Diary of a Network Geek

Just some pretty pictures to look at.

Seriously, I have been under the weather all week and I don’t have a lot left over for even a Friday Fun post.
I don’t know if it’s just allergies or a hateful Summer cold, but my head is all stuffed up and my brain is working slower than molasses at the North Pole in January.  So, pretty much, all I’ve got for you is this one link to Flickr’s 20 Under 20, a “celebration”…
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Another one for the photography geeks.

Some of you may have guessed that I enjoy photography just a little bit.  You may have deduced that from all the photography related links I share on Fridays.  Or possibly because I tell you am obsessed by it virtually every chance I get.  Either way, it’s true.  I find myself staring into portraits of people in magazines trying to figure out the lighting setup based on the reflections in their eyes.  When I see a photo I like on Flickr, I usually check the EXIF data, if it’s available, to get some idea about how the photographer made it.  The EXIF data is far from the whole story, but, at least, it gives me some idea how the photographer was setting the camera to get the light and depth-of-field that they did.

Well, recently, I was reading an entry on Chase Jarvis’ blog challenging his readers to reverse engineer one of his photos.
I kind of love those sorts of things, to be honest.  But, what was cool about this one was that someone in the comments pointed to a website that automagically pulled the EXIF information from the photo!  How cool is that!?
The site is called Jeffrey’s EXIF Viewer.  And you can use it to pull EXIF information from either a photo on your hard drive or that you find on-line somewhere.  I haven’t actually tried it on Flickr for people who don’t upload the EXIF data, but I’m sure I will be in the near future.  In any case, it’s free, outside of some advertising, and it’s pretty cool.  (Also, for the hard-core tech geeks like me, I’ll note that it looks like it was programmed in Perl, which is my favorite programming language.)

So, go forth, find photos and check them against the EXIF data to see if you can guess the photographer’s settings!
And, enjoy your Friday!

This is pretty cool!

You know those “sun jar” and “moon jar” things from ThinkGeek.com?  How’d you like to make your own?  Seems like a genius idea to me.  And, apparently, the folks at Lifehacker thought so too, because they have a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a sun jar.  Check it out!
You can also see my own attempts at Flickr in the DIY Moon Jar set.
It’s super easy to do and not very expensive.  Not only was it fun, but I figure now I have some emergency lights that don’t need batteries the next time a hurricane comes through and knocks out power!

Doing the 365 thing at Flickr?

Well, this might not be the only thing you use to make some of that happen, but according to this article at ReadWrite, Daily Mugshot might help. The article talks about a site that has a set of free tools that will help you take a daily picture of yourself, to track the continual change in your outward appearance.
I may do this, just to track the changes in my face this year as I try to loose that post-chemotherapy weight that I’ve gained.

The “inside” changes are all on you.