My wife and I made something a couple of weeks ago, and her name is Simone. Our families and some friends want to see lots of pictures, but most people don’t want us to flood their Facebook feeds with baby photos (nor do we want to). So we’ve been uploading them to Flickr mostly, but I wanted a slightly simpler page where people could just see a carousel slideshow of photos of our daughter. There was no good immediately-integrated-with-Flickr JavaScript carousel I could find, but I was pretty easily able to integrate it with Fotorama.

Here is the final product (and beautiful pictures of my girl). Here are the easy steps to do it yourself:

1. Sign up for a Flickr API key. If this is a non-commercial site, it's free and instant.
2. Grab the download or copy the hotlink markup from the setup page in the Fotorama docs
3. Add this markup to your page:

   <div class="carousel" data-auto="false"></div>

   There's a lot of configuration options you can add besides that. Here's the full list.
4. And now the final step, the JavaScript that populates the carousel:

     <script type="text/javascript">
       $(function() {
         var AddPhotosToCarousel = function(data) {
         var imgs = [];
         $.each(data.photoset.photo, function(index, photo) {
           imgs.push({img: photo['url_m'],
                      thumb: photo['url_sq'],
                      caption: photo['title']});
           });
           $('.carousel').fotorama({ data: imgs });
         };
         $.getJSON('[api.flickr.com/services/...](https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photosets.getPhotos&api_key=XXXXXXXXXX&photoset_id=YYYYYYYYYY&format=json&extras=url_sq,url_m&jsoncallback=?',) AddPhotosToCarousel);
       });
     </script>
   

You must put your API key and your photoset’s id into that big URL you pass to $.getJSON(). If you want the photos to show up in reverse order (as I did), change imgs.push() to imgs.unshift(). You can display things other than photosets (search results and such), but you’ll need to dig into the Flickr API docs to build those queries yourself.

Three winters ago, I took this picture while I was working from home, waiting for the icy roads to warm up. Since then, it’s become a fairly common photo to accompany blog posts about working from home. (Thanks, in part, to my very friendly Attribution-only Creative Commons licensing.) Here are a couple examples.

But now it’s come back to bite me. I’m now an image meme called “Freelancer Fred”. It’s on quickmeme, and BoingBoing covered it yesterday.

Wait, what? That’s an outrage. I hope it was a sale. Update: Ah, jeez. It was a photoshop. I’ve been hoodwinked.

My pinhole photos came on Saturday. Several of them came out pretty well, and I was surprised that my camera had virtually zero light leaks. M’s mom is scanning them at work and emailing them to me today, hopefully they’ll be up later. (They’re up, as of 12:30.) I’m planning a second 110 pinhole camera, but I thought I’d share what I’ve learned from my first attempt:

1. Make the pinhole smaller much bigger! Even the ones that are good came out pretty fuzzy.
2. Make sure the pinhole is centered and parallel to the film plane. The photos were all more up-and-to-the-right from where I thought they were.
3. Compensate for reciprocity failure.
4. For that matter, I just need to get better at judging light conditions.

A round-up of the pinhole camera links that I used (and others that I just found interesting) while building mine:

• Pinhole Calculator, possibly invaluable for an experienced pinholer, but also a good reference for a newbie.
• Pinhole Spy, the source of the original directions for the 110 camera. I modified the shutter and had to slightly enlarge the entire thing.
• Estimating exposure for those without a light meter.
• A garbage can pinhole camera, the biggest example I've seen.
• The SPAMera uses 120 film and is surprisingly advanced.
• Dirkon, a notoriously complex paper pinhole camera.
• Matchbox pinhole, the directions that inspired my project.
• Chris' photos taken with a matchbox pinhole camera.

I don’t get the newspaper, and I don’t watch TV news programs; instead, I get almost all of my news via the Internet and NPR. The problem with this is that I don’t often get a chance to see what places or people in the news look like.

For me, Flickr is a great way to follow current news events visually. Today, I’m keeping an eye on photos tagged with strike and the NYC group pool.

Almost all digital cameras (with the notable exception of all but the newest camera phones) support a JPG comment format called Exchangable Image File Format (EXIF). When you take a photo, a lot of nice details about shutter speed and aperture are saved along with the image (and a lot of confusing and technical data, too). Unfortunately, if you take photos with a film camera and scan in the photos, the data is all missing.

Luckily, there are a number of tools made exactly for such a situation. Exifer is a good freeware option, but there’s also MaPiVi, which is open-source and cross-platform. There are a ton of them out there, if you ask the right people.

A hundred thousand thanks to smackfu, my fellow MetaFilter user and Naugatuck resident. I added him to my contacts list on Flickr a few weeks ago to watch and see if he posted anything that might look familiar. Yesterday, I was greeted with this message when I logged into my account:

Subject: smackfu has given you a Pro Account!

smackfu wrote you a message: "Everyone I know on Flickr is Pro but you, and I have a free account to give away, so have fun!"

smackfu has given you a Flickr Pro account, good for one year. That means you can have all the benefits of Flickr Pro accounts: 2 gigs of uploads per month, unlimited storage, ad-free browsing, and unlimited photosets and features.

Check out his photostream.

Nomad and Mari converted his E3 Pac-man shirt from a XL to medium this weekend. I’m considering doing the same, because this shirt feels like an especially large XL, even after an I-hope-it-shrinks pass through the wash.

I have about 250 photos from the six years of NVAD. I’ve decided to post a few of my favorites online. It’s clear that we were all very bad photographers, because even my favorites aren’t that great.

I’ve started taking some pictures with my low-res camera on my Visor, and posting them to Flickr. There are a few up there of my workplace right now. I hope to integrate a “latest photos”-type thing into plutor.org in the near future.

M, Mari, Chris, Nomad, and I just got back from our trip to the family camp in Maine. It was a fun time, but it was pretty dang chilly all weekend. Here’s a few of the highlight photos.

Update 09-08: Chris has posted a few of his pictures from the trip, including their visit to Boothbay and Popham Friday morning.

Nomad, M, and I did some geocaching at White Memorial this weekend. We looked for four caches, and only ended up finding one (blame me for not bringing all of the necessary clues). The one we found was supposed to require kayaks or canoes, but we just beat back the woods to get to it.

Fourteen miles of hiking, and two-thirds of a vertical mile of climbing in two days to get to the top of the tallest Mountain in Massachusetts. It was completely worth the effort.

Check out this “poke your eye out” blue 2003 Nissan Altima. Commence bragging.. now.