computerish observations

Flickr, 500px: photosharing communities

Since about 2006 I have been using Flickr. It is a good way to share pictures I’ve taken at a party or other event with the people who were there just by emailing a link to a group of photos instead of sending hefty attachments. But there is another aspect to photosharing sites like Flickr. That is something to do with the search for a community of people with the same interest (so much of the Internet offers this). So there are a number of similar sites that have the reputation of something a little more serious than Flickr where the vast majority of images are taken on smart phones. 500px is one of these that has caught my eye. Some of the photographs posted on 500px, as on Flickr, are impressive. Many though, to my eye, seem more like exercises in achieving some kind of photographic cliche and there are a small number of types of photographs that many seem to aim at – the sunset taken with an extreme wide angle lens to take one example. Many shots on 500px have attracted a number of comments, including a few to some of mine. So while I am touched that anyone would bother to write something, even a few words (most are), about my uploaded images, I think that overall the comments made on photography sharing sites are extremely banal. I have never seen critique for example. In fact it is easy to wonder whether most of the commenting is little more than a crude attempt to drive more viewers to commenters’ own images (some posters recommend just this to neophytes). And, as with much of the Internet, many contributors seem to be far more interested in the number of apparent visitors they get than in doing anything creative or interesting.

To many this will be obvious but what is interesting to me is the way it is possible to unconsciously adjust expectations, and the type of subjectivity you present, when on the Internet. And I wonder whether there is a rather desperate attempt at community at work here that, in my view, rarely delivers anything remotely like it. There must be other places to find dialogue and critique.

One review of 500px is here, along with reviews of some similar sites.

Sharing routes from Garmin Zumo and Basecamp

Basecamp is the Mac sort of version of Mapsource. If you are both clever and lucky you can design routes on the Mac and export them to the Garmin and retrace them. Its easy to import routes into Basecamp from the GPS. But what about sharing them on a blog or something similar in a more intelligent way than just taking a screenshot and posting the picture? This is useful but not quite it: http://rolfje.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/how-to-share-garmin-routes-with-your-friends/
Then there’s Garmin Connect but that doesn’t seem quite right.
What about this from Motowhere. Its a route I’ve placed there a while back and it should show up here:


What about satellite images?


Here’s an import from another motorcycle route sharing website Open Road Journey. It seems a bit more developed than MotoWhere, where the ‘forums’ are moribund and just full of spam. ORJ appears to have real articles on it:


Finally, there’s Everytrail of course.It seems more sophisticated when tacking GPX files from the Garmin.
the ‘back’ way to Ipswich and a route around Cambridge at EveryTrail
EveryTrail – Find trail maps for California and beyond

Quality Time

After spending most of the day buying and installing lagging for my and H’s outside pipes and fixing her leak(in freezing cold wweather), I finally settled down to some quality time- not with my family but with my new toy (now where s that right shift key?) Asus. Thanks to some detailed instructions (this keyboard is so small!) at http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:beginners_guide I now have a proper Linux desktop instead of the kiddies’ big buttons. The same site also taught me a bit about using this with wireless networks. It works fine where i am now on an unencrypted network but still doesn’t like mine even though the password is now 13 characters long (I had no idea about that requirement for non-Macs). I am starting to warm to this little machine. For some people the first thing they did on receiving their little Asuses was to dismantlle it to see how it is put together then solder extra things into it. My son’s approach to ladybirds was a little like that as a two year old.

Getting to know the Asus EEE pc

I took delivery of this little toy yesterday and so far am not too impressed with it. It seems hopeless at connecting to wireless networks. I connected to one unencrypted network but my own seems to cause problems. Isn’t this kind of computer called a ‘netbook’? The ‘net’ part ought to be easy. The keyboard is pretty small and so is the screen but I think these will just take some getting used to. I hate the ‘simple’ interface which seems to be aimed at small children and I haven’t found out how to get back to the normal Linux desktop. The webcam works with Skype which is hopeful. Battery life is ok but not impressive…

Macbooks and weightlifting – and trivia

…a complaint about Mac laptops in general. I have a nice G4 Powerbook that started to break down just over a year ago and, with a few months warning, gave me enough time to work through the lengthy bureaucracy at my university to order a replacement (ordering a Mac was a bit odd for a start in a place where most people use Dells). The standard machine they supply is the white plastic MacBook I am typing this on. It of course has this cinema proportion screen, great for watching dvds which occasionally I have done but a waste of space for writing stuff which is what I usually use it for, and a waste of weight. I hate carting this white blob of plastic around (even the black one is really just a white blob of plastic disguised as something cool and black).

So, what is the moral of this story, to conclude? There isn’t one at all. We all spend too much of our affluent lives going on about this kind of banal trivia.