Daily Archives: Sat, 15 September, 2007

Free Digital Calendars

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Ok, it might not be as good a bargain as it sounds but these really are free 🙂

Continuing my exploration around flickr, and thanks to Alun Salt, I came across “fd’s Flickr Toys” – one of which allows you to take your flickr images and convert them into calendars. Not being one to miss out on the chance to play with “gadgety” stuff like this, I had to give it a try. As a result, I now have three images you can download and use as desktop calendars (or if you are browsing this with a mobile device, you can use these as backgrounds – if you have a big phone…). All three images are saved as JPEG files and are 1280×1024 pixels in size.

Unlike most images here, these will not open in a lightbox but will open as the full image. If you want to use them, I suggest you go along the lines of a right click and “save target as” or “save link as” (or whatever your chosen browser does to save the target of a link rather than the thumbnail image).

October CalendarNovember CalendarDecember Calendar

And now I will return to finding more odd Flickr things 🙂

[tags]Photos, Flickr, fds Flickr Toys, Calendars, Free Gifts, Wallpaper, Digital Images, Technology, Fun, Fun Things[/tags]

lewes street

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lewes street

lewes street,
originally uploaded by djsosumi.

Again, continuing my wander through Flickr, I came across a thread which was discussing “your most popular HDR image.”

In this discussion people were posting HDR images which flickr had rated as their most “interesting” – this is something Flickr works out by how many page views a picture gets, how many comments and how many times it is tagged as a favourite by some one.

Oddly, some of the pictures are pretty tame – especially when compared to some of the fantastic HDR ones. This picture (oddly the first one in the thread) is probably the one “I” think is the best HDR picture but some of the others are amazing as well.

It seems that with HDR some subjects are more suited than others – brightly coloured cars produce some amazing effects as do boats and Gothic architecture, but fruit (apples) seems to end up pretty pedestrian. Oddly, I am not sold on the HDR elephants either, but I like pictures of elephants in general.

Anyway, now it is time to work on my HDRs and see what I can produce.

Media in chains

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There’s an excellent post on Hell’s Handmaiden about internet censorship.

Following a link from there to rense.com about Sonoma University’s censorship project brought up information that was a few years old, so I tried to find the most recently updated Project Censored.

This is an interesting and crucial project, with Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008 released within the past few days. The rankings of specific items may be debatable but the whole collection is well worth looking at and thinking about. They deserve our support for making this information available.

Confusingly, Project Censored seems to be reporting on the future, though. It seems to put us in 2008. (I checked my PC date. No surprise to find that it is indeed still 2007, although maybe the International Dateline has become stronger due to the magical power of the Internet to collapse time and space and the US has leapt 3 months ahead.)

Hell’s Handmaiden remarked upon the complacency shown by so many people’s comments on Internet censorship and the associated lack of civil liberties. This pervades most people’s responses to any threats to hard-won freedoms.

I tried to tabulate the reasons why people don’t seem to care, from apathy through an unwillingness to interfere in other countries to a feeling of powerlessness to change anything. The last is probably the most powerful motivation for those people who care. It’s worth remembering that societies change all the time, sometimes – but not necessarily always- for the worse.

Meerkats Posing

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Meerkats Posing

Meerkats Posing,
originally uploaded by chi liu.

Blimey – there I was looking round Flickr for inspiration and I came across this picture of some Meerkats (Suricata Suricatta).

Needless to say, this photo managed to break every “cute meter” on the planet. As far as flickr animal pictures go, it certainly has drawn some interest with hundreds of people adding it as a favourite (quite rightly so) and zillions of people leaving comments.

Oddly, for the zealots who write photography magazines, this picture has drawn so much praise despite it being reasonably “pedestrian” as far as technical skill goes. Just goes to show that all the rules in the world don’t count when you can take a fantastic photograph.

This certainly is a fantastic photograph.

[tags]Photos, flickr, meerkats, pictures, photographs, Digital Photos, Suricata Suricatta, Photography, Digital Photography, Animals, Cute[/tags]

Nulls Back

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In case you have missed it, Nullifidian is back blogging – today with a nice catch of Archbishop Rowan Williams claiming that he cant come to terms with humans being created for a “Purpose.” Brilliant. Well worth reading.