flickr on S Anand

Advanced Google Reader

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve stopped visiting websites.

No, really. There’s only one website I visit these days. Google Reader.

Google Reader is a feed reader. If you want to just catch up on the new stuff on a site, you can add the site to Google Reader. Anything new that is published on the site appears in Google Reader. Right now, I’ve subscribed to over 50 feeds. There’s no way I can remember to visit 50 sites – so I’m actually able to read more and miss less.

In a sense, that’s the essence of using feeds to read stuff: remember less, read more and miss less. If I ever find an interesting site, I just add it to Google Reader and forget about it.

But it goes beyond that. You can subscribe to search results.

Videos, for examples. Subscribe to a search for google engedu on Google Video. Any new TechTalk at Google, you get it in your Reader. (The talks are fabulous by the way.) Or search for hindi movies.

Photos? Track new photos of the Indian cricket team on Flickr.

Movies? Get an update of the latest movie torrents from mininova or torrentspy. Or just get updates on American Gangster DVDRip.

Presentations? Track anything on Javascript or consulting from SlideShare.

Documents? Find new eBooks on Scribd.

Not all pages offer a feed. But Page2Rss offers a reasonable solution. It converts pretty much any page into a feed.

It’s gotten to the point where anything I know I want to read, I put it on Google Reader. The rest of the Internet is when I don’t know what I want to read.

Comments

Jayan 16 Dec 2007 12:00 pm: Same here. I ve been using it for over 2 months now. I subscribe to over 200 feeds. This reader is coool.. - (http://ekalayva.wordpress.com)
Simon32 16 Dec 2007 12:00 pm: I agree, RSS is great! Btw, you might also want to checkout Feedity - www.feedity.com for creating free custom RSS feeds.

Playing sounds backwards

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

You can play a video backwards and still recognise the scenes quite well. Can you do that with sound?

I tried it on this Bryan Adams clip of Summer of ‘69 (mp3). When played backwards (mp3), it almost sounds like Arabic!

Instruments sound weird backwards too, like the guitar played backwards and drums played backwards.

It’s seems obvious once you see the wave file. The picture below shows the guitar. The sounds are clearly not symmetric left to right.

Whereas this guitar is a lot more symmetric, and doesn’t sound too different backwards.

So how come we can’t recognise sounds played backwards, but can recognise video played backwards? (Initially, I thought it was a trivial question. But I couldn’t find a trivial answer. The question may be subtler than it looks.)

Comments

B anand Prasad 25 Sep 2006 12:35 pm: its nothing to do with the technology Mr. Anand let me give an example dnana ….you just spell it… it sounds something like (d-na-na) now if we know that reversing it could(possibly) result in Anand — dnanA, then we could recognize all backward sounds its just that we r not acustomed to hear sounds backward. now practice daily some words which are often used like “good morning” “thanks” now say them to someone in a correct situation…90% of them will recognize it.. thats it my friend….sorry for reversing “Anand” name….its my name too
S Anand 25 Sep 2006 1:48 pm: Anand, if I’ve understood you right, we don’t recognise sounds backwards because we’re not used to hearing them. Agreed. My reasoning was: we’re not used to seeing things backwards either. How come we’re so much better at recognising those? A part of the answer is, we recognise sounds mainly by their movement in time, but images by their spread across space. But I wonder if there’s more to it…
ND 26 Sep 2006 3:07 am: I think this may have to do with the fact that seeing consists of detecting multiple facets like motion, pattern etc. The brain may have more data points decompose and “meaningfully” analyze backward. While hearing consists of analyzing the frequencies and amplitude implying lesser data points to “meaningfully” analyze backward with the same speed as visual stimuli. Caveat - Just my guess!
S Anand 26 Sep 2006 6:23 am: Hmm… ND, that’s a possibility! Certainly, in terms of information content, there’s more coming in visually than aurally.
ND 27 Sep 2006 12:42 pm: I asked three intelligent folks (an american, a german and an indian) to read “eye”, “racecar”, “malayalam” and “never odd or even” and waited for their reaction. Got blank stares! But it was sitter when explained. Guess some humans find it difficult to recognize a palindrome while reading and speaking. Taking a few million huge steps to infer humans normally normally don’t even try to process sound or reading alphabets backward. Is it easier to recognize a popular word like one’s name or a tune like Happy B’day when spoken or sung backward? A related front and back concept - I have always wondered why the bar showing s/w installing moves from left to right. And the same when uninstalling also. Is it convention? Why not show something more perceptive like a container getting filled or getting drained?
Sudeep Nair 20 Nov 2006 5:40 am: Anand, I feel that the fundamental difference between a reversed text and reversed sound is that the text is still completely visible to the eye at once, and so there is a subconscious process where the brain is able to decipher the text by trying out some permutations, whereas in case of sound, the individual notes reach the ears and disappear. They do not remain “static” or “stationary” for the brain to be able to try some reverse permuations of individual notes and identify the original sound. This reminds me of another observation that in case of English text, the reader is able to decipher the words if the first and last letter of every word is kept fixed and all other letters in between are jumbled. Msot raeedrs wlil be albe to udnreatsnd tihs snetncee atlohugh the lteerts are jbulmed.
Anonymous 20 Nov 2006 6:15 am: If we extend this logic from text to video, I think there is some degree of “persistence of vision” which allows the brain to “refer back”, unjumble and make sense of video images, but there is no persistence of sound. So in addition to anand prasad’s point about “familiarity of words”, and ND’s point about “more meaningful data points”, I would think that “persistence of images” is a major factor helping us understand visual images better than sound.

Top 10 cameras on Flickr

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Top 10 cameras on Flickr. Topping the list is Nikon (D50 and D70), followed by Canon.

New features in Picasa Beta

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

New in Picasa’s beta:

geotagging (place photos on the map)
search by colour (find photos with red and yellow)
hide pictures: that’s useful, sometimes…
upload to Google video and to Picasa Web
FTP your photos

Comments

Anand 15 Jun 2006 11:39 am: I got an invitation from Google to try Picasa Web Albums. How does one selectively share some photos and not all in an album ? I do not want to mail these photos instead would like to make only some public. Could you highlight the major differences between this service and that from Flickr ?
S Anand 15 Jun 2006 8:51 pm: You can select photos from your Picasa album to upload – you don’t need to upload all of them. When compared with Flickr, PWA is more for sharing with friends and family than for photo discovery. So no tagging, no groups, no top-10 photos now browsing for other users.
Anand 16 Jun 2006 1:52 pm: I know I can selectively upload photos from Picasa to web albums. I may want to recover space on my PC by uploading all the photos from my hard disk to web albums. from that collection of photos online i may want to share only some publicly. I suppose then I have to create a pair of albums online for every album in Picasa so that one album online can have the private pictures and the other can have the public pictures
S Anand 17 Jun 2006 10:25 am: Yes - you can’t mark individual photos as private. Actually, PicasaWeb doesn’t have any such thing as private. Even if you mark an album as unlisted, if a person knows its URL, they can always access it.
Anand Srini 17 Jun 2006 4:33 pm: If a user has not chosent to make any album public then knowing the URL does not reveal those pictures. try it out. make all your albums unlisted and see for yourself what you can see using your URL.I have tested it. the only solution to my problem is to move private pictures from one album to another album and make it unlisted
S Anand 25 Jun 2006 8:54 am: Oh, OK. But looks like privacy problems will continue to plague Picasa Web Albums for a while. Just do a google search for site:picasaweb.google.com

Picasa Web Albums

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Google has released Picasa Web Albums and I managed to sign up. See my web albums.

The bad part about Picasa Web is that it’s a long way from Flickr in terms of tagging and sharing. But it probably wasn’t built for that.

The good part is that it’s integrated with Picasa (integration with Flickr was my top wishlist item for Picasa) and best of all, with Google Earth. You can geotag photos on the new Beta version of Picasa.

Comments

Dhar 14 Jun 2006 9:25 am: Two quick questions: \
1. Can I view the orginal size of the image or will I be restricted to some lower resolution image? \
2. Are there any upload limits (per image or per month)?
  Cheers, D.
Dhar 14 Jun 2006 9:28 am: Oh OK. Question answered:
“High-quality photos, automatically resized and optimized to fill available screen space”
“Each Picasa Web Albums account comes with 250MB of free storage space”
Details here.

Flickr taglines

Sat, 27 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Taglines. A timeline of Flickr tags. I can’t describe this one. Just see it.

Retrievr

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Retrievr. You sketch out what you want to see and it tries to make a match on Flickr.

Flickr Explore

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Flickr has introduced a set of new exploration features. You can view interesting photos, tag clusters, and Flickr’s favourite sets / groups.

Sparkler art

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Sparkler art. Long exposure photos on Flickr with a sparkler. via Dhar

Flickr enhancements

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Flickr enhancements include 20 MB/month of uploads, 200 photos, and cheaper Flickr Pro accounts.

Bloggers Meet April 2005

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Pictures from the Mumbai Blogger’s meet with Aadisht, Altaf, Amit, Anand, Arnab, Nandan, Ravikiran, Saket, Sameer, Yazad, Zainab, and myself.

Comments

S Anand 15 Apr 2005 5:33 am: More photos from Sameer

lickr

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 12:00:00 +0000

lickr: Flickr, without the Flash.

Flickr is a popular photo hosting service that uses embedded Flash files as part of their interface. On every page, there will be a little delay while a new Flash file loads. Lickr removes the need for Flash. It runs within the web browser Firefox, stripping the Flash before the user can even see it, and replacing it with an equivalent interface in pure HTML and Javascript.

Google sightseeing

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google sightseeing. See the US through Google Maps satellite images.

Comments

S Anand 8 Apr 2005 11:00 am: Also check out the Googlemaps tag on Flickr
S Anand 8 Apr 2005 11:12 am: and the Memory maps

How to beat the free account limits in Flickr

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 12:00:00 +0000

How to beat the free account limits in Flickr.

Comments

Dhar 4 Apr 2005 10:46 am: Read the article with great interest. This was an unfortunate title as it does not tell you anything about
Dhar 4 Apr 2005 10:47 am: beating the limit, all it does it tell you how to maximize the number of photos you can upload. Pity… :(
S Anand 4 Apr 2005 11:35 am: Actually, using sets, you can upload as many photos as you want and view them. So that’s really beating the limit, in a way.
Dhar 5 Apr 2005 1:24 pm: Ahhh, will check the funda of sets when I get back to Mumbai after my trip to Jammu!

Flickr related tag browser

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

A Flickr related tag browser.

Transparent laptop screen

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Transparent laptop screens. Quite clever, actually. via Dhar

Comments

S Anand 30 Mar 2005 6:15 am: More transparent screens at Flickr