Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

on eecue.com (Dave Bullock)

Monday, December 31st 2007

Here is a short movie I put together of my HDR photos from this past year:

Note that the images aren't actually in order. If you're interested, the full resolution Quicktime movie can be found here [~100MB].

Update: My friend Steve Kesler asked me how I put this movie together. It was actually pretty straight forward. I just exported the images from my photo management application (LightRoom) and then in Quicktime I selected File > Open Image Sequence. I then selected the first image in that folder. It takes a few minutes to process the images and then I saved and uploaded in to blip.tv.  

 

Saturday, December 29th 2007

 

Friday, December 28th 2007

 

Thursday, December 27th 2007

I've lived in both areas, and clearly Downtown LA is the winner... but once again, go vote you conscience.  

 

Wednesday, December 26th 2007

 

Monday, December 24th 2007

I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas (or a Happy Holiday if you don't celebrate Christmas) and a Happy New Year. I hope you have had a great year and I wish you the best for 2008. Enjoy your holiday and don't forget to send joy and best wishes to your friends and family.  

 

Saturday, December 22nd 2007

 

Friday, December 21st 2007

 

Thursday, December 20th 2007

Clearly, Downtown LA has San Pedro beat, but vote your conscience. 

Wednesday, December 12th 2007

DV Expo : WIRED News Gallery

Two weeks ago I shot the DV Expo in Downtown Los Angeles for WIRED News. The gallery went live on the front door of wired.com today. This is the first time I've had two pieces on the front door of WIRED News at the same time. I'm really really really looking forward to my first magazine assignment, if I ever get one! 

Tuesday, December 11th 2007

Like most people, I've been writing since I was a kid. Unlike most professional writers I never went to college. I guess that makes me somewhat of a hack. I have been blogging for roughly 5 years now. In that time I've gone from writing on my personal blog, to writing for LAist, to writing for blogging.la, to blogdowntown and now to WIRED News.

When I first started writing for LAist, I was excited. For some reason I thought my stories were going to be edited by an editor. As it turns out, the editors at LAist, don't actually do any editing. At blogging.la, the editorial policy is clear: there is no editorial policy. When I started writing for Eric Richardson on blogdowntown, he did edit my work, which I found helpful.

When I first approached WIRED about running some of my photo galleries, they turned down my pitches by said they would keep me in mind. At DEFCON this year they contacted me and paired me with their reporter, Kim Zetter. The next time WIRED got in touch with me was to cover their NextFest show.

I ended up writing captions on a little over half of the photos that ended up in the NextFest gallery. After Nextfest I covered the ASTRO show and that time I wrote the intro as well as the captions for the entire gallery. Since then I've been doing roughly 1 or 2 galleries a week for WIRED.

Being edited is a great learning experience for me. I like to compare what I wrote to what the editor and the copy-editor end up posting as the final piece. I haven't had any humorous interaction with the copy-editors like Siel had, but I'm guessing that the WIRED copy-editors are a little more hip than the folks editing the LA Times blog.

The more I write, the easier it becomes. I've also been reading Daily Writing Tips. Today's post was a collaborative piece consisting of 34 tips from various writers. I found many of them very helpful and I hope you do too. 

Monday, December 10th 2007

EVS23 on WIRED News

Last week I stopped by EVS23 and shot some photos for WIRED News. You can check the gallery here. [Screenshot above hosted by flickr.] 

Saturday, December 8th 2007

Dorkbot Socal Presentation

I have uploaded the slides from my HDR presentation last weekend at Dorkbot Socal. I am going to be giving an HDR workshop at some point in the next few months. Keep and eye out for more info about that. [Image hosted by flickr] 

Thursday, December 6th 2007

So a few people have asked me if there is anything in particular that I want for the Holidays. If you want to buy me a present and can't think of anything, check out my Amazon Wishlist. Thanks in advance!  

Wednesday, December 5th 2007

*UPDATE: 545 W 127th St* Unknown liquid leak from cargo container in vacant lot; @ 50 gallons on ground; NFD - Brian Humphrey###

LA Fire Department (LAFD) via TwitterMail at 21:11

*Hazardous Material Investigation* 545 W 127th St; TG 734-B1; FS 64, No injury; No evacuation; No further details; Ch:7,13 @8:39 PM -Bri ...

You can read more on the LAFD Twitter Page. My SAR Team also has a Cave Rescue Twitter Page as does the San Bernardino SAR team. 

My Multi-Geek Personality

Scott Johnson drew this poster of 56 geeks. I went through it and clipped together a composite of the geeks that I consider myself one with. Which geeks are you? 

Wednesday, November 28th 2007

6th Street Bridge and Downtown Los Angeles

I'm giving a talk on HDR Photography this Saturday at Machine Project for Dorkbot Socal #25.

Today's digital cameras have a limited dynamic range compared to film. If you shoot a photo of a landscape with a beautiful cloudy sky, your landscape will be properly exposed, but your clouds will be washed out or vice-versa. High-Dynamic Range photography allows you to circumvent your sensor's limitations by taking multiple photos with different exposures and combining them on your computer. All you need is a camera capable of manual exposure settings, a tripod and a computer and you'll be on your way to HDR mastery. Presented by Dave Bullock.

I'll be showing (for the first time) the individual RAW files that I combine to create some of my favorite HDR shots.  

Wednesday, November 21st 2007

Dorkbot Socal, an eclectic group of nerds, geeks, hackers, makers, builders and breakers, arranged a tour of Mister Jalopy's secret laboratory / garage / headquarters: Hooptyrides, Inc. Mister Jalopy is featured on the cover of the current Make magazine, sitting atop his "Urban Guerrilla Movie House". His Giant iPod, a wooden entertainment console containing a Mac Mini and utilizing the original controls of the console, previously appeared in Make.

Hoopytyrides HQ is located in an old, dual-bay auto shop, with many of the original accouterments still intact, including the pinups that adorn the walls of the basement machine shop, old-school hydraulic lifts and a Clayton dynamometer. Mister Jalopy describes himself as more of an assembler than a engineer, pointing out that he simply takes apart existing technology and puts it back together to better suit his needs. Either way about it, Mister Jalopy's creations are fun, functional and attainable by interested makers who want to create their own repurposed entertainment equipment.

Mr. Jalopy on his projector bike

Mister Jalopy perched on his Urban Guerrilla Movie House, a mobile pedal powered projector build from a mixture of old furniture, vintage cans, salvaged optics, an LCD monitor and a bicycle.

You can check out the rest of the photos after the jump. 

Monday, November 19th 2007

A few months ago, before the iPhone was released, I put my email address into an AT&T/Cingular form so I could be notified when it was available for purchase. I later decided that AT&T's horribly privacy (NSA) track record was enough reason not to switch to their service so I'm sticking with T-Mobile for now. I just got an email from them, trying to get me to buy some random crap, and I decided to click on the "Remove Me" link at the bottom of the page. That link brought me to the following page:

att opt out insanity

It appears that they want your address, cell phone number, landline number, name and email address to remove you from their email list. It turns out that they just want your first and last name and your email address for the removal to work, but the form is certainly not clear about that and I'm sure plenty of folks fill out the whole thing. I didn't put my actual name into the fields, but added something a bit more colorful that I'm sure nobody will actually read. Anyhow, the mass email should really just have a link that removes you, instead of taking you to this horrid form. 

Here are a few links / screengrabs of recent photos I've shot for WIRED News:

wired sc07

wired living home

wire norton sales

wired autopia bling

wired autopia gtr

Photos hosted by flickr. Keep an eye out for my out-takes coming soon! 

Sunday, November 11th 2007

I just landed in Reno, NV for the Super Computing '07 (SC07) conference. I am here on assignment for WIRED News. Keep an eye out here and on wired.com for photos of clusters, supercomputers and various other cool and interesting toys from assorted government and industry nerderies.  

Friday, November 9th 2007

So I won a Basic Stamp kit from ebay last week. Last night I had a chance to play with it. I went through the included book, and got through most of it. In the end I built the following:

BasicStamp2 Servo Control

That is a servo on the left, the basic stamp has some code in it that detects the position of the potentiometer in the lower center of the breadboard using capacitor discharge timing and then moves the servo to match the pot's position. The 7 segment display lists a number between 1 and 10 depending upon the servo's position. The white colored LED actually flashes either red or green depending on if you're rotating the pot clockwise our counter-clockwise. It was fun to build and actually not that hard.

I am really excited about programming microcontrollers and I'm looking forward to my next projects. At some point soon I feel like I'll be able to finally hack the Furby. You can check out the code I wrote here.

Update for Riyad:I made the thing on the left spin when I turned the little white knob on the right. I did this using magic. 

Friday, November 2nd 2007

Last week I attended the ASTRO annual meeting at the LA Convention Center. I shot some photos of the cool x-ray gun toting robots on display. Keep an eye out for more of my nerdy photos galleries over on Wired News. 

Wednesday, October 31st 2007

I was just getting used to my randomly assigned callsign: KI6LZK, and I just noticed that my vanity call has been approved: N3CUE. It's sort of a play on eecue, obviously. I guess it won't matter in a few weeks when I pass my Extra exam and I can get a 2x1 or 2x2 call. =] 

Sunday, October 28th 2007

I'm an early adopter. When the OS X Beta came out in 1999 I jumped right on it, being a FreeBSD user I was right at home with the BSD subsystem and command line. When Leopard arrived via FedEx at my office yesterday I hesitated only slightly before installing it.

I asked some of my other nerd friends if they had encountered any problems, and I took at look at Apple's discussion forums, paying particular notice to this issue, which currently has over 350 replies and 25,000 views. One of my friends said that if I ran the disk utility from the Leopard install disk before I upgraded it would solve that problem. I ran disk utility, it found a problem and fixed it and I had no trouble upgrading.

Once my system booted up I went through all my applications and checked to see if they functioned properly, and everything did until I got to Zend Development Engine, which opened up fine, but my project had no files in it! I try to add them back to the project, but when I went to /home I noticed that it was totally empty! I thought that the upgrade had delete my web development files, and I was pissed, but luckily I had a backup that wasn't too old, and most all of my projects are in CVS, SVN or git repositories. I posted this thread on the Apple discussion forums and the next day I got the following response which restored my /home directory and all its contents!:

The good news is that your files are still on the drive. This is because 10.5 is now a real, certified Unix OS. However, I think that the default setting should have been to preserve the /home as a local directory. See the explanation here.

That worked, my files in /home were unharmed, Apple's new "real UNIX" features caused an invisible volume to be mounted using /home as the mount point.

My next problem came when I tried to print to my Epson 3800, I downloaded the new drivers from Epson's website (they have a 10.5 driver) and installed it. Now when I tried to print to the 3800 the printer was auto-detected but I still couldn't print. I'm sure this will be fixed shortly and it's not an emergency for me.

The third issue I noticed this morning was that ATSServer was using 185% of my processing power (I have a Core Duo MacBook Pro). Right now it's not a huge deal as I'm about to go out to take some photos anyhow, but this could put a damper on activities that do require my processors full attention like working with RAW files in Lightroom.

All in all, I'm very happy with Leopard's new features. The system is actually faster, if you can believe that! Moving around windows, loading websites and opening applications seem to work much more smoothly than before. This is a great update from Apple, I'm sure they'll work out the kinks soon. They did just release a Software Update to fix the login problems and the 802.11 issues, none of which affected me.

Update: I forgot to mention, I check my mail through an ssh tunnel to my IMAP server and I've been getting server timeout warnings. My server isn't actually timing out though, and this was never an issue in Tiger... I'm guessing Leopard's Mail.app is just more sensitive. It actually hasn't been a problem this weekend, only on Friday. 

Thursday, October 25th 2007

As I mentioned on Tuesday, my Search and Rescue team got called out. I am a member of the San Bernardino Sheriff's Cave Rescue Team, although we don't put out fires we have assisted with evacuations and security during fires in the past, notably the large fires 4 years ago, a year before I joined the team.

Yesterday at about 0400 I hit the road and drove out to the shipping container that is our gear storage shed, where I met Sonny Lawerence. We picked up the Sheriff's vehicle and headed up to the operation center in Twin Peaks where we were briefed and given our mission.

Our assigned task was to patrol the commercial districts of Crestline and Rim Forest looking for looters. If we saw anything odd happening we were instructed to call in to the command post on the 800MHz radio. We were issued Nomex shirts and rubber goggles, along with an 800MHz HT to compliment our 800MHz mobile in the truck.

We began our mission after a eating a county-catered breakfast. I spent the day driving around slowly between the two tiny commercial strips of Crestline and Rim Forest. In Rim Forest we saw a guy with his pickup trucked backed up to a hardware store and another guy inside. We called it in, and as we were waiting for the Sheriff's Deputies to come the guy in the pickup took off. One of the Deputies knew that guy inside who was the owner. Other than that our day was uneventful, although I did get some cool shots of Tanker Helicopters sucking up water from Lake Gregory:

Tanker Helicopter

Tanker Helicopter

Tanker Helicopters Refilling

We didn't get too close to the fire, here is a photo of the Grass Valley fire:

Grass Valley Fire

And here is a photo of the Slide Fire:

Slide Fire

For more information about the fires near Lake Arrowhead, check out the Rim of the World website as does the SB SAR website. 

Tuesday, October 23rd 2007

I just got paged. Tomorrow at 0600 I'll be at the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Station. I'm not a firefighter, I do Search and Rescue, so obviously I won't be putting out any fires. I will most likely be doing evacuations. I'll post an update tomorrow when I get back, and I may also be twittering. I'm also going to try and get some photos of the action. 

Thursday, October 18th 2007

I just want to congratulate my beautiful, sweet, wonderful, caring, intelligent, inspiring, empathetic, hot and sexy wife, Penelope, on passing her Nursing 200 final today with flying colors. You did a great job baby, and now you just have a little over a year to go! You're going to be the best nurse ever! You are the world to me sweetie pie. I love you!

Penelope and Dave in Taos, New Mexico

Photo of us atop the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos, from our recent trip to New Mexico. 

Last night I shot some photos for a project that I'm doing for a band. I will give more details and show the finished product when the project is finished. Here is one of the out-takes from last night:

Blue-J and the Hollywood Sign

Zoom in for a closer look at the sign and the stars.  

Wednesday, October 17th 2007

A short bit I wrote about a life sized version of Bumblebee in Hollywood just went up on the Wired News Underwire Blog. I'm looking forward to doing more writing and photography for Wired News, and hopefully for the actual magazine as well at some point.  

Tuesday, October 16th 2007

Last weekend I went on a hike up in Altadena with an Urban Exploration group known as Urban Adventures. I've done a good deal of UE in my days and I am excited to be part of a group dedicated to said adventures. Here are some photos I took of the dam:

Dam in Arroyo Seco

Dam in Arroyo Seco

You can check out the rest here in my Arroyo Seco Dam gallery. 

Thursday, October 4th 2007

When I was 10 years old, my Dad bought me a used ham radio. It was consisted of two large stereo console sized boxes, one being a receiver and the other a transmitter. I used to love listening to the conversations in far off places on the HF bands. I never did get to use the transmitter, as I never learned Morse code or took the Ham test.

Half a decade later I read an article in Phrack about the Yaesu FT-50R, and I knew I had to get one. Once again I used it for listening, as without a license, transmitting was illegal.

Last week I was at my Father-in-law's house installing some skid plates on my FJ Cruiser. He was showing off some cool electron tubes to me and offhandedly mentioned that he would probably never fire up the radios in his ham shack again. I didn't tell him about it, but this inspired me to get my license. I looked up the next testing location and found one last Saturday at the Northrop Grumman complex in Redondo Beach, which also happens to have an awesome electronics swap meet which I need to go back and photograph.

After studying the material for a few days and taking a bunch of practice exams, I felt I was ready for the test. I passed the Tech Class test on the first try, and since I had already paid my $14, I went ahead and took the General Class test as well. I ended up failing the General by 1 question.

After failing the General Class test, I made myself a study guide, and learned all the material. Last night I went to a Ham test in Torrance and this time I passed the General Class! It takes up to 10 days for the FCC to assign you a call-sign and put you in their license database, and I'm still not showing up yet.

I can't wait to work the HF bands, I'm planning on picking up my first HF radio in a few days. I really want the ICOM IC-7000, it's an amazing radio in a compact package. The IC-7000 fits what once filled a whole work bench into a tiny package roughly 6.5" x 2.25" x 7" and has a removable faceplate for remote mounting in a vehicle. Now if only I can convince Yay, my lovely, beautiful, wonderful, hardworking, intelligent, sweet wife to let is letting me drop $1500 on this amazing radio! Maybe if I remind her that And it could save our lives in an emergency.

UPDATE: My callsign now shows up in the FCC's database: KI6LZK.

UPDATE 2 Yay, my wife has given me the go-ahead to go and purchase the IC-7000... I'm excited. Heading to pick it up in a bit and then off to the Mojave to hang out with my father-in-law. 

Thursday, September 27th 2007

I've been putting my photos on flickr for several years now. I joined flickr well before they were absorbed by yahoo. I have a "Pro" account which means I have actually paid money to flickr/yahoo for their services. Until recently I have been very happy with my experiences with flickr.

Earlier this year one of my photos from Coachella made it onto this official flckr blog post. The photo is no longer on that post, and it's not because I asked them to take it down, but because I asked them to credit me properly. I had previously asked the original blog poster several times to update the credit to say my name (Dave Bullock, not eecue) and to link that credit to my website (eecue.com not flickr.com/photos/eecue). After several attempts at contact, I never heard back from the original poster, mbaratz, so I sent in a message to both flickr help and abuse. Here is the response I got:

Hi Dave,

FlickrBlog is part of Flickr and this our standard for accreditation.

If you would prefer, we can remove your content from the post in question.

Regards,

Heather

Hmm, interesting, so basically their policy violates my BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. Instead of bringing that up I politely responded:

Ok, I understand. I'd really rather not have you delete it, wouldn't it be just as easy to credit me as it would be to delete it? How about you change the accreditation and then everyone is happy. You can keep the photo linking to the flickr page.

=]

-Dave

So I was hoping to get a reasonable and polite response, be it yes or no, but instead Heather responded with this passive aggressive missive:

Dave,

I've removed your content from the post. I think that this is the easiest way to make everybody happy.

Regards,

Heather

I was flabbergasted, I couldn't believe that they would just delete my photo instead of working with me and changing a single link in a blog post. Flickr is a huge champion of Creative Commons, I find it ludicrous that they would refuse to practice what they preach. Apart from Creative Commons, flickr requires you to link back whenever you post one of your photos on your site, but now they're refusing to link to me? They even insert rel="nofollow" on any links you put in your photo descriptions, but we're forced to link back when we post those same photos?

I am seriously considering removing all my content (5,976 photos which have received 277,092 views) from flickr. I don't really want to do this, but I feel totally insulted by this interaction I had with Heather.

Here is the photo in question:

Cauac Twins Tesla Coils 

Monday, September 24th 2007

Sunday, September 23rd 2007

Los Angeles has been dry and cloudless all summer. I really love the way clouds look in an HDR photo, and as I'm working on the last few shots I need for my first solo show which is coming up either in November or January, I couldn't resist spending a few hours driving around LA and getting some shots. Here are some photos of LA from a few vantage points I found throughout the city, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights and Baldwin Hills Estates:

Downtown LA and Truck Yard

Dowtown LA From Lincoln Heights

Downtown LA from Baldwin Hills Estates

You can check out the rest on flickr or in my Downtown from the Hills gallery. 

The clouds yesterday were really amazing. I drove around some of my favorite haunts and shot some photos of the skyward splendor:

Tanks and Trucks

Pacer Furniture

Tress, Tanks and Bricks

You can check out the rest of them here.

 

Saturday, September 22nd 2007

Our vast arid-wasteland-cum-metropolis has been parched past the point of desiccation after our lowest annual rainfall on record this year. Finally our city is breathing a collective, rain-drenched, sigh of relief. The rain is falling right now, the streets are wet and glimmering, if I was outside my nostrils would be filled with the smell of soaked pavement. The thing I miss most about growing up in the Bay Area is the rain... the rain that fell more often than it does here in the desert that Mulholland converted.

Hopefully this next year will be a wet one, like it was in 2005. That was the year the Mojave was carpeted with wildflowers, many of which hadn't bloomed in centuries.  

Friday, September 21st 2007

Today the sky in Los Angeles was filled with the most beautiful clouds that we've had in some time now. I couldn't resist driving around my favorite industrial areas South of Los Angeles and shooting some photos. I even got a chance to try out my new Gobi Stealth roof rack, which has a mesh top and can support 300lbs, making it a perfect photographic platform. Here are the results from my excursion:

Bridge Over Los Angeles River

Boilers

Railroad Bridge Over River

Trains Below the 710

All photos were taken with a Canon EOS 5D, through a Canon 24-70 EF f/2.8 L atop my trusty Bogen Manfrotto 3021BN connected to a Arca Swiss B1 Monoball Head triggered using a wired remote. Each photo you see here is a combination of 3 bracketed shots: 0,-,+ 2 EV which were combined with Photomatix. More photos after the jump.

 

Wednesday, September 19th 2007

Here are a few photos I shot last night at the Geek Dinner:

Geek Dinner Group Shot

Geek Dinner Group Shot

Heather Vescent

Jory Felice Metaphoto

Andy Sternberg Metaphoto

Rizwan Kassim

The rest of the photos can be found on flickr or in my Geek Dinner gallery. 

Tuesday, September 18th 2007

Scott Beale just posted about ZingFu ignoring his CC license and using one of his photos for a promotional card without either asking (which is required for commercial use) or crediting him. This happens to me rather frequently, which is why I've borrowed (with permission) the wording that Scott uses on all his photo on flickr:

This photo is licensed under a Creative Commons license. If you use this photo, please list the photo credit as "Scott Beale (Laughing Squid)" and link credit to laughingsquid.com.

Of course, I've replaced his name and website with mine, but I am guessing from his results, this will still not be enough.

The last two entities to refuse to properly credit my photos, and thus violate my creative commons license, were NPR and the Flickr Blog. I have also recently been contacted by an editor on Wikipedia, who has asked me to change my license to allow for commercial usage, which I will not do by any means. I find it very unfortunate that Wikipedia forbids -NC CC photos, but here is a page in support of their reasoning.  

Monday, September 17th 2007

Over the years I've made my way through various Ultra-Compact digital cameras, the latest being the Canon Powershot SD550. I don't especially like the SD500 for a number of reasons which I don't feel like listing here. What I am going to list, is what I do want in an Ultra-Compact Digital Camera:

Required:

  • Somewhere Between 5 and 10 Megapixels
  • RAW Mode
  • Full Manual Mode
  • Tripod Mount
  • Excellent Low-light Performance
  • Quick or Instant Startup Time
  • ≥ 3" LCD
  • ≥ 2x Optical Zoom
  • At Least 24-50mm Equivalent Zoom
  • Fits Easily in Pocket
  • Macro Mode
  • Video Mode
  • Doesn't Use Obscure Memory Format
  • USB 2.0
Would be Nice:
  • Water-Resistent of Water-Proof
  • Image Stabilization
  • Bluetooth / 802.11x
  • Face Recognition
  • Standard Sized Batteries

Obviously there is currently no camera that meets my required specs, but I'm hoping there will be some time soon. I was considering the Leica D-Lux 3, but because of its poor low-light performance and protruding lens won't work for me. If my SD550 dies before a camera with my required specs comes along, I'll probably go with the Nikon Coolpix S51, although it doesn't have a RAW nor manual modes.... ok so maybe that won't work. For now I'll just make it a point to lug around my 5D as much as possible.

Btw, this post was inspired by Scott Beale's post about his new Fuji Finepix F50.

UPDATE I have created a handy little size guide so you can get a real life idea of the size of the various Ultra-Compact cameras out there. So far I have only done Canon and Nikon, but I plan on adding other manufacturers. You can download the Ultra-Compact Camera Size Comparison Chart [66k PDF].

UPDATE 2 Hmm, I think this might be the perfect camera for me: Canon SD870 IS. 

It's been a good run for me over at blogging.la, but I have decided that I no longer have the time to contribute quality, unique content. I have been mulling over this decision for some time now, and I decided to stop putting if off and admit to myself that I'm just too busy to handle all the blogging on my plate. I will now be focusing on writing for eecue.com and blogdowntown. If you're interested you can read through my 283 posts from the 2 years and 2 months I wrote for blogging.la. 

Thanks to Scott Beale I now have a Yahoo! Mash profile. I also have invites if you need one. It would be helpful if mash included a way to invite from a vcard file, but otherwise it seems pretty cool.

UPDATE Ok so I know this is still in beta, but the fact that Yahoo's own service flickr's module has now broken my RSS feed link is somehow pleasantly ironic:

Invalid URL: http%3A%2F%2Fapi.flickr.com%2Fservices%2Ffeeds%2Fphotos_public...

I should point out that it did work this morning.

UPDATE 2 I have added a few friends and none of them show up in my friends list, although I show up in theirs. Odd.

UPDATE 3 Ok I get it, the friends don't show up until they've claimed and set up their profiles. There are some pretty cool little modules, I like the twitter feed. 

I'm excited. My first WIRED gallery just went online! So far there are 11 images in the gallery, but soon there should be around 20. Checkout my photos in the WIRED Nextfest Gallery. =]

Update The rest of my images, totaling 22, are now up on the gallery. I ended up writing the captions for the remaining 11 images. Unfortunately, WIRED.com's gallery doesn't allow two bylines for a gallery, but Kristen Philipkoski was nice enough to allow my to have the byline even though she wrote the captions on the original 11 images. Thanks Kristen! 

Sunday, September 16th 2007

Here are a few of my photos from the WIRED Nextfest:

Humankind

Zou Ren Ti & Clone

Safari Keepon

Albert Hubo

Winem

Morpho Towers

E-TAF Automatic Door

Anamatronics Workshop Creation

You can see the full gallery on flickr or here: Nextfest Creative Commons Benefit, Nexfest Day 1 and Nextfest Day 2. If you haven't checked it out, take a look at my Nextfest Robot Roundup, which I just updated with photos. More after the jump. 

Friday, September 14th 2007

Tuesday, September 11th 2007

Last night I got a chance to get up close and personal with Keepon, the friendly dancing robot, at the WIRED Nextfest Creative Commons Benefit. I was hoping to see him perform live with Spoon, although honestly I'm more of a Keepon fan than a Spoon fan, but Keepon's performance was in the lobby, not on stage:

Keepon

I had a chance to chat with Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima a bit about their robot and they even took off Keepon's pants/dress so I could get a shot of his guts which consist of 4 geared DC motors and a RISC processor to control the motors:

Keepon Lower Guts

They didn't take off his skin, but they said they would for me during the press preview on Thursday. The did let me peak behind the curtain at the beautiful rats nest of cables, interfaces and two MacBooks being used to control the quartet of Keepons.

Keepon Brains

Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima showed off their robots to an interested crowd:

Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima demo Keepon

Evidently girls really, really, really like dancing squishy robots (I mean really):

Keepon Gets Kissed

You can see more of my photos from the Nextfest Creative Commons Benefit in