Flickriver:

I’m loving this site. It’s a great way to browse Flickr images without having to deal with the Flickr interface, which for pure, good old-fashioned browsing is a bit on the pants side and too full of distractions.

If you've half an hour to spare, check it out. You might find something you like.

In bullet-point form, because I'm not capable of anything else right now.

• Banshee is being an arse on Karmic on my desktop machine. Can't figure out why. It freezes up when playing big files (podcasts are particularly affected by this), plays too fast sometimes (so it sounds like I'm fast-forwarding through songs) and other times just crashes for no apparent reason.
• So, I've switched back to Amarok in the mean time, though I don't particularly like Amarok 2, and the way its UI behaves is irritating to me at the moment.
• I've more-or-less, bar some work for the reviewer, fixed bug 471974 which should mean that bugs with lots of subscribers shouldn't time out any more. Hurrah for asynchronicity.
• People keep marking as favourites old photos of mine on Flickr, from the days before I considered myself worthy of having people in front of my lens. Not that I don't appreciate it, but I'd rather people liked the newer stuff.
• I had a crisis of confidence last night (again; how boring you must think me) about photography, mostly, and where I think I want to be. I've made peace - for now - with that particular demon; I don't know quite where I want to go but I think I know some of the things I want to do on the way.
• I've been playing a bit with Tumblr today. I quite like it's simple interface, and I suspect I'd use something like that quite a lot for things bigger-than-a-tweet-but-smaller-than-a-blog-post. Haven't quite worked out how to fit it in with what I do though; maybe aggregating everything together through FeedBurner is the way to go.
• I finished reading Michael Moorcock's Gloriana last night. Good book but didn't really grab me all that much. Somehow it just didn't quite sit right with me, and I don't know why.
• Started reading The Lies of Locke Lamora today, for the second time (I never finished it the first time round because I foolishly left the book on a plane in Schoenefeld Airport in Berlin). It's just as good as I remember.

Anyway, tired, can't think, going to do something that requires no brain.

I mentioned a few posts back that I did a shoot with my friend Michelle whilst we were both at the Canonical Allhands conference at the La Mola. We didn't have much time - maybe forty minutes for something that I'd usually expect to take a couple of hours over - and the rushing about (not to mention the heat, the humidity and my overwhelming nervousness) meant that I made some rookie mistakes that I shouldn't have. Then again, that was the whole point of the shoot.

Anyway, three weeks after returning from Spain, and I've managed to pare the shoot down to the best sixteen frames that I shot. There were others, but not as good as these, nor as representative of what we did. Michelle was an awesome subject, especially when you consider that she's never posed for anyone before and was being ordered about by a big, hairy, sweaty Englishman with camera around his neck.

Flickr slideshow below the fold. Hope you enjoy it; I enjoyed making it.

Read more...

Hooray for Waterstones
Originally uploaded by Graham Binns

A request comes from Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group (link):

Happy-snappers unite! We need as many people as possible to take photos of stuff that embodies the database state, and the UK's world-famous surveillance society (wake up! You've just walked into it).

On 11 October, No2ID and the Open Rights Group will make a live collage of the images you've taken in a prominent location in London (to be confirmed), to celebrate Freedom Not Fear Day 2008.

So, here's how you can help:

1. Spot something that embodies the UK's wholesale transformation into the surveillance society/database state. Subjects might include your local CCTV camera(s), or fingerprinting equipment in your child's school library
2. Snap it
3. Upload it to Flickr and tag it "FNFBigPicture" - please use an Attribution Creative Commons license.
4. That's it!

Go forth and snap, my lovelies!