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Super Happy Fun Time Friday

A couple years ago my parents came up for a visit to Alaska. Part of the trip involved some campground “camping”. The kind with those giant bath houses that have concrete floors and many shower stalls. One night while I was in there brushing my teeth, mom walks in and asked what I was doing. Of course, I immediately flashed back to childhood and tried quickly to think what I was doing that could possibly be out of the ordinary. She asked why I was running the water while I was brushing my teeth - like I don’t pay for it at home. At that moment I realized I had - for all my years, been running water down the drain the entire time I brushed my teeth. I had never even stopped to think about it to that point. This video illustrates the potential impact my simple act of changing that one aspect of my routine could make.

• Beautiful posters at ISO 50 - particularly this one
• Charis Tsevis’ “small pieces” mosaic illustrations. Amazing attention to detail.
• PicLens - yes, it is cool. Magical? I wouldn’t go quite that far
• Hacking Flickr - Add refferer information to comments you make on Flickr with this GreaseMonkey script. There is also a Flickr Hacks group I never thought to look for

Photophlow: Flickr’s Live Community

Around Christmas time I received an invite to Photophlow and had such a fun time chatting with other Flickr users there that I really wanted to blog about it. I was swamped back then and am finally getting around to it. Terrible, I know.

So what is Photophlow? The short version is that it is a way to connect with other Flickr users in real time and chat, but Photophlow has some amazing features that are pretty impressive. When you log in you’re taken to the anteroom - a place where you can configure your account and access rooms.

Group Rooms: Aside from the Main Room and a private room connected to your user, you also have access to rooms for each Flickr group you belong to (created automatically), active rooms that belong to your Flickr contacts, and the most active rooms on the server.

Inside a group room

Browse Flickr Photos: In each room you can browse the photos of each Flickr user in the room with you.Clicking a photo posts it to the room for everyone to see. You can also browse manually if the room is busy and you don’t want to disturb others, or browse privately which is like a “covert” mode.

Inside the Main Room

Send Comments, Tweets, and Tumbls: While viewing a photo in a room you can send a comment on it back to Flickr, Send a link and blurb to Twitter, send it to your Tumblr blog or do all three at the same time - very slick. Definitely something to check out if you love photos, have a photography class, or like chatting it up.

Viewing photo details with links to comment, and tweet

Using Atlas to Scout Ahead

This morning I received an email from FreshLogic Studios, and with all the online services and accounts I have I couldn’t quite remember why they were emailing me, so I went to their site to refresh my memory. A few months back I had come across their Atlas application that had a cool tie-in to Twitter so I created an account, voila… question answered.

It turns out Atlas has some other handy features that I hadn’t played with before. I’ll be traveling the next couple of weeks and took the opportunity to map some driving directions. Normally I would use Google Maps, am glad I tried this instead. (Attention terrorists) Below is the route I’ll be driving from Anchorage to Seward. It is a very scenic drive as you can probably guess from the map.

Next I grabbed the directions from PDX to a conference near Portland I’ll be at next week. This map isn’t quite as pretty as the first one.

… So I zoomed out to see what was nearby …

Still, I wondered what the area was like on the ground. Having never been to Portland yet I don’t know what quite to expect, so I see there are other features Atlas has that can help me discover more about the area such as “Bird’s Eye View”. Now I can see what areas of Portland really look like …at the University of Portland for instance…

… and the conference location …

Now how handy is that? How many times have I wished I knew where I was going before I got there? Atlas also shows images of the local area that other people have shared on Flickr. My next question is where all the hotspots are. Atlas can map those too courtesy of hotspothaven.com. Hey Look! There is that cool bookstore that Chris told me about that I will definitely stop at.

Spelling With Flickr

Spell with Flickr lets you spell anything using photos of text found on Flickr. Man, my name is long.

Mini Cards from Moo

Moo.com is offering to print mini cards of your Flickr photos - $20 for 100 cards form as many photos as you like. If you have a Flickr Pro account you can order 10 cards from 10 different pictures for free (first 10,000 orders only). Go get’em!