I really like Processing, the programming language. I’ve been using Processing for about a year and a half, and I use it fairly frequently. I use it almost exclusively to do quick and dirty tests of ideas where I want graphical feedback. Because very little of this work has been seen by the general public, […]

Happy Valentine’s Day! This mosaic was made from about 3300 candidate Flickr images containing one of the tags love, heart, kiss, hug or venus. Target Image: Detail from Botticelli “The Birth of Venus” I wrote my photomosaic software in Perl, making use of ImageMagick, and the Flickr API. I describe some techniques for making photomosaics […]

No longer a rough cut – Flickr Hacks is now in print! Brian Sawyer, our excellent editor, posted this image, which constitutes proof. There will be some signed copies of Flickr Hacks at the Flickr 2nd Birthday Bash this saturday, as well as some other surprises which I had a hand in. Sadly, I’m teaching […]

I’m pleased to report that the

In the last two months, I’ve become fascinated with clocks and automatons. My family never owned a mechanical clock, but I had an aunt with a musical cuckoo clock, and a grandfather clock that showed the phases of the moon. I wondered what made the pendulum keep swinging (was it magnets or batteries?), and what […]

The book cover for the book Paul and I wrote is now available on Amazon, and here’s what it look like. Here’s the Amazon listing, should you care to pre-order 1 or 2 hundred copies… :) UPDATE: Can’t wait for the book? You can get early access to an online edition using O’Reilly’s new Rough […]

An Astounding Test of Skill Tell a friend (it helps if the friend is in the same room…) that you are going to prove that, although you both are relatively good typists, you are the faster one handed typist. To begin the test, tell your friend to put one hand behind her back, and one […]

Some people begin the new year by pledging to lose weight or quit smoking. My usual pattern is to try to find two or three new obsessions each year. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that these obsessions find me! This last year, those obsessions included digital photography, photo mosaics and logic puzzles. After 20 […]

I’ve developed a new kind of puzzle which I’m calling a Krypto Kakuro. They combine elements of crossword puzzles, sudoku and cryptograms (or cryptarithms to be precise). Here are some samples for you to try. If you aren’t familiar with kakuro puzzles, I suggest you solve a few of those first, before tackling these puzzles, […]

How krazy do you have to be to fly around the world on a sleigh and jump into a gazillion chimneys? This mosaic portrait of Father Christmas is constructed from Flickr photos matching various christmas-related tags: snowman, wreath, christmas tree, poinsettia, etc. This image was made using techniques I describe in the forthcoming book Flickr […]