Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Good ideas for websites
Sean and I have had some good ideas for businesses and websites during our radio show, so it is only fitting that we share a source for similarly stellar ideas from online – Good website ideas by Simon the Web Genius.

Simon is the alter-ego of David Thorne, the man we talked about in 2008 for trying to pay a bill with a picture of a spider.

I have had a number of his other online pranks float through my inbox in recent weeks, so he is clearly tickling the funny bones of people in my friends network.

David’s site is 27bslash6.com, and it is not for the kiddies. It is for people wanting some silliness and amusement.

You can find the spider story there along with Simon’s web ideas. Here are a few:

• everything.com – This would be a website where instead of having to look all over the internet for what you want, it would all be in the one place. This would effectively end the need for search engines so I would have to be careful that google representatives do not kill me in my sleep.
• whereaboutsami.com – This would be a website where users can write the name of the city and street they are on and I would tell them where they are.
• whatkindofcoughisthat.com – A website that contains sound files of different coughs. Each cough would have a description to allow the user to sound match and determine the kind of cough they have before going to the chemist and buying either dry or wet cough medicine.
• screensavingpage.com – A website that is a black page so that people can go there instead of buying a screensaver.
• amihavingaheartattack.com – A website for people having a heart attack.

For more site ideas, some laughs and a healthy dash of black humour, visit Good Ideas for Websites.

Adelaide Fringe
It is Fringe time in Adelaide again, so it is worth checking out the Fringe website. Lots of information is available about every show and my favourite part is the part that lets you see YouTube clips of the shows and performers who will be appearing. Follow this link to watch Fringe 2009 YouTube Clips – click on the show of iterest and then, in the show’s profile page, click on the television icon and the video clip will pop up. 

Passport Photos for Free
I needed to attach two passport-sized photos to some papers through the week and my Google search brought me to ePassportPhoto.com. It describes itself as “the Internet passport photo booth, empowering people around the world to make free and valid passport photos.” The site claims to, “put an end to the passport photo rip-off,” and I must say I have always thought the passport shoot was a money-for-jam job for photo labs and photographers. My Fringe media pass photo was snapped by a friend on a cheap digital camera, trimmed to size in photo editing software and emailed in. However, this website makes it even easier – as long as you have photo paper and a colour printer. You simply choose your country and the service sets the size your picture needs to be, upload your picture, you move your picture around so your forehead and chin are in the right place, choose how many images you want printed per sheet, then hit print.

The site is free but move through it carefully – it is set up to make it easy for you to simply send your image to Snapfish for printing for money (which is the site owner’s right, of course).

You can create images for your fake Ids, whoops, no, I didn’t say that, I meant, for a range of legitimate reasons at ePassport Photo.

Sweet Cron
There are many social networking sites out there today and many of us find we have our virtual selves spread across numerous sites. There are some aggregation solutions available – places or tools for tying your many profiles into one place – and FriendFeed springs to mind as a popular option in this category. However, some programmers led by Yong Fook in Tokyo have come up with a free, open source tool that you load onto your own website to gather your various manifestations into one place. If you comment on Facebook, upload a picture to Flickr, or do many other similar things, those fragments will all be displayed and archived on your own site in what the makers call a Lifestream.

The name, SweetCron, is, I imagine, a play on the word “sweetcorn” because a cob of corn holds many kernels into one place and a “cron” is a “time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems”. At least, that is my guess and I might be reading too much into it!

As of February 2009, you can join the public beta by registering your email address at Sweetcron.

Ants, ants, ants

Through the week we battled an ant invasion. I mentioned it on Facebook and got told how wonderful ants are (in other people’s houses).

In particular, there were two great links. One is actually for a software company that has based some software on the way ants search for food and lay trails for the rest of the nest to find the food. The site is http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml. The insight this site gives, as pointed out to me by Liz, is that using boiling water on your benches and wherever you see scouting ants will cut the scout off from the nest and leave you in peace. It is quite involved and includes diagrams. In particular, it shows how ants are not very efficient because when one ant crosses another ant’s path, it cannot tell which direction is the home direction and which is the food direction. It means there are many wasted trips.

The other site is dedicated to ants and in particular the “diet” section is eye opening. Did you know they can eat small insects (some nests in the UK go through 100,000 insects per day), the bodies of insects and animals left behind by other insects and animals, fruit, vegetables, and sugary substances. They sometimes eat their own dead and even ant eggs.

But the most amazing thing is that some ants keep “herds” of aphids just like we keep cows. They place the aphids onto stems of roses and similar plants and allow them to feed on the sap. Hungry ants then stroke the aphid on the back, producing a drop of “honeydew”. In return, the ants protect aphids from predators and even create shelter for them in the nest.

You can read more about this at Ant Nest.

Pixenate

I have found the perfect online photo editing tool for people who are not tech-heads or savvy photo software users already. It is pixenate and it has come to the web with a very simple interface for playing with your photos online.

You can crop, change exposure, and all the usual things, plus you have access to some fun tools that are very popular these days, such as rounded corners, polaroid effect, and even the “lomo” effect which is part of a fad at the moment of shooting shots on film with a “lomo” camera – they are like cheap cameras with “toy” lenses that do lend a sense of fun to photography.

You can see it for yourself at Pixenate.

Baby Gamer

Well, it had to happen. Children are starting with computers at a younger age and now there is babygamer.com – a site dedicated to online games for babies. You might go crazy after hearing “boing” for the 2,000^th time but you might also have enjoyed a distracted child for five minutes.

Fisher-Price is behind a number of these games along with Crayola and many of the big baby names. But the site is not made by a corporation. In fact, it has been put together by some parents who wanted to pool all the good, free, online games for babies into one place.

Along with the boing-boing games, Crayola’s fireworks show is fun, as you plan a fireworks display – probably not for the really little babies because it has a small degree of complexity as you set fireworks to go off on a timeline, but it is in the “infants” category so maybe I am reading more into it than there is!

My favourite is Pom Pom’s Shell Game – a bright, colourful version of the pea in the cup game.

On the whole, these games are simple and delightful and worth a visit by parents. You can find them at Baby Gamer.

Adelaide Now’s Viral Images

Every now and then, you find an interesting list or gallery of material that makes you think or is entertaining. This one is both. It is a collection of 100 images collected from viral emails.

There are plenty of classics here and I am sure there will be many you have not seen. My favourites include:

• The “dogs allowed” photo
• The film crew standing in the path of a rally car that has lost control
• The sheepdog leapfrogging over sheep
• The baby monkey hugging a dove
• The two window cleaners dressed as spiderman
• The classic is the battery powered battery charger from NaiveTek J

You can see all the pics at Adelaide Now Viral Image Gallery.

Gary Sauer-Thompson
Here is an Adelaide man who is producing and interesting blog, rich with interesting words and pictures. Gary describes himself as someone for whom “Adelaide is home. Work is often in Canberra. Relaxation is in Victor Harbor.” He says he is a “frustrated photographer & philosopher who has lost his way in life. I used to be a policy wonk. Now, as a knowledge worker I have trouble learning to live in a complex digital world. Personal expression is the way I critically cope in a technological mode of being.”
His blog, which I am linking to, has four main sections – conversations, public opinion, philosophy and junk for code. It is the junk for code part I will link you to so that you can watch his pictorial essay on the River Murray unfold. At the time of linking to this section of his site, there is a prominent story on his recent trip to the Milang Jetty. He weaves in political comment, regarding Brendan Nelson’s recent visit as part of the Mayo by-election campaign for Jamie Briggs, along with a wonderful picture of the jetty. If you scroll further down the page, you will see more dramatic pictures of our River Murray in all its resplendent distress. The colour and detail that Gary achieves in his photographs is stunning, and he is doing an important job of keeping the river in our consciousness while we dodge occasional rain showers and run our hot water taps without fail every morning. You can see this blog stream at http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/.
Make sure you scroll down to the Mundoo Channel photograph near the Murray Mouth just south of the barrages. Surrounding the photograph, Gary reminds us “the barrages were constructed seven decades ago to pool freshwater behind them, providing drinking and irrigation supplies to farms and towns … the situation is one whereby the levels of the freshwater lakes continue to drop behind barrages that currently keep out the sea. Scientists warn they could within months turn acidic, irretrievably damaging them.”.

Food facts
Now this is an interesting site on many levels. Firstly, it is funded by Meat and Livestock Australia so straight away we know we need to be on guard for “spin”. We know that only research that supports the consumption of red meat will be included. We know that censorship by omission will be the key to keeping the funding body happy. That being said, I am a meat eater and they are selecting research from authoritative bodies, so it is a site that will be in harmony with my expectations and understanding of the world.Secondly, I don’t know how such a nicely designed site can be created and NOT be compatible with Mozilla Firefox. It is incredible. This site totally breaks in Firefox, the second most popular browser used today. I would be having a few words with my web designer if I was the funding body.
Thirdly, there are some interesting comments in the “facts” that would make juicy conversation pieces for your next dinner party (as you eat your red meat, of course), here are just a few:

• It is important to eat a wide variety of fruits from apples to citrus to berries and bananas, “from fresh to stewed to canned varieties”. Now I know that canned and stewed fruits are not totally bad for you, and can be handy back ups when fresh fruit is out of season, but who has ever heard of making sure we mix canned and stewed fruit into our diets? That would be similar to saying you must eat red meat but must also include jerky in your diet. Bizarre.
• It mentions we need to include cheese in our diets and then on the next point it says we need to reduce consumption of cheese and other foods with saturated fats.
• Interestingly, it does point out the down side of dairy food, sugars, oils, and alcohol, but when it talks about meat it gives a glowing reference apart from lightly mentioning we should trim fat from our meat. I am sure there must be other points of concern and it would have lent more credibility to the page if they were included in the way pros and cons were included for other food types.

On the Weight Management page, it states that we need, for our evening meal, 4 servings per week of 200g of red meat, 2 servings per week of 200g of fish, and 1 serving of chicken without fat or more meat. For lunch we MUST eat 100g of lean protein – beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, etc. It says we need just 40g of high fibre cereal, 2 and a half cups of non-starchy vegetables, one serve of fruit and dairy, and a dribble of vegetable oil.There is advice on eating less, namely, setting times for eating, not eating in front of tv, chewing more, and washing your plate straight after eating (that also helps marital bliss). The other classic piece of advice is to choose smaller plates and bowls. I must say, I think the jury is out on that one. Having to go back for a second plate all the time would be annoying, leading to frustration, leading to depression, leading to more consumption of comfort food.
Overall, this is an interesting site that will easily keep you interested for a few hours. Just don’t sit down with a bowl of snack food next to you as you explore it! Using Internet Explorer, you can visit the site at http://www.foodfacts.com.au/.

Ugly Dresses
Oh my! Just what do girls do to each other? You must see this collection of ugly dresses, mainly bridesmaid dresses that charming brides have foisted upon their best friends.
There are some interesting categories of pictures from bad shape and bad colours to the must see categories of bad shoes, ugly weddings and tattoos and skanks. Some highlights are:

• Ugly weddings – Was this made in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts, Deodorant Application.
• Ugly shoes – Bridal Sneakers Complete With The Ankle Tattoo, and Minivan, Sneekers, Man-Calves.
• Tattoos and skanks – Tat, Beer, Cig, and a Casino, and Wedding Tattoo Rule #3. Actually, I have to paraphrase tattoo rule number three which features a girl with some pseudo eastern tattoo on her left shoulder blade, fully exposed by her low cut wedding dress. The advice is: Don’t let a $50 tattoo ruin a $20,000 wedding. If you still think that your tattoo is meaningful and that everyone else actually gives a rat’s about what it signifies you are wrong. The only people who actually pretended to listen to that crap were guys who were trying to “get to know you better” in your past, and guess what? You are married now.”

Actually, the most razor sharp commentary was also saved for the tattoo section. It is the picture entitled “shark tattoo and a million other things”. The commentary goes: “Ivory Dress & White Bra. Bleached blond hair and leathery skin. Black plastic watch and crappy tribal shark tattoo. Also, someone should slap the Maid of Honor for screwing up the pearl buttons.” Unleash the sarcasm within and visit http://uglydress.com/index.html.

Fast talking Fred
I was alerted to Fast Talking Fred by an article in The Age, in which it highlights that Fred’s creator, Lucas Cruikshank, is already a minor celebrity at the age of 14, still two years away from being legally able to drive, vote or get married. On YouTube, Lucas’s character, Fred, is attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers, leading to sponsorship deals and talk of television shows.Fred is “a six-year-old with anger management issues who lives with his alcoholic mother and whose absentee father is doing time in jail.” The attraction comes from Lucas’ baby face, the timeworn comic device of having someone older play someone younger, and the “chipmunking” of his voice.
Fred’s weekly videos began in May and four of the episodes have had more than one million viewings. You can see his YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/Fred.