fine whine

The more I play with making fake CD covers from flickr photos, the more I get frustrated by the sheer number of interesting photos that are unusable because of their creators’ chosen license. I realize that if I emailed them, many wouldn’t mind me using their photos for something like this, but that seemed like it would be so much trouble.

So instead I programmed a little script to find only the usable shots, and made a page for it. Took me a couple hours, give or take, to get it working.

To be more specific, here’s what you might want to know about what I did.

Flickr photos can be licensed in a number of ways, either through the default “© All rights reserved” that regular copyright protection grants, or through the more flexible and friendly creative commons licensing with its many permutations, including requirements for attribution, non-commercial and commercial use, and even the licensing of derivative works. So what I needed to do was take the five hundred photos flickr picks each day for their “interestingness”, and filter out anything that was marked “all rights reserved” or “no derivative works”. Fortunately those happened to map to the integers 0,3, and 6, which meant filtering them out was a simple modulus test*. Calculations aside, the rest was a matter of a few hours’ work and the phpFlickr documentation to get a working script that wouldn’t hammer my server, nor get me banned from flickr’s.

So all it does is check 3,500 of the last seven days of interesting photos, and from those, screens out the usable ones. From my quick observations, the percentage of correctly-licensed photos chosen for their interestingness is under ten percent. Which means that hopefully I can save people some time. The one that it picks, at random, is ready to use.

Click here to try it for yourself.

Go ahead and put your comments and questions below. I’m releasing this as a 0.1 version - I know there is much more I’d like to do with it, but since it works, I figured I’d get it out there for people to play with. My source code is messy, but eventually I’ll get the relevant bits of it posted too.

* At the risk of sounding too nerdy, modulus is, and has been, one of my favorite mathematical operations. It’s just a fancy name for “the remainder”, but since that sounds like something out of elementary school, I think everybody calls it the much more impressive “modulus”. It’s wildly useful (or at least, I’ve used it a lot), and, well, I’ve used it a lot, probably more than multiplication and division combined, in my programs over the years.

I’ve uploaded more than ten of the random CD covers I’ve created (mentioned earlier) to a new flickr set* I made.

See it here.

As I’ve started spending more time and effort on making them, I’ve found myself going through old, uninstalled fonts and using parts of Photoshop (and the Gimp, and Illustrator, too) that I’d not used much of before. I’ve even re-done a few from before that looked, well, cheesy. I imagine this set will only grow as I mess with more of these.

What can I say? It’s fun.

* I could finally create a third photo set having activated the “pro” subscription that Janice gave me for Christmas. Thanks Janice!

So ever since I read about them on Neatorama, I wanted to make some random CD covers. From what I read, the recipe was simple:

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of the band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the album title.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, license permitting, is the album cover.
4. The finished product belongs in the CD cover meme pool.

I turned out a few in as many hours. I tried to stick to the rules, but couldn’t bring myself to use the photos that were marked “© All rights reserved” when I knew there were ones licensed (via creativecommons) for derivative works, as this would likely be considered. Though I ended up reloading a few times more than I liked, I did come across enough to make these (and a few more that I’ll eventually upload).

Making fake album covers is nothing new to me. Back when I was first learning Photoshop I’d made many a cover using stock photography for a fictional band called “Spontaneous Grape”, going even as far as creating a fictional record label* to release them. But coming up with the titles was often the trouble, and moreover selecting photos that I thought would be interesting even more so. Without those aspects to worry about, I can crank these things out much faster.

Eventually I’ll get them up on flickr, annotated and everything else. But I’ve got to take a break from making them first.

* The name of the label was Ludd Records, and it was rather a bit of a dumb in-joke. One of my many online identities was that of “Luddite Industries”, which I thought to be a particularly sophisticated joke, in that the Luddites would not likely be operating a web site. Here’s the logo, which I drew in AutoCad, knowing it better than Photoshop at the time.

Someday I’m going to make a black t-shirt with this on it in white.

This is the first* video I’ve shot with my mobile phone. I think I’ll stick to using my nicer digital camera to take videos, a device intended for such purposes, and not something that ultimately is meant to be a phone.

So what’s in the clip below? Natalya and I were running around some hallways, and I decided to shoot a little footage, for, um, posterity or whatever.

There isn’t really any sound (if you can’t see anything click here) - you can hear her laugh around seven seconds, but that’s about it. The main highlight is around the fourteen second mark, when she stumbles sideways, notices something on the wall, and tries to shove whatever she’s carrying into it.

Yes, that’s an electrical socket, and no, the footage was not followed by her falling over, crying, with her hair all sticking up. The thing in her hands that is almost completely unrecognizable (due to the bad video quality) is a wooden puzzle piece, and fortunately not a conductor. So it’s possible she learned about insulators, but not likely.

I almost learned something, though. Here I was holding the camera(-phone) and just letting her do whatever she wanted, safe or not, and I didn’t even think to stop her. I’d often wondered why people managed to make all of those videos that show up on youtube or America’s Funniest Home Videos of something painful or stupid, without dropping the camera and stepping in to help. Well, it seems to just happen that way, I guess. I’d like to figure out why.

Maybe it’s because cameras aren’t exactly cheap. I know I’d be in a lot of trouble if I dropped, and broke, my phone, though not as much trouble as an electrified toddler.

*To be fair, it’s actually the first two videos I’ve taken, edited haphazardly together with Windows Movie Maker. I think if I intend to do any real video editing, I know I’ll use a better camera and better software.

Though it coincides with the beginning of the new year, my attempt to post more frequently has nothing to do with any official New Year’s Resolution. That said, if I have any chance of keeping it up, I’m probably going to need to have some drafts ready for future dates when I can’t find anything interesting to post.

Which leads me to a fortune I recently found in a cookie:

Which is rather relevant, I suppose, but I’m only posting it because it ties into a discussion I’ve had with many people over the years: I seem to be more likely than most people to get fortunes that don’t gain a bit of double entendre humor by adding “…in bed” to the end of them. Like the one above*.

I do realize that it’s probably statistically insignificant and that I get no more of them than any other person would from the same fine dining establishments, but I seem to notice it more.

* Or others I’ve posted previously.

So with the holidays lately I’ve had a few weekdays away from my desk*. As is often the case when this happens, I had some errands to run, and interesting stores in which to stop nearby. At one point I found myself wandering through a MicroCenter (though I bought nothing), and near the video game section I saw something I wish I could’ve caught on video (and posted to youtube). But I didn’t have a good camera handy, and my phone’s movie mode would’ve been rather a bit lacking. So it’s time to dust off your imagination (take that, you click-happy tweens).

In front of me, there was a kid playing Guitar Hero. For those not in the know, Guitar Hero is a console video game that comes with a plastic guitar-like controller, and players push fret-like buttons while doing a motion similar to strumming, in time with popular rock and metal songs (or cover versions thereof). The kid appeared to have average skills, hitting the correct buttons at the right time. This was not the remarkable part, of course. Much more interesting than the player, was the kid standing next to him, fingers in the air, miming the same notes.

He was playing air Guitar Hero. There was, of course, a second guitar controller on the demo kiosk, but I think he was probably having more fun playing his fantasy version of the song than actually hitting the buttons. Or he was trying to be supportive of his buddy. Or perhaps he was doing a very convoluted form of mockery.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Guitar Hero, from my feeble attempts to play it, is already once removed from the actual experience of playing the guitar. This kid found a way to do it one better, I guess. And about 50 to 80 bucks cheaper, too.

* I almost wrote “…weekdays I wasn’t working” there, but with something of a slowdown at work I don’t know if I can count all the hours I was there as hours I really worked. I was there, and available for work, there just wasn’t any to do at the moment. Hence the deathmatch tournaments of Nexuiz, and before that, Marathon Infinity (through the magic of AlephOne).

I remembered something else that was somewhat notable for 2007: it marked the first time I’d ever eaten guacamole*.

* For the curious, 2006 was the year of the cantaloupe.