According to a recent post in the Flickr Blog the ‘favorite’ color of the Flickr community is a warm brownish taupe. The blog points to a nifty application, favcol which computes the average color of all the images on Flickr recently tagged ‘favcol’. In actuality, that brownish taupe color is what you tend to get […]

from Machine Project, my favorite art gallery for geeks here in Los Angeles. Hands On’Semble Episode Four of Everybody Loves Difficult Music, a music and discussion series Thursday March 23rd 8:00pm Please join virtuoso hand percussion group Hands On’Semble as they play original compositions that blend the rhythmic concepts and playing techniques of North and […]

I’ve been a little obsessed with cuckoo clocks for the past few weeks, and here are a few cuckoo-related oddments. A friend of mine gave me an unwanted cuckoo clock, and I repaired it and hung it on a wall at home. Every time the cuckoo chime goes off, it makes me giggle. Sadly, most […]

I guess you know your blog has arrived when people start offering you free stuff. Sprint contacted me a week ago to tell me that they wanted to give me 6 months free service and a free phone. This is part of Sprint’s “Ambassador” program, in which they are giving phones to bloggers. I assume […]

The Jesuit Polymath Athanasius Kircher is a personal hero of mine. I constructed this Kircherian coverpop, which contains a collection of images from his books, which covered such varied subjects as geology, magnetism, architecture, music, egypt, and china. Stanford University Library’s Department of Special Collections has graciously granted me permission to use these images. The […]

Kakuro Puzzles, for the uninitiated, are numeric crossword puzzles. If you like Sudoku, you will probably like Kakuro too — they both can be quite addictive. There is a collection of free kakuro puzzles in my puzzle section. Last year, I wrote three inexpensive Kakuro puzzle books for Ulysses Press. They can now be pre-ordered […]

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

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre is a UK based exhibition and virtual museum of automata, or mechanical sculpture. There are some amazing pieces on this site, some in the form of Quicktime movies, which you can enjoy, as well as wooden kits you can buy. Their designing kit looks particularly cool — it contains a variety of […]