the days to when I could say something about it). It's a truly wonderful redo of the photo pages, adding a nice simpler layout with larger photos, easy mapping, and a cool quick zooming lightbox option.

What really makes it shine is that keystrokes (the arrow keys) work both on the photo page and within the lightbox. On my home fiber connection, this makes going through large photo sets pretty close to browsing iPhoto at full screen (in both cases, each new photo takes about a second to load). And while I used to curse having to muck through 70 or 80 photos someone took of an event, now I can just fly through them in large resolution using my keyboard.

The slightly larger photo size is great too, as are the easier to find sharing, favoriting, and other previously hidden controls.

Another thought I had after using it a week or so was that with the larger photos, lightbox, comments, and favorites, the whole photo page comes off feeling a bit more "bloggy" in a way that made me wonder if I should continue to keep a blog of my favorite photos around somewhere else, and instead just keep it as a set at Flickr itself.

Cutting Libraries

CuttingLibraries, originally uploaded by Daniel Solis.

Just put it on repeat

I've watched this six times and for some strange reason I could watch it many times more.

How to enjoy bigger photos on Flickr

As a longtime flickr user and photographer with ever increasing megapixels at bay, I've slowly become dissatisfied with the small 500px wide default photo layouts at Flickr. I edit my photos full screen on a huge monitor and I'm often cropping and adjusting based on that view, so when I upload to Flickr I realize the detail and what I was trying to frame is often lost. For the past several years, I've always defaulted my Ten Years photos to 1024px wide for these reasons.

I've wondered about Flickr someday doing larger "HD" layouts and I've tried a few greasemonkey scripts in the past, but nothing quite worked for simply browsing larger shot versions. Then I realized they've always had what I wanted, I just didn't realize it.

Here's how you enjoy large photos on Flickr:

1. From whatever page you access contact photos, a user's photostream, and/or a photoset, click on the slideshow link

2. As soon as the slideshow loads, hit the pause button on the lower left

3. Use your keyboard's left/right keys to navigate through the set of photos at full screen. If your mouse pointer isn't in the very top or very bottom of the browser, all slideshow chrome will fade in a couple seconds leaving you with giant photos on a clean crisp full browser display

Holy shitballs

Holy shitballs, originally uploaded by mathowie.

Back in college, my favorite undergraduate class of my major was Limnology, or the study of lakes and rivers. I loved it so much that I went to grad school and eventually helped teach it as a TA while doing soil and water chemistry of a lake ecosystem.

In the world of limnology, there are three big lakes everyone talks about. It shouldn't be a surprise that certain lakes always get talked about in a study of the subject since I suspect every English major has to know Chaucer, Math majors gotta know Erdös, and Physicists hear about Newton, Feynman, and Hawking all the time.

So among the limnologists I rolled with, the big three were Lake Tahoe in California (a good demonstration of a glacial lake), Lake Baikal in Siberia (deepest, largest lake by volume on earth), and Crater Lake in Oregon (perfect demonstration of a volcanic lake). I'd grown up in California so I'd been to Tahoe many times, I'd seen/read tons about Baikal but never thought I'd see it in person (though I know someone who has), but I'd always wanted to see Crater Lake in Oregon.

I've lived in Oregon for over six years now and I've gradually started exploring quite a bit of it, going up and down the entire coast, all over the northwest side, some of the central area around Bend, and much of the far eastern and northern segments, but until today, I've never actually gotten to see Crater Lake.

We drove up and stayed the night before about 7 miles outside of Crater Lake in the quaintest little motorlodge straight out of the 1950s. We awoke this morning and headed up, still not knowing exactly which peaks that surrounded the lower valleys contained America's deepest lake. After a half hour of driving, parking, and walking, I finally crested a path to take in this view and the first thought that came to my mind was this:

"Holy shitballs."

The morning light was great, the surface was still and there were great reflections and the deep blue water was a deep blue unlike anything I'd seen before. I was in awe. I still am. Sometimes nature is so incredible you left with nothing to say but "Holy shitballs".

Flickr's skinner box

Flickr's most addictive page in their giant game that is photo sharing is easily the Recent Activity page. It used to be a slight drag to have to check comments you left on other photos as well as your own, and soon after they redesigned their iPhone version of flickr, I realized the combined activity page was a much better solution to the problem of how to keep up on what has changed on flickr for you.

I'm happy to see upon checking my activity tonight, the same info on the iPhone recent activity page is now showing up in their website proper. Very cool change.

iStockphoto ends up on a license plate!

My new license plate, originally uploaded by mathowie.

I love my new Share the Road license plate that is now offered here in Oregon. It's only $10 as a one-time fee and half goes to the Bicycle Transportation Alliance and half goes to Cycle Oregon, both bike-friendly organizations I support.

I noticed it looked familiar when it showed up. I've been a casual user of iStockphoto for some time and I recently designed a site for a race series a friend was throwing (first race is this Saturday and I'll be there in the beginner class!) and I used iStockphoto to get that cool outline of Oregon and the cyclist profile (I used a slightly different illustration). When I opened the DMV envelope I instantly recognized the cyclist, because it's this file, just reversed, and with the water bottle removed from the outline.

I'm not faulting the designer, iStockphoto is a great place to get super cheap illustrations and I use them all the time, rather, I'm more stoked that an illustration there ended up working all the way up to an optional state license plate.

The first 24 hours of Fuelly

The first 24 hours of Fuelly, in statistics, originally uploaded by mathowie.

Holy cow. 24 hours ago, I took the stage at the START conference and explained some of the thinking and process behind me and pb's new site Fuelly. I knew it was an influential crowd, and I knew if it was good it might take off, but I thought maybe we'd hit 1,000 users by the end of the weekend at most.

Thanks mostly to twitter and other blogs (like Lifehacker and Get Rich Slowly) it's grown a bit faster than we expected. A cable network is doing a piece on it. Various awesome iPhone developers are wanting to plug into the API we still need to build. It's really been a crazy 24 hours.

Our inboxes are bursting with feature requests and bugs, but I'm really happy with how far we got building a site in just a few weeks. I'll be posting a full story of the development and creation of the site on fortuito.us in a week or two when all this dies down a little, hopefully inspiring other developers to try building their own similar projects.

My cousin's wedding hack

Putting rings on, originally uploaded by mathowie.

My cousin Tony and his girlfriend got married this past weekend and as a young couple in Southern California, they've been saving for years for their first house. On the occasion of their marriage, they didn't want to fill a non-existent house with blenders and trinkets but didn't want to flatly refuse gifts since weddings tend to be a place where people like to help out new couples by giving them gifts, but I think they felt weird asking for money towards a new home purchase.



So they came up with a pretty cool idea. He's an artist and she's a writer, and together they collected a bunch of paintings, ceramics, photos, and drawings and put them up for silent auction for several hours before and after the ceremony. Everything I liked had bids into the hundreds of dollars and all told, I bet they raised a couple grand in the process of letting family buy some pretty cool works of art.



I hope my other artist friends and family do this in the future, because I thought it was a pretty cool idea.

30 second clips from the aquarium

I love that flickr is limiting videos to 90 seconds. It makes it the twitter of video that way and I don't find myself ever getting bored clicking around my contacts. Here are a bunch of 30 seconds-or-shorter videos from a trip to the aquarium today.

Globalization is freaking awesome

Chinese Hammer fucking rules, originally uploaded by mathowie.

I stumbled across Chinese Hammer tonight and fell in love with it for a thousand reasons. Just the thought of someone halfway around the world mimicking a video from 1989 in a move-for-move remake. Also, the mom on the couch crocheting, oblivious to the awesome dancing. Then I posted it to MetaFilter only to find there's a such thing as YouTube Doubler to play them side by side.



I captured the best bits in a short movie here. About 30 seconds in, things start matching up and it just keeps staying awesome for another minute or so.

update: cool, the dude has a ton of other videos (Thriller, more MC Hammer, etc)

More fun than a pile of powdered sugar

Do I Look Cool Like They Do in the Movies?

originally uploaded by Max Sparber.

You might have seen a hilarious / bizarre / historical set of found photos someone picked up at a swap meet of a 70s cocaine party. It's really oddball stuff.

Even more odd, Astro Zombie (and friends) from MetaFilter started recreating the photos with their own mirrors and powdered sugar and a ridiculous new flickr pool was born.

ReCAPTCHA's quality is going down?

ReCAPTCHA's quality is going down, originally uploaded by mathowie.

Several months ago, we implemented ReCAPTCHA on MetaFilter contact forms, to thwart spammers. It's a good cause and a great idea: the nonsensical text you decode ends up helping public domain book scanning projects.



But lately, we've been getting a steady stream of complaints that it is not working or is unsolvable. Last night I tried out the contact form and was surprised that in the first ten images presented to me (keep hitting the little refresh button, the top of the three buttons on the control), at least half were totally undecipherable.



Here's an actual screenshot of one I saw this morning. The first word is impossible to decipher. My question is, has ReCAPTCHA had such success that all we're left with is the really, really bad book scans?

WWNPHD

WWNPHD, originally uploaded by the sweetchuck.

I'm sorry, but that's the greatest movie poster of all time

Domain related junk mail

Domain related junk mail, originally uploaded by mathowie.

In the beginning, I listed my home phone number and apartment address on all my domains. By the late nineties, the marketers/spammers showed up and after the tenth early morning phone pitch and junkmail blast, I gave up and fabricated a generic-sounding address and slapped a movie-style 555 phone number on all my domains.

Last Fall I finally buckled down and got a PO Box and I decided to try putting a real business address and phone number (at least my SkypeIn number) back on my domains. Today I did my monthly PO Box check and it was full. For the first three months of my mailbox, I got almost no mail but today it was stuffed with special offers for the owner of metafilter.com. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since there's almost no cost to blasting out ads to every domain owner but it was still unexpected.

My biggest worry when looking at this stack of mail? I hope the person living at 123 Fake St. in San Francisco knows how truly sorry I am for the past eight years of junk mail.

Flickr: Photos from oregonianphoto

This is wicked cool: Flickr: Photos from oregonianphoto

Someone from the big state newspaper The Oregonian is posting all the photos that go with stories in the paper to Flickr. I found it because I follow my small town's photos by flickr tag feeds. The paper gets new readers by mixing it up on Flickr, and they get to sell more photo reprints of stuff people like.

People keep saying that the internet is going to kill newspapers but stuff like this is the future: mixing a paper's output with related web communities that benefits both parties in the end.

flickr, always innovating

ho ho ho hat/beard is the best wacky easter egg feature ever. Try adding it as a note to your photos.

Flickr "detail" sets

I've been using flickr on a daily basis for over two years. Today I followed a link from someone's blog and landed on a page I've never seen before, and it rocked. It's simple, but I didn't have any idea it existed. It's the "detail view" of photosets, which is so much more useful for getting the gist of a gallery that I wonder why it's not the default view.

Don't know what I'm talking about? Check this out: Early this past spring I built a deck, and I made a gallery about that, so compare:

Holy cow, I built a deck! - a photoset on Flickr (default)

Holy cow, I built a deck! - a photoset on Flickr (detail)

See how much easier the detail view is? No more squinting at little thumbnails, you can instantly scan everything in a set without having to click on anything. Just add "/detail/" to your flickr set links when sharing a gallery. Your readers will thank you.

Noe Valley

Noe Valley, originally uploaded by dunstanorchard.

Ah, nerd humor.

Brilliant, clever hack for apartment dwellers

I always miss the 3rd, originally uploaded by cherrycan.

I love this. If I always went out of the same door (like in an apartment), this would be a lifesaver.

A Homemade Bender Costume

Are ya thirsty?, originally uploaded by chrismiller.

Wow, that's one hell of a halloween costume.

John Hodgman is not me

hodgman, originally uploaded by mathowie.

Just to clear that up.

Oprah Vette

Oprah Vette - Tampa Bay Possee, originally uploaded by karrelbuck.

Why god why?

The awesomest thing ever

(Dance Dance DNA Revolution, originally uploaded by mathowie)

DDR Science game at the scripps aquarium, full story on flickr.

Web 1.0 Summit

(Web 1.0 Summit, originally uploaded by Laughing Squid)

Glorious

Slashdot PT Cruiser on Highway 24, pt. 3

(Slashdot PT Cruiser on Highway 24, pt. 3, originally uploaded by allaboutgeorge)

Maybe someday someone will catch the MetaFilter Yugo on the freeway when it's out of the shop (custom license plate: JRUN ERR)

flickr + cameraphone + wine label = archived wine reviews

Rafe posted a great idea for keeping track of wines you've bought, to note which ones you liked and didn't like.

Personally, I try more new wines when I'm out at a restaurant or a party and I think the idea is more useful when out and about. If I'm trying new wine while traveling, I could take a cameraphone shot of the label and give a quick mash of the keys to leave my rating or thoughts on it. If you tagged all your wine label shots with the same tag in flickr, you could see all reviews at a glance, and maybe it would help me remember that one wine I had at a wedding six months ago that I loved.

I don't get pro photographers

I'm a big fan of Ben Saunders, mostly because I get to vicariously live through him (and I do plan on donating to his next big adventure), but in this entry he says:

I've taken the photos down again for now - I'm slightly concerned about people nicking expedition photos that I've nearly lost digits trying to take...

It goes on, and I know Ben's not a pro photo guy so I don't mean to pick on him specifically, but I've seen the same message from a lot of other people that used flickr and happen to make their living taking photos. "I don't like people nicking my photos" and "Is there any way to prevent others from making blog posts about my photos, using my photos?" are the things you often hear from them in the flickr forums.

Photos are jpeg files on the internet. Everyone that looks at a photo online makes a copy of the file at flickr.com just to view it in their browser. Sometimes people like photos and save them and maybe even make them their desktop background. Sometimes those same people add you as a contact and become fans of your photography. These are all good things for people that like looking at photos and photographers.

She's flying

(She's flying, originally uploaded by mathowie)

So cute.

Google adds RSS reader to google.com/ig

(Google adds RSS reader to google.com/ig, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Google's homepage just turned into a clone of My Yahoo, with a RSS parser built in.

How not to treat your avid readers

(Stupid Flash Ads, originally uploaded by plemeljr)

I've been seeing more of these things as well, even in firefox. Looks like it's time for a flash blocker.

star wars figure, forgotten

(star wars figure, forgotten, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow)

You never know what washes up on shore

Say it ain't so doc!

(Say it ain't so doc!, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Filed under: reasons why doctor-patient communication should never be handled by RSS in the future.

The shoes that owned paris

(The shoes that owned paris, originally uploaded by Stewart)

I'm comfortable admiting I'm a fan of shoe design not just for men, but women as well. I have to agree with the people of Paris: these are some fantastic shoes.

Basic Skate Party/Contest

(Basic Skate Party/Contest, originally uploaded by QsySue)

Amazing set of skatepark photos here.

Obi-Wan Mathowie

(Obi-Wan Mathowie, originally uploaded by fandango_matt)

The hits just keep on coming. I thought I loved the Tron one the most, but this Star Wars themed one takes the cake.

Free Flickr contest over

I got a handful of great responses in my earlier Flickr Pro giveaway thread. I love the idea of repurposing flickr for a wedding photographer -- you could use the private gallery options to show photos to clients and keep the negatives. I love the idea of helping out budding photographers, limited by the free account's storage boundaries, I've always felt artists should never be limited by tools.

But I love helping non-profits more, so I have to give the top nod to the Free the Slaves site. I think having a way to email photos from the field or from members worldwide could really shed light on their work and hopefully help end the practices of forced labor and child labor.

Several others said they might give away their extra flickr pro accounts to other posts in the thread, so if you hear from a random stranger about it, that's why.

Oh, by the way, if anyone from the Free the Slaves site could email me their flickr free account name, I can then upgrade it to pro status.

Free! Pro! Flickr!

I have one extra 1-year pro account at Flickr to give away.

If you want it, write a comment stating why you want it and I'll give it to the best one. You have 24 hours. Thanks!

matt jackson

(matt_jackson, originally uploaded by glassdog)

These are all great. One dorky photo and the madness begins.

Flickrsphere growing

(vorkjes, originally uploaded by graafschap)

9 months ago, I posted a picture on Flickr of a bike problem I was having, so a friend could see and suggest a fix. Alison joked that few would ever search for the tag "forks" because it was the first photo ever tagged with that. Today, there are four pages of photos tagged with the word "forks" including this most recent one, which I thought was quite cool.

Our little copyfighter

(Costco, originally uploaded by mathowie)

As we were buying our first diapers ever (will be needing them soon), Kay noticed they had some sort of cross-promotion with disney, putting characters all over the diapers. I knew what she was thinking when she mentioned it; it is a little scary to think infants are being marketed to by the Disney Corp.

But I cast away all fears when I realized something and said "Yeah, but think about it, these are diapers -- our daughter will get to shit right on Mickey!"

Great shot

(originally uploaded by jperkinson)

I know there are millions of photos of kids online, but jperkinson's are amazing.

For Veterans Day

(lest we forget, originally uploaded by striatic)

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Last year I happened to be in Vancouver on this day, and thought Canada's form of remembrance was both tasteful and respectful.