Daily Photo

Hotlinking is embedding an image in your website using the <img> HTML tag pointed at someone else’s server, rather than your own.

This is an enterprise fraught with hazards. You don’t control the image, and if your page is popular it disproportionately hits their server and their bandwidth allowance.

In extremis, they may do what Textfiles.com administrator and BBS: The Documentary maker what Jason Scott did when he goatsed hundreds of thousands of MySpace users. Be warned.

(This is a worksafe imitation of the world’s most famous shock site, in case you’re lucky enough not to know what goatse is.)

Screen capture by Jules de Whyisbox, 20 August 2009.

This was too good a photo to pass up.

Perhaps this DVD isn’t the best on the subject. (Try this one or this one or this one.)

There’s also the Marathon Training Assistant shirt. My dad used to race greyhounds; lovely sweet dogs, but, being bred athletes, you will get remarkable fitness walking them several miles a day.

I understand the people who made this also make one on training an adopted cat. Our adopted stray, Tabs, is at my feet now. Training him basically required supplying food on a predictable basis. He knows a good gig when he’s on one.

Photo: “I think this speaks for itself” by Jimena, posted to The Daily WTF, 23 January 2009.

As I say in nightclubs, having a camera means you’ll never need a pickup line. Spencer Tunick gets hundreds of people to pose naked for photo installations on a regular basis.

This photo is from Amsterdam in 2007, for the Dream Foundation. Tunick took the photo of women standing across a canal (on a perspex bridge, so it looks like they’re just floating there) and then put it in place over the same canal as an installation. This is it from another angle.

On May 6, 2007, he got about eighteen thousand people to pose naked in the Zócalo, the principal square of Mexico City’s.

I tend not to get that many models at once. Also, mine wear more clothes.

Photo: “20070623-173001-4908″ by reggestraat, taken 23 June 2007 in Jordaan, Amsterdam with a Canon PowerShot Pro1. CC by 2.0.

This is the world’s largest solar furnace, in Odeillo in the Eastern Pyrénées in southern France.

Have a look at the large version of this picture. See the pixelation-like effect in the reflection? That’s lots of flat mirrors.

Just imagine the bugs you could fry with this baby.

If you don’t have the cash on hand for that many mirrors and a building to mount them on, the goddamn lunatics at Google have achieved similar results with a Fresnel lens. Note the array of fried pennies. You can also make a proper solar furnace with a Fresnel lens.

Photo: “Four solaire” by Daggett2008, taken 29 August 2008. CC by-sa 2.0.

Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, banana-car! I have no idea who the dude in the car is or who made the thing. That’s in San Francisco, though.

This banana car appears to be a mutant bicycle descendant. There are a couple of batshit insane brothers, Steve and Spade Braithwaite, working on a truck with a banana frame body, though. “The project so far: It’s starting to look like a wireframe banana.”

There’s apparently a banana car mod for Grand Theft Auto, though I can’t find a site for it anywhere that doesn’t look like it’ll do unspeakable things to about half the people browsing to it …

Photo: “Banana car” by Mega Hammond, 18th September 2006. CC by-sa 2.0.

I’m Australian. So I think everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is wrong. (Which includes me, because I live in London.) We only play on the upside-down joke when selling you dreadful tourist rubbish in Swanston Street. Honest.

Why do seagulls fly over Australia upside down? So they can save it for New Zealand.

If you’re an American visiting Australia and want your compact discs to play, don’t forget to follow every bit of advice here.

What I want to know, though, is if, when YouTube did its April Fool’s Day upside-down video prank, the videos were right-way-up in Australia.

Photo: provenance unknown.

I must admit, I’ve cheated on this one — the original is indeed 3.2 kilobytes of severely overcompressed demotivator.

JPEG compression is a wonderful idea. The discrete cosine transform turns a series of points into a series of sine waves, which add up to form your image. You can drop higher-frequency components as you wish when making the image, thus meaning you can get a good-enough approximation at way better compression than you’d ever manage with lossless (as with PNG). The same sort of compression is used with video (MPEG) for the same reason: you’re basically not going to really see the difference.

The minus point is for things with sharp edges, such as line drawings or text. In which case PNG is going to be what you need to resort to.

Of course, there’s saving space … and there’s severely overdoing it.

Photo: provenance unknown. Clever, though.

4chan.org is the Final Boss of the Internet. I described it in an article for Uncyclopedia soon after discovering it:

The 4chan imageboard is the winner in the competition for World’s Most Work-unsafe Website. If you look at 4chan from your work computer, your monitor explodes, smoke comes out of your PC and your Ethernet cable melts. Then Networks come over to your desk and beat the fucking crap out of you personally.

Q. Explosion, smoke, melt, crap, got it. Are LCD monitors subject to explosion too, though?
A. That depends. Do you feel lucky, punk?

It’s not particularly good for viewing at home, either. My wife told me that if I ever browsed 4chan in her presence again, I would be divorced. I had to concede this was entirely fair and reasonable.

4chan is where Internet memes come from. LOLcats, Rickrolling, O RLY?

You’ll note I’ve taken care not to link 4chan anywhere in this post. There’s a reason for that.

“It’s just a little bit too retarded down there at the center of everything.”

Image: The Bible as synopsised by a 4chan.org /b/ regular. Anonymous Internet folk art, presumed public domain.

A dead Vespa scooter in a “bike graveyard” in Payson, Arizona. Dead technology is powerfully attractive. Particularly when it was a nice bit of kit in its day.

I grew up in the green suburbs of western Perth; within walking distance was an abandoned factory. If I’d had a good camera and lens when I was sixteen there’d be a pack of snapshots of rusted machinery and broken louvre window closeups in the two boxes of photos in my spare room.

It’s like wandering around town with a Walkman playing Metal Machine Music would have been in the late 1970s. Of course, these days everything sounds like that.

Photo: “Vespa” by Rob Sinclair. Taken with a Nikon D200 with Sigma 30mm F1.4 EX DC HSM lens. Taken 31st July, 2008. CC by-sa 2.0.

NOTE: None of the links below are to the actual Goatse image. Promise.

Oh dear Lord. The classic shock site has inspired millions of Internet folk artists. Including corporate logos — much like the b3ta-inspired competition to spot bored graphic designers putting penises into any logo they can. One of those things that once you see it, you see it everywhere. YOU CANNOT UNSEE THIS.

The original Goatse is renowned as the finest possible insurance against bandwidth thieves. Jason Scott goatsed a hundred thousand MySpace users, which deserves some sort of award.

Image: Goatse Snowman, Internet folk art created with Snowman Construction Kit. I wouldn’t normally put up a “found on the internet” image, but I think this one warranted it.

It’s snowing in London today. Twenty centimetres of snow overnight and another thirty expected tonight. Public transport is shut. I’m not at work today — my boss texted everyone not to bother trying, and one guy actually made it in but went home again. We expect the same tomorrow.

This is from Ottawa, Canada in December 2008. They’re a bit more used to snow there. The above shows what happens when a small snow cloud really hates you personally. (Or, more likely: when snow is cleared from all around the bike rack but not off it, then left to pack into ice.)

The moral of this story: when it’s snowing like this, you don’t need to lock your bike up.

Photo: “‘Snow-Megaddon’ Approaches - Ottawa 12 08″ by Mikey G Ottawa. Taken December 17, 2008. CC by 2.0.

Velcro was invented in 1948 by George de Mestral after he took his dog for a walk and came home to find it covered in things much like the seed pod above. The name is a combination of the French words “velours” (velvet) and “crochet” (hook).

The hard part is apparently getting the nylon hooks to come out just right. Do that and it sticks to most things, though the right loop fabric does help a lot.

“Velcro” remains a registered trademark, though genericised beyond much possibility of rehabilitation. Just think of the possibilities.

Photo: “Pretty Dead Things” by Ian Muttoo. Taken in Brampton, Ontario on 5th October 2007. CC by-sa 2.0.

This is not a painting or (much of) a Photoshop job, but a high dynamic range photo. This is to get all the dynamic range in a scene which you couldn’t capture in a single photo, but could in multiple exposures of the same scene with different settings. Since Photoshop Creative Suite 2 includes a “Merge to HDR” feature that does most of the grunt work for you, these have become increasingly popular.

So you get scenes like the above. That’s a photo from a hotel roof in Las Vegas of the New York New York Hotel. It looks like the remains of the pitiful little Manhattan Island preserved by the Martians hundreds of years after their invasion.

This is a daylight shot. The photographer has a shot of the same scene at dusk and mostly HDR shots on his Flickr.

Photo: “Post Apocalyptic New York” by Shayan (USA). Taken on 23 April 2007. CC by 2.0.

I have four hundred kilograms of vinyl records here that I brought from Australia to London. They take up a stupid amount of space. And all the music I listen to now is on MP3. (Or AAC. Or Ogg.)

The trouble with vinyl is that eventually you’ll need to restore things to play it on. Good things. Nice things. This is a photo from a series about restoring a 1960s Thorens TD 124 Mk II record player. It was tanais’ father’s, bought the year he was born. So he recovered it, cleaned it and restored it and now uses it as his own preferred turntable.

My parents bought one of the last of the HMV four-speed turntables in 1971. Then they decided they should buy some records to play on it. TV compilations. All the K-Tel you can eat. Awful, awful.

Photo: “Oil bath for the bearing shaft” by tanais. Taken 6 June 2008. CC by 2.0.

This one struck a chord with me because (a) swords are cool (no longer being much daily use for combat, they’re the playthings of geeks and obsessives) (b) my girlfriend is pretty handy with a sword as well (c) she didn’t swing it around when she was pregnant, but she probably should have.

The woman in the photo is doing Wudangquan, specifically Wudang Double Sword. But any decent sword practice will help get the arms moving, the metabolism raised and the heart pumping.

And the boys will treat your little girl with remarkable amounts of respect. If they think Dad’s scary … just wait till they see Mum out the back chopping a dummy to bits.

Photo: “pregnant warrior double sword 2” by dizznbonn. Taken 15 December 2006 with a Panasonic DMC-FX01. CC by 2.0.

That’s a portrait of her self, not myself. My image doesn’t show up on CCD.

When I moved to London, I was somewhat surprised to find that the weather was more or less the same as Melbourne, just one or two degrees colder. That one or two degrees, of course, is enough to give us snow a few days a year. Or, rather, SNOW!!! with capitals and three exclamation marks. I’m from Perth, where summer is forty degrees Celsius; I didn’t see snow till I was thirty-six. I still bounce up and down at the sight of it.

(There is snow in Melbourne, but only up in the Dandenongs and not much of it.)

We just had a cold week where a warm front in the Atlantic Ocean led to cold air coming straight down from the Arctic. A few days of snow, then a week of sunny days at minus two. Melbourne weather in extremis: several layers, gloves, scarf and sunglasses.

Photo: “..so…much…snow… *dies*” by *Zara. Taken with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT on 10 March, 2008. CC by-sa 2.0.

Soap bubbles are inherently cool. My daughter thinks so, anyway. She keeps pointing at the bottle of bubble liquid and going “mmm … mmm …” until we pick it up and blow some bubbles.

The miracle of the soap bubble comes from the surface tension of water, decreased but stabilised by the soap — via the Marangoni effect, where the soap goes wherever in the bubble it’s needed. The iridescence comes from the thickness of the film (800 nanometres) being comparable to the wavelength of light (340 to 760 nanometres).

The bit I haven’t managed to find an explanation of is how to make them more stable. The bubble liquid has run out so we topped it up with washing-up liquid, which doesn’t make bubbles nearly as well, and certainly not streams of them. Perhaps if we use more concentrated liquid, that’ll work.

Photo: “Soap bubble” by Raphael Quinet. Taken in Nandrin, Liege, Belgium on 24 June 2007 on a Nikon D70. CC by-sa 2.0.

What’s the first thing a good roboticist thinks of? A robot bartender! This example is a mojito machine, the Robomoji, being shown off at the Roboexotica Festival in Vienna, Austria in November 2007. Engadget coverage.

Other nice robotic bartender projects include this cocktail-making robot at the 2007 Maker Faire, this bartender bot complete with face also at Roboexotica and BaR2D2.

The Mojito original recipe is: 1 teaspoon powdered sugar, 2 oz lime juice, 4 mint leaves, one sprig of mint, 2 shots Havana Club white rum and 2 oz club soda. Put the mint leaves into a long glass. Squeeze the juice over it directly from a cut lime. Add the sugar, then gently smash the mint into the lime juice and sugar with a muddler (a bartender’s pestle). Add crushed ice, add the rum, stir, top off with soda. Garnish with the mint sprig.

Photo: “Mojito machine” by RobotSkirts, taken 22 November 2007 on a Nokia N95. CC by-sa 2.0.

It’s January 6th. Do you know where your Christmas decorations are supposed to go? Will you ever get the plastic tree back in its box? Will the ornaments fit back in their box? Will you find the ones the cat got hold of and whacked under the couch with its paw before the toddler does? Oh look, there’s the battery from her V-Tech robot companion that says “I LOVE YOU” when the child hits it. Yep, we’re living in the future.

Now now, you don’t have to collapse in despair and jump into the bathtub with an armful of plugged-in fairy lights.

You do? Well, don’t do what Mr. Thomas did here. Remember to put the water in first. FIREWORKS!

Our Christmas decorations are staying up another three days for Božić.

Photo: “65/365: Kiddies, don’t try this at home!” by Mr. Thomas, taken 5th December 2007 with a Canon PowerShot Digital Elph SD800 IS. CC by-sa 2.0.

This is a clock that’s on display in the Australian War Memorial museum, in Canberra. It was found near the epicentre of one of the first atom bomb explosions (not sure if it was Hiroshima or Nagasaki).

The hands show the time of the explosion (which would make this more likely the Hiroshima bombing, around 8:30am, rather than the Nagasaki bombing, around 11:00am). You can see how the glass face was melted by the heat and has dripped off the bottom.

Photo: “Japanese clock melted by WWII nuclear bomb” by maembij. Taken 17 February 2005 on a Canon Ixus 40. CC by-sa 2.0.