A rainy Valentine’s evening in Oakland, California. I only had the small camera (my trusty Canon S100) with me, but I liked this shot of a rainy sidewalk, or pavement where I come from!. It was taken on 8th street, just outside the New World vegetarian restaurant – which I strongly recommend by the way. You can see the Starbucks that is on the corner of 8th and Broadway.
Added a few more photos to the new galleries, including this sunset lit shot of the Porta Ballena sign in the Alameda gallery. Most of the new shots are in the Flowers & Plants gallery, but there are also some new sunset photos.
The more observant reader might have noticed the link to the blueDonkey.org galleries appear in the links list to the left. Now though I have a few more photos in there (most of which have been seen on the blog already). In future though I suspect more photos will appear in the galleries than appear here.
From a technical viewpoint, the galleries are powered by Singapore which I found while looking for a PHP/MySQL based photo gallery solution that also allowed a lot of control over the presentation. Singapore has both style sheet based presentation and very configurable templates. In its most recent version it also has MySQL support for all the metadata associated with the photos. That means that all kinds of smart galleries are potentially possible in the future (e.g. galleries generated based on camera used or location).
An article on the BBC’s website predicts that 2005 will be the year when more devices become wireless.
As far as IEEE 802.11 devices are concerned, they refer to the Philips Wireless Music Centre, pictured right and the Sonos Digital Music System, a Linux based secure music distribution system based on a mesh network (more information in the LinuxDevices.com device profile).
They also talk about other wireless technologies, including wireless USB and the now well established Bluetooth standard.
Up on Alameda Point, the former naval air station, was a wall with this painted on it. That was ten years ago, so this year marks the 70th anniversary of the first Pan American Airway’s China Clipper flight. You can read more about this little piece of history, recorded in a simple painting on the wall of a disused hanger, on these sites:
Color Fields Colr Pickr is an interesting use of the tags that the web photo site Flickr provides.
Another photographer to check out is Steve McCurry, perhaps best known for the stunning portrait of an Afghan girl photo (right) taken in 1984 that appeared as a cover shot on National Geographic magazine in June 1985.
It is impossible to pick even a few favourites from the shots in his galleries – check them all out (clicking the photo takes you to the next in the series, and at the end of each gallery back to the index page, so it is very easy to go through all of them). When you’re done with the galleries, check out the journal pages, including the September 11, 2001 entry from New York.
Check out this cool idea for a hanging panel TV: when it is turned off it is a functional mirror. MirrorMedia, the company behind this idea, have a number of different sizes (smaller ones are LCD and the larger ones Hitachi plasma panels), as well as a range of frame options so they will blend in with any decor.
MirrorMedia is a UK company, and all the current retailers listed on their site are UK based. There are distributors listed for Ireland and South Africa too, but no US distributor is given 🙁
There is a great photo over on the PhotoSydney blog taken by a five year old. This is even more motivation to get the Dakota PV2 cameras I have converted for reuse and running so that I can give them to some kids I know. These would be a great, low cost (under US$20) introduction to digital photography, and if it gets broken it is not a big deal.