I prepared these images by downloading about 42,000 thumbnail images from Flickr, and rendering them on these maps. Each image is displayed in the area where the photograph was taken. Bright spots correspond to metropolitan areas that accumulate a lot of photos.

If you pay close attention to the differences between the two photos, particularly Florida and the Great Lakes, you’ll see that people prefer to photograph the sun sinking (or rising) behind a body of water. Hence eastern-facing coastlines tend to accumulate more sunrise photos, and western-facing coastlines tend to accumulate sunset photos.

For the technically curious, I prepared the image using Perl and ImageMagick. The US state outlines come from publicly available US Census data, and I used the Perl library Geo::Coordinates::UTM for converting latitude and longitude to a UTM projection.

You can view the hi-res versions, in which you can make out the individual photos, here:

Sunrises
Sunsets

UPDATE: Daniel Drucker suggested plotting the states themselves, something he first did about two years ago, when Flickr first implemented geotags. Here’s my result:

A few of my friends occasionally run into problems caused by invalid file types. This can happen when someone accidentally types the wrong file extension on a file when saving it.

For example, my friend Beatrice, who does transcriptions, often receives audio files that are named “something.mp3”, but the files are not actually in the MP3 format. They’re something else, like AIFF or WAV. Other times, she may receive a file with no extension at all, and she can’t figure out what type it is.

When this happens, it can cause the software that is trying to use the file to complain (while other software mysteriously works fine). You can often fix these problems by figuring out the correct file format, and changing the file extension accordingly.

If you have run into this problem before, check out this Field Guide to Your Files, which shows you how to analyze and fix this problem.

Field Guide to Your Files

A new product, Reaktor Animated Circuits from Native Instruments has an interesting sequencer called Spiral (shown above) which was inspired by my Whitney Music Box.

I’ve been playing with a version that Native Instruments sent me, and it’s pretty cool!

If you’re interested in getting Animated Circuits, you’ll also need the latest version of Reaktor 5 (their incredibly powerful synthesis construction kit) in order to use the Spiral user interface.

A few readers have written to me in the last few months, requesting Killer Sudoku puzzles, so I’ve been feverishly working weekends to get some ready for the website. They are just about ready to go, and I’m ready to pass out samples.

Killer Sudokus are an interesting hybrid between the Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles currently offered here at KrazyDad. Solving them requires both the complex logical strategy used in Sudoku, in combination with all the arithmetical strategies used in Kakuros. If you have not tried them before, you will find them extremely challenging — a little slow-going at first, but very rewarding. My wife, a former Kakuro addict, is now addicted to them.

I’m providing these sample puzzles both to give you a taste, and also to double-check I haven’t made any horrible programming mistakes. You’ll find instructions printed on the puzzles.

Killer Sudoku Sampler

Killer Sudoku Collection

If you notice any problems with these puzzles, or you find the instructions unclear, be sure to let me know!

UPDATE: I’ve created a new Killer Sudoku section on the site. Currently there are three difficulty levels offered, with more difficult puzzles to come…

In a recent comment here on KrazyDad, Daniel Piker shared some flash variations he made recently of the John Whitney-inspired “Incremental Drift” animations used in my Whitney Music Box.

These are all visual eye candy, without music, but they demonstrate some great flash animation techniques!

• One with semicircles
• One very colourful one – The complementary colours at the half-way point are nice!
• and one where the elements are arrayed on a grid, not overlayed on the same point.

More to come on Dan’s blog.

I’ve moved KrazyDad and Coverpop to a new private server at Dreamhost, in hopes of improving performance. Performance does indeed seem to be better and so far everything seems to be working okay. However, this here is a big complicated website, and I may have missed something.

Let me know (by commenting on this post) if you encounter any parts of the site that are newly broken, and I’ll take a look.

– Jim

UPDATE: It’s come to my attention that both Flickr Random and The Big Picture are broken. Keep me posted if you find anything else.

UPDATE: Both fixed…

It suddenly occured to me as I was driving to work yesterday that the songs “Crack that Whip” by Devo, and “Breathe” by Pink Floyd are oddly similar (did I mention it’s a loooong drive?)… So I downloaded the demo version of Ableton Live last night and came up with this mashup at 2 in the morning. I was pleased to discover that the two songs are already in the same key, and the tempi are closer than you’d think!

Dark Side of the Whip

(by the way, I’m using Yahoo’s very handy media player (aka “Goose”) to embed this audio. My friends at Y! Music, Santa Monica, worked on it, and it is a beautiful work of engineering!

More puzzle mosaics here.

Embed codes available here.

I’ve been playing with making these puzzle-style animated mosaics this week, for a Topspin-related project. The final image is made by reassembling parts of the original image.

Here’s a larger Obama/McCain mosaic.

And here’s the first one I made, featuring David Byrne and Brian Eno.

UPDATE

Here are some more I made on Saturday.

Flag/Obama
Marilyn/Mona
Sgt Pepper / Beatles