‘Missing’ Mobile Phone Uploads ‘Finders’ Pics to Flickr
November 9, 2006 at 5:39 pm | In Blogs, News, Strange Uses | 1 Comment
‘Welcome to teh Intarweb, losers. Now you can go to jail.’
That’s what a Dutch guy’s first reaction was when pictures of the thugs who had stolen his phone showed up in his Flickr photostream. But things don’t turn out to be that straightforward.
So what happened?
A few days ago, a Dutch 25-year old blogged about how he’d lost his mobile. It could have happened anywhere, really – on the bus, on the train or at any moment of his journey that day. He was unable to do more than report his phone as stolen (or missing) to the police and block his SIM.
Losing a mobile phone, however, is never a police priority, so that would have been the last he ever heard of it.
Or so he thought.
This morning, the guy, Martijn, was rather surprised to see several pictures he had never taken himself show up in his Flickr photostream . Together with a rather mysterious image of a parrot, there was one pic showing two guys he’d never seen before.
The guys who had either stolen, or found, his phone.
Now, Martijn had a little app by ShoZu installed . With this program, the phone’s user is asked whether they want to automatically upload the pics they’ve just shot to their Flickr account. The two curious looking types apparently had no idea what this meant and clicked ‘yes’.
So, now the guy knows who has his phone, but he doesn’t know who they are. And the police still can’t do a thing, because the duo might just have well ‘found’ the phone.
If they did find it, they’re not the most honest of types either, because they should have just turned it in at the nearest cop shop – not switch SIMs and use it for taking happy snaps of themselves.
The two won’t remain anonymous for long though. Dutch satirical news site GeenStijl (NoStyle) has already picked up on the story, and the item has everything to become quite the ’skateboarding parrot’ for the regular news stations as well.
I’m real interested for sure to see how this little Flickr gem will turn out.
Get Your Polyoramic Moo’s
November 6, 2006 at 10:11 pm | In Moo, Strange Uses | Leave a Comment
Say what?
Flickr user John Ralston has devised an interesting interpretation to the Moo cards.
He created two sets (one, two) of fifteen drawings printed on Moo cards that you can arrange in any order to create a unique panorama.
You’re not limited to just the one panorama, though, because the fifteen cards can be arranged in no less than 1,307,674,368,000 different ways. I didn’t bother to check that however.
You can order sets of his moo’s at $10 each.
Flickr Song
November 5, 2006 at 10:29 pm | In Blogs, Creative Commons, Music, Strange Uses | 2 Comments
Jonathan Coulton is a musician and songwriter from Brooklyn, New York. A little over a year ago, Jonathan set himself the goal of writing, recording and publishing a new song every week on his blog.
Jonathan is conducting this experiment to see if it is at all possible to make a living as an entirely independent, unsigned artist. He is rather big on the idea of Creative Commons and offers his music for free to all who want to download it.
Of course, that means that Jonathan is largely dependent on donations and purchase to keep at it.
In the same spirit of creative exchange, Jonathan has done a song with a video entirely made up of CC licenced photographs from Flickr.
You can download a better quality QuickTime movie by right-clicking this link.
His blog is here, the lyrics to the song are here and Jonathan’s infinitely more erudite FAQ explaining it all in more detail is here.
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