The 23x blog

Daily iPhone photos

Jared Earle — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:34:06 +0000

For the last 136 days, I’ve posted an iPhone photo on the internet just about every day. Where I’ve missed the occasional day, I’ll post its photo the day after, but more often than not, I take a photo and publish it to Flickr on that day. It started out as an experiment, posting a photo to Twitter using twitpic, but it soon became clear that this was not an ideal solution whereby I switched to Darkslide, as described here. At first, I didn’t make too much of a song and dance about it as I didn’t know how many days I would last before giving up.

What the iPhone 3G can do with enough light

What I have learned over the last four and a bit months is that the discipline needed is rather hard at the beginning, but unsurprisingly gets easier as you do it more. However, even now I sometimes forget and have to start looking for something to photograph instead of just finding something.

Danger on flaking paint

Also, I very quickly learned the limitations of the iPhone 3G’s camera. It’s noisy in low-light, it’s fixed-focus and it’s basically not very good. The new iPhone 3GS has a significantly better camera that has a lens that can focus and is much better at managing differing light levels, something else the 3G suffers from being bad at. However, with practice and trial-and-error, you can get some decent photos with it.

Light fitting on the stairs to my work

The iPhone’s camera also has a rather slow scan, which can make action shots nigh-on impossible, but this can make for some intriguing effects of you move the camera while taking photographs. It takes a little getting used to the timing, but is an entertaining distraction.

Swinging camera

When there is a certain amount of light, the photo quality improves dramatically and the camera almost becomes a proper camera, albeit a mere 2 megapixel one. A friend of mine in Japan takes iPhone photos on a regular basis and some of his come out remarkably clearly. The reason for this is that there is apparently a better quality of light in Tokyo than there is in Glasgow. However, now that summer is threatening to give us proper light, we northern iPhone users may get some decent photos from our crappy cameras.

Blue sky, a statue and a bird.

So, as the saying goes, the crappy camera in your pocket takes better pictures than the fancy camera you left at home. Why not try taking a photo a day with whatever camera phone you’ve got. Post it to Twitter and show us what you can do.

A day dolphin spotting at Fortrose

10 stupid ways to increase traffic to your site!

Jared Earle — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:04:39 +0000

Start a stupid top ten list.
Put the good hints up front.
Make the last item of the list a good one.
Split the list before you get to the filler.
Pack it full of filler.
Refer to another item on the list as this adds filler, like number 5 above.
Split the list over several pages as each page counts as a view for your adverts.
Drag it out to ten items, because it seems like the right amount.
Use promising filler before a useful last item.
Mention how cool/stupid Twitter is as comment-bait. If you don’t know what Twitter is, mention Apple vs PC and take an indefensible side.

Then, write a paragraph to say some bullshit that has a few SEO terms, like SEO or MLM and watch the link farms link back for the trackbacks and backlinks as the circle-jerk inflates itself by one. Oh, and solicit comments by begging and then tweet the list without using a URL shortener. Comments?

Update: 2009-04-17

Come back later and add an 11th point.

Ménière’s Disease, the common rare disease

Jared Earle — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:41:28 +0000

Until I went to an ear specialist for an unusual weird loss of balance migraine thing, I’d never heard of Ménière’s Disease. I was told it was rather rare and there was no way of diagnosing it, apart from ruling everything else out. A few years later, and once everything else had been ruled out, I was diagnosed, provisionally, with this rare inner-ear disorder. Then I moved country from France to my native UK. Once again, they had to rule everything out, but they were pretty quickly convinced I had Ménière’s and I was put on a rolling prescription of Betahistine, which has reduced the severity of it for the past couple of years. Anyway, sob story and tinnitus aside, this isn’t about the disease as much as it is about how rare it … um, isn’t.

Betahistine Hydrochloride, 16mg

I suspect you’ve never heard of it, as I hadn’t when it was suspected to be the cause of my ear problems. However, shortly after hearing about it, it appeared everyone knew someone with it. My best mate, who returned to Scotland from Japan the year before I did, was diagnosed with it. My brother in Thailand doesn’t have it, but his wife does, as does his ex-boss’s mother. Friends, plural, of my missus’s family have it. Alan Shepard landed on the moon after being cured of it (cures are apparently risky and don’t always work) and Guy Kawasaki blames his attacks on Powerpoint. Julius bloody Caesar had it! It’s not rare, yet no-one has heard of it.

So, when I finally get an obscure incommunicable disease that will make me interesting at cocktail parties, it turns out everyone already has it, thank you very much. Great. Whoopee. To make matters worse, the cure is “sometimes it just goes away.”

Twitter pictures with Darkslide

Jared Earle — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:04:05 +0000

This article will demonstrate one way of posting photos to Twitter from an iPhone that allows us much more control than the usual ways, with a robust and reliable back-end provided by Yahoo’s legendary infrastructure. The key to the whole exercise is Darkslide, an iPhone Flickr client created by the man behind the brilliant FlickrExport.

The apps I use

Every day, I take a photo with my iPhone (The camera isn’t the best on a phone by a long shot, but it’s the camera I always have with me) and post that picture to Twitter. I started out doing this with what seemed like an ideal solution, twitpic, as it’s pretty much available in any iPhone client and as such has a few nice little features, like a picture icon appearing in twitpic posts in Tweetie, my Twitter client of choice.

Twitpic - as seen in Tweetie

However, and you’d guessed there would be a however as this article is about Darkslide, Twitpic has suffered from reliability issues and has, in some cases returned different pictures to the ones you upload. In fact, one picture tweeted by Stephen Fry has been known to take the service down. What would be better in this case would be a more robust image hosting service with a history, like Flickr. That’s where Darkslide comes in.

My Photos

Darkslide is an iPhone application (available in both free-with-ads and paid ad-free versions) that plugs straight into the Flickr API. It’s got loads of decent features, like your contacts’ streams, photos near you, earches, etc., and does the job really well. So, before we go any further, log into your Flickr account in Safari on your iPhone, install Darkslide and set it up. If you plan to use a separate Flickr account for Darkslide, set it up and login on the iPhone before launching it. When you first launch Darkslide, it’ll ask you to approve it in Flickr. This is a simple step as long as you already logged into Flickr on your iPhone. Once this is done, it’s time to choose which Twitter client you want to use by going to More and selecting Settings. Twitterific, Tweetie and Twitterfon are supported as is the Twitter website using Safari. Once this is done, we can finally post a photo to Twitter.

Settings

First, take a photo using the camera. This can be done in Darkslide itself in the Upload section or using the iPhone’s Camera app. I prefer using Camera as Darkslide doesn’t let you look at the picture as well as the standard Photos app does. If you use one of those photo enhancement apps, I don’t, then you can do that at this point, before Darkslide gets its hands on it in. Launch Darkslide and select Upload at the bottom. This will give you the choice between taking a photo and using one we’ve already taken. Choose the picture using the Camera Roll as usual.

Upload

Camera Roll

Edit the title and description here, and set the location to your current location if you’re near where you took the photo. If you’re not at the exact spot, it’s still a good idea to use the current location of you’re fairly close as when edit the map in Flickr later, it’s easier if you start off near the photo location instead of having to locate the area from scratch.

Details

More details

Once you’ve filled in everything you want, remembering you can always edit it later in Flickr itself, you upload the photo by clicking the share icon in the top right. This then uploads the picture, giving you a progress bar across the bottom.

Begin Upload

In Progress

Once the picture is uploaded, it gives you the option of opening it in Flickr or posting it to Twitter. If you want to make a few more changes here before posting it, click on Open Flickr and change what’s needed; you can always post to Twitter from the Darkslide My Photos library as I explain later.

Upload Complete

Once you click on Post to Twitter, it launches your Twitter app of choice with a bit.ly link to your Flickr page. I presume that, once Flickr have their URL shortening system up and running, it’ll use that, but that’s a question you can ask @darkslideapp on Twitter, if you feel so inclined. Anyway, write some words here and click Send.

Post to Twitter

That’s it, you’ve now posted a Flickr photo instead of a Twitpic. You get all the advantages of Flickr, like the view count, the maps, your comments etc., and none of the flakiness of Twitpic.

As seen in Tweetie

If you want to post a photo that’s already in your Flickr stream, go to My Photos in Darkslide and touch the picture. These are the two view options: Rows and Thumbnails, selectable in the Settings, of course.

Thumbnails view

Rows view

Selecting a picture brings up this screen.

Picture info

Clicking the Share icon in the top right gives you the choice to Post to Twitter, and selecting that will open your Twitter client, as described above, ready to post your photo.

Share photo

My one complaint about Darkslide, and it’s pretty trivial as you’ll see, is that it doesn’t open Flickr in the amazing Flickr Mobile by default, even though you’re 100% guaranteed to be on an iPhone. You need to go to Flickr and scroll to the bottom of the site and tell Flickr to always redirect by clicking on the link.

Click the link at the bottom

These are what the two different Flickr sites look like. Regular and Mobile:

Regular Flickr site

Flickr Mobile

This is what a contact’s page looks like in Darkslide:

Contact's photos

All in all, Darkslide is pretty near perfect on the iPhone. Give it a go and tell me what you think. If all else fails, you can look at my crappy daily iPhone pictures, my less crappy pictures or follow me on Twitter.

Stuff what I done

Jared Earle — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:37:55 +0000

Twitter, it seems has everything. So much so that when I wrote my URL shortener, tw3.it, no-one even noticed because there were already enough out there that another didn’t even show up as a blip on the radar. Still, being the go-getter I am, I decided to create a new service and I realised I had a spare domain with a silly name, plook.net.

plook.net

So, it didn’t take long to throw the PHP/MySQL code together, write a perl script cronjob to sent a tweet using Net:Tweet and voila!, Plook was born.

Now, as with all these ideas, it turns out I’m not the first person to think of this, but I don’t mind, because it’s fun and I like having done it. It also made me revisit tw3.it and add an API of sorts so it could be used to just return the short URL instead of a page with a link back. So, give these services a go and tell me what you think.

On top of that, I took a picture of a Meerkat. You may find that much more interesting.

"Ooh, what's that over there?"

Rude Vegetables

Jared Earle — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:21:41 +0000

This is the back cover of the 2009 Marshall’s Kitchen Garden Catalogue.

Mmm ... Pumpkins

It’s not just me, right?

Free porn? No thanks …

Jared Earle — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:41:38 +0000

Every so often, I get someone accidentally using my gmail account, like Jannaria Earle, a 20-something year old woman in the US that frequents dating sites and is looking for a new job, or a John Earle in Florida that has an interest in real estate and ice hockey. However, this one takes the biscuit. A certain James Earle in the US tried to get his gmail address able to send as mine, presumably as he thought this would give him my address to use. I sent him a mail at his gmail account to tell him to stop it.

Then the mail arrived. It was a receipt, presumably for this James Earle bloke. A credit-card receipt for 30 days of porn. Oh my, free porn! How fortuitous can one man be!

The site? I’d been lucky enough to get a free month at … Men In Pain (Duh, not safe for work), a site with pictures and videos (allegedly; I didn’t download the videos) of men being hurt by women. Lots of pictures of some woman abusing her bloke, all topped off with a picture of the smiling couple, presumably to show that they are still talking at the end of the ordeal therefore it’s all legal and consenting.

Oh my. Image © someone else and used here for review purpose, or something. Please don't sue me or send one of your scary women round to correct my evil ways.

Why oh why could he not be interested in cute girls with large boobies or something less … wince-inducing. Would kink.com (the parent company of Men In Pain) really be your first port of call for internet porn?

Dude, run away. Seriously, I don't think she has your well-being at heart.

So, James Earle, thanks for the gift of free porn, and I don’t want to sound unappreciative, but it’s not my bag.

First day of frost

Jared Earle — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:43:42 +0000

So, we went for a walk and I took a couple of pics.

First Frost

I think the winter will be much easier to photograph with my newly-learned HDR skills.

Frosty Lock

This horse even had the decency to stand still for the three exposures necessary for the HDR process.

Cold Horse

Anyway, that’s enough self-indulgent Flickr pimping …

Sorry for the lack of updates

Jared Earle — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:37:58 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates, here’s a picture of a kitten to tide you over.

Strawberry Meep

Go look at my Flickr page if you need a diversion. I’ll try and come up with something fairly interesting very soon.

Most Celebrated Sporting Venue In The World?

Jared Earle — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:29:19 +0000

As you may have seen, John Gruber over on Daring Fireball referred to Yankee Stadium as “the most celebrated sporting venue in the world”. Immediately, I thought this was not the case and decided to correct him, informing him the most celebrated sporting venue in the world was in fact … oh, um what is it again?

Photo of Yankee Stadium by Silent Wind of Doom, Wikipedia.

A quick twitting got a few suggestions, like Madison Sq Gardens from @cimota and Old Trafford from @lbutlr, whereas Colin in my office put forward Brands Hatch and a few other footbally ones while I came up with The Colloseum, oddly enough, and the Indianapolis Raceway.

Needless to say, outside the US, there aren’t many, apart from maybe a few Japanese, that would choose Yankee Stadium.

Am I wrong? What are your suggestions for the most celebrated sporting venue in the world? Comments below, please.