Tag: images

FlickrFan

After listening to an interview with Dave Winer on a TWiT (this week in tech #134) podcast, I became interested in a “service” Winer was hacking together called FlickrFan. You may not recognize the name, but Winer was involved in the development of RSS. Anyway, Winer was describing FlickrFan and it was my impression he was describing a method for acquiring high quality images from “services” for display on HDTVs using a device such as Apple TV. The description of the quality of the images caught my attention.

I don’t own an AppleTV or have a HDTV, but it turns out you can use this service on a Mac and if you want use the images it downloads as your screen server. I have found the ever changing display of great images quite captivating. Default image feeds include AP wire photos and Agence France-Presse wire photos. You can add whatever additional feeds you want.

I took this picture of my office workspace to give you a feel for what appears on the screen(s).

Flickrfan in my office

A one or two sentence description of each image is also provided.

flickrfan.jpg

I am a news channel (mostly CNN) junkie. This feed of images adds a new dimension to this hobby. You can use this software in other ways, but just using it as a way to access news images has been worth the effort.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Loading

Taking A Closer Look – Proscope HR


It is amazing how those of us working with educational technology issues get so caught up with online tools and topics. I am no different. However, there are interesting tools and opportunities enabled by these tools that we may be starting to forget. My career began with a biology major and interest in teaching high school biology. I continue to be interested in science education. This is possibly evident in the images you see here from time to time.

Biology is a field with an important visual element. Technology allows this visual element to be captured and “studied”. Sometimes the objects of interest require magnification and inexpensive tools are available to enlarge and capture the images. ProScope HR is suited to this task.

ProScope HR

Here are a couple of samples.

Dime

Dime Magnified

This is one of those mystery images. What is it?

10 PM Beard Magnified

I call this 10 pm shadow.

Loading

TiltViewer

Here is another Cindy suggestion. If you do Flickr projects, you might want to experiment with TiltViewer (from Airtight Interactive). The viewer allows you to browse and manipulate flickr images within a type of 3-D environment.

You can create a URL that allows others to view public images within this environment.

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/tiltviewer/app/?user_id=86785198@N00 – the resources to be offered are made available by attaching flickr identification codes to the end of the TiltViewer URL.

TiltViewer

Loading

Aging Companies and New ideas

Perhaps you have noticed the bid made by Microsoft to purchase Yahoo. It always bothers me when innovators (not certain I would categorize either company among the new innovators) gets gobbled up. This seems to happen everywhere I look – it has happened to the textbook market and it clearly happens to technology companies. Joe Nocera (NY Times) makes the observation that this is a move of an old company. Remember IBM? Microsoft has been so productive, but now seems destined to try to hold on by using its financial leverage rather than its innovation and creativity. Can’t keep up with Google, buy the nearest competitor.

Flickr would be a great acquisition for Microsoft, but if Flickr is generating enough revenue to keep and develop this service, I would rather it remain elsewhere. I understand the struggles of the startups, but I object to the ponderousness when megacompanies inhale smaller companies. So, I could move my flickr images to Picasa as a protest, but that would be lot of work and I would then simply be moving between what have become the two big players. There must be a sweet spot in there somewhere. How to protect it?

Some do disagree and see this as a way to encourage rather than discourage competition.

Loading