7 December 2007 Archives

How many misspellings does it take to make a successful mashup?

Elaine posted a note about Flickr adding edit capability via Picnik. I immediately tried it out, as the following screenshots demonstrate:

[images lost]

Just as with the stand alone version of Picnik, some of the functionality is free, others are part of a premium package: $24.95 per year.

Picnik is one of the few online photo editors I did include in the book, primarily because it’s one of the better organized, and has some of the most interesting effects. One aspect I like most about it is the sliding scale tool, which provides live scaling of the image.

Picnik uses Flash, like all of the online photo editors do. Flash isn’t a requirement, though. Most of the functionality, and then some, that Picnik can do can be done with something that most people already have installed at their linux-based hosting site: ImageMagick.

To use the ImageMagick, you do need to have command line access through SSH. ImageMagick can also be installed on the Mac using Macports, and accessed via the Terminal application. Once installed, the following command:

convert purpledragon_thumb.jpg -bordercolor white \ -background DarkGray -polaroid 5 purplepolaroid.png

Creates the following effect.

Purple dragonfly polaroid

Or, you can use Picnik with the premium package.

From Dark Roasted Blend: The Art of Extreme Sleeping. Photos of nappers from Japan, to China, to the States, including cats, kids, and Japanese girl students. An incredible photo story.
The “crowd-sourced justice” types (thanks to Dave Rogers for the term), may find themselves the target of the laws they advocate. One of the local laws being considered in the state of Missouri (and elsewhere) would hold sites like MySpace, Blogger, and Facebook liable for comments and posts considered ‘threatening’, or a form of harassment. The same would apply to Google, AOL, and Yahoo, for any threats or ‘harassment’ via email.
Today marks the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, an event celebrated less and less every year. Wired has a short and wonderfully dispassionate look at the events of the day. On the day before Pearl Harbor, my Dad turned 31 years old. He was a train conductor, somewhere over the midwestern plains. When he heard about Pearl Harbor, he got off at the next stop and immediately signed up–serving in the 82nd Airborne throughout the war. Dad received battlefield commissions, eventually making the rank of Captain. What kind of soldier was he? Well, he greatly admired Bradley, and despised Patton. That should tell you all you need to know. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Discussing his new book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman writes:

Iâ€™m not a vegetarian, and Iâ€™m not an advocate of a vegetarian diet; Iâ€™m an advocate of Americans eating fewer animal products – less meat, fish, poultry, and dairy. And there are two excellent reasons for this….First off, we eat too much of that stuff for our health; every single responsible, independent, and impartial study shows as much. But they also show that replacing the beef in your diet with potato chips and soda wonâ€™t do you any good. You can be a â€œvegetarianâ€ and still eat plenty of food thatâ€™s bad for you.

Secondly, the production of animal products as food is a major contributor to global warming. See the UN Report entitled Livestockâ€™s Long Shadow … which says, ultimately, that 18 percent of greenhouse gasses are a direct result of the production of animals for human consumption.

So if you cut back your consumption of animal products significantly, you not only reduce your chances of heart attack and other so-called lifestyle diseases, you reduce your carbon footprint – the impact you have on global warming.

The concept is not to cut out all meat, but to cut down on the amount of meat we eat. Americans eat far more meat then is needed–especially with diets like Atkins, which are environmentally equivalent to Indonesia’s deforestation . Via Sierra Club Compass.
David Lance Goines from Illustration Art:

I am a competent technician. I give value for value. I am an honest workman, and I do not want people to think that I am a con-man…. therefore I do not call myself an artist. I create flat, representational objects—books, illustrations, posters, stained glass windows, greeting cards, wedding invitations, wine labels–in return for money. I’m glad that people like what I do, because that means that I can go on doing it. I like what I do, and consider it a privilege to be able to make my living doing it. But, I am not, at least in twenty-first century terms, an artist. I’ll leave that to those who have no idea at all of what they do, or who they are, or where they are going, and must, for want of any other word, call themselves artists.
From Loren, on Following your Bliss:

For me, at least, the best reason to spend so much time and money producing a web site is to attract others who share your interests and appreciate your efforts. Such a community has helped me to grow in ways itâ€™s hard to imagine until youâ€™ve actually been part of one. Virtual communities of poets, photographers, philosophers and programmers have enriched my life in ways I would never have imagined before blogging began.