Happy halloween! I have something spooky to share and it’s another thing to add to the do not do on the internet list: post/share/blog pictures of your keys.

I just went back through and removed pictures taken of my keys and posted in a past blog post here. I believe this is a first for this blog in 5+ years. I don’t remember ever removing any picture that was posted before anyway.

Damage done, I’m sure these pictures are cached elsewhere and wouldn’t be that difficult to find. Even though the quality of the photos aren’t very good that doesn’t matter any more because your keys can be hacked from low-quality pictures:

“This idea should come as little surprise to locksmiths or lock vendors,” said Savage. “There are experts who have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photographs for some time. However, we argue that the threat has turned a corner—cheap image sensors have made digital cameras pervasive and basic computer vision techniques can automatically extract a key’s information without requiring any expertise.”

So if you thought sharing pictures of your keys were harmless, think again. It’s like leaving your password on a sticky on your monitor. I just searched Flickr with the keyword ‘keys’ and thousands of pictures of keys were returned including the one shown above with the ironic caption: "Show Me Your Keys." Er, not.

In this let’s share everything world, it makes more sense to pause and think: wait, if I share something like this what could happen?

I’m going to try and start leaving comments on pictures with a link to the story on blogs I read. Bloggers who give any personal details are at additional risk (especially those using their legal names) with this kind of thing. Be a good internet neighbor and help spread the word.

My friend Lestat shared YearbookYourself saying: "I can see you doing this." He was right.

You need to do a better job lining up the size of your face than me. I got the angle right, but not enough face which made me look like Yul Bryner in Westworld when his robot face is taken off.

You can also save the pictures and share with your friends. Can’t save the whole yearbook though, bummer. Maybe that feature will be added down the road.

Note to Mac OS X readers: none of the IFRAME embeds in this post work at this time with the Mac. Sorry about that, Photosynth is a Windows-only thing at the moment although they say they are hard at work on a Mac version.

Note to Windows users: If you have trouble viewing any of the IFRAME embeds, just visit my Photosynth page to see all the synths. Update 6:59pm PST: I just removed all the IFRAME embeds, they weren’t working right and just screwing up display of text in the browser.

Day #1

As probably heard already, getting into Microsoft’s new Photosynth picture service on launch day was difficult. Saw too much of this:

 

I wasn’t going to let scaling woes deter me, I kept checking back throughout the day trying to get through the process.

Day #2 - First synth: 72% synthy

I finally got in and tried putting together my very first Photosynth of the Rockin’ The Rivers concert we attended recently in Montana feature Dennis De Young and the music of Styx as well as Manny Charlton playing with Nazareth. This is the largest annual rock concert in Montana:

Process seemed to go ok until about 85% of the way through where it just froze up and stared back at me like this:

At Get Satisfaction, a service for tracking customer service issues, I found numerous people complaining about the stopped during publishing phase issue.

Came back a couple hours later and my Photosynth was showing as ‘72% synthy.’ I’m embedding below using IFRAME which if you’re reading via RSS you might have to click over to this page too see and — a big, big sorry to all Mac OS X reader — readers on Macs can’t see the finished synths If the IFRAME is hosed you can see the synth directly here

Day #3 - more synths created and synth experimentation

Tried creating my second synth of the Pierce County Foothills trail which is near our office. I had 25 pictures for this collection. This was my first time where the process worked all the way through. My second synth only scored 10% synthy. Not very good. I almost deleted this synth since it only seemed to have used 2 of the 25 pictures.

Tip: use the SPACEBAR to get through all the photos. Here is the IFRAME embed of my 2nd synth (If the IFRAME is hosed you can see the synth directly here):

The difference between the two synths is the similarity between the pictures. Through trial and error I learned that pictures that were more similar were more synthy. So if I had started with one picture and then just moved and took more pictures.

I did the following planning for my third synth, starting at the edge of a road and walking toward a wooded trail:

• total of 105 pictures, my biggest synth attempt yet (nearly 250 MB worth of photos)
• every 10 steps I snapped a picture from about the same perspective and view
• every 100-200 steps I would alter the vertical level of the photo
• at scenic intersection I panned the camera left and right at about the same vertical position
• at the end of the road, where it turned into a trail, I took several shots so photosynth would (hopefully) detect I was still on the same path, only there was no more road straight ahead, I was not going into a wooded area
• at the end of the trail, I took a panaromic set of pictures from my position that led back to the road I’d just walked as well as to the river that blocked my path in front of me
• I took no close-up shots

Now how did this turn out? Same as my very first attempt: it froze up about 85% done at the "publishing synth" phase. I decided to pare back the number of photos with synth #4 attempt and only do the attempted panaromic pictures I took at the end of the wooded trail, which numbered about 25 in all.

This one finished at 55% synthy and wasn’t quite what I expected. It feels a little bit like you are walking through the trail. The panorama portion is broken. IFRAME embed:

At this point, I decided seek out how to make something closer to 100% synthy. While doing that I went to work on synth #5 attempt by taking a bunch of pictures around my desk. In this picture I:

• took more pictures of the same things with very small variations
• pictures were taken at different zoom levels
• I panned more up and down with pictures

This resulted in being 89% synthy, my best effort, IFRAME embed below:

This turned out to be the best created synth out of the 5 so far (only 4 of which have shown up). Use the + and - to zoom in and out and see different things around the desk. You can even see this very blog post in draft mode on my monitor in portrait mode inside Windows Live Writer. This might be a good way to start out with your first synth creation. Just take pictures around your desk or some other common area in your office.

While writing the last paragraph I got another idea for a new synth. I decided to make a synth using my Gibson Les Paul Studio red wine guitar and allowing viewers to stroll up the neck of the guitar. Sort of a synth journey of navigating the fretboard while playing a smoking guitar solo.

Turned out to be 0% synthy. Guess I’ll have to refine this idea and/or take better pictures. The results of this guitar experience swayed me from a 6th and final synth attempt for this blog post. I was going to take the screenshots I made — most of which weren’t used — in this post and combine them into a synth. Since my guitar one was a bust, I figured the screenshot one would be too, so forgive me bailing on the title idea.

Decided to leave the title alone because it describes the thought process one goes through when creating synths. Whenever I pick up the camera now, I’m thinking about synths. That to me spells a great way to start a new service. Features I’d like to see added — and forgive me for calling out the social card — the ability to add friends synths, create folders of favorite synths and more. Sure, there are a zillion bookmark tools out there, but it would be very cool to have these functions built in. How about a Stumble-upon like synth exploration feature?

I could go on and on. Yes, this is a FUN service, even though it’s getting pounded and off to a rough technical start and doesn’t work on a Mac yet. Photogs are going to love this. Most fun I’ve had checking out a new online service in awhile.

Sunday morning and what else to search for on the web? The Jesus Christ middle finger gave me an itch and decided to scratch for more image queries for middle fingers and share the results. Google Images 1 - 20 of about 1,530,000 — yowsa, if you can believe their ‘estimation’ they have the most middle fingers of any place on the web:

Flickr middle finger as slideshow (Flickr shows 10,140 results). This would be one to put on one of those picture frames above your TV — or on your TV — to freak out guests. Flickr competitor Zooomr only has 7 middle finger pictures.

At least 3,335 are showing their middle fingers on Photobucket:

The middle finger photoshopped out of flames seems to be one of the more popular pictures. Popular at Imageshack too which has 4 versions of it in the top 10 results out of 267 total pictures.

I would show you the results for Smugmug but as of this writing they are having Amazon S3 image hosting problems:

Historically, Amazon has been very stable.  We’ve seen three of these in our entire history with Amazon (>2 years), including this one.  I expect, like the last two, that service will be restored shortly.

Don doesn’t seem to think this is a middle finger image moment. Those paying for Smugmug might think so. Moving on, webshots has 19,627 middle finger images and hey, not a one of them is that flaming finger.

I checked AOL pictures but didn’t turn up any middle finger photos. Am I doing something wrong there? Oh, and yes, there is at least one middle finger picture here. This makes 21 posts out of 4,777 where the words middle finger have been used over the last 5+ years this blog has been in existence.

Did I miss a good place for more middle finger images?

If you haven’t heard already Merriam Webster’s word of the year for 2007 is w00t, but this word did not make it visually into the new Merriam Webster Visual Dictionary. Too bad, just imagine what great images could be attributed to w00T! For a serious example, see weightlifting.

If you didn’t know what was a barbell, wristband, sleeveless jersey, weightlifting belt, trunk, knee wrap, strap or weightlifting shoe the image with related links will help. I was disappointed that Merriam Webster didn’t offer images for words like weird, strange, eerie and haunting. A picture of Michael Jackson would have worked for all those. At the least they could have done a mashup with the Flickr API and offered a visual dictionary based on tagged words (e.g flick search results for w00t). No fun.

Adding to the disappointment, the “TOOLS” link at the top leads to a page which says: “This page is under construction.” Oops. You can leave them feedback which leads to a contact form which requires first name, last name, email address, subject and your message. I didn’t bother filling that out, because my comment would have been simply a link to this blog with the following image:

This sanitized, PC version of a visual dictionary feels like 1987, not 2007. I like the concept and the images they do have are worthwhile, but this service left me hungry for more. Grade: D

Kudos to Abdylas Tynyshov, (Ades for short) for sharing 140 icons in four different sizes (80×80, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24) completely for free at userinterfaceicons.com.

These aren’t crappy icons and part of some lame icon social network and Ades doesn’t even require a credit link although that’s the nice thing to do as I’m doing here — and I’m not even using any of them yet. Sometimes when you don’t require people to do things, they’ll do them anyway on the web.

The Whole Internet (TWI) displays all 4.2+ billion IP addresses on a scalable map.

Does 4.2+ billion sound like not enough IP addresses? It’s not.

You might have already read/heard that IP addresses in the current IPv4 of (nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn) format are running out and that is why IPv6 is being rolled out in June 2008. IPv6 will eventually provide some security features in addition to a ton more IP addresses, although it will take time for the world to catch up, much like HDTV being adopted over traditional TV. Since IPv6 is not backwards compatible what will happen for some period of time is both protocols will be supported.

via Spectrum Online:

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which boosts the number of addresses up to 2^128. This number is so large that we have no words to describe it, but by one estimate there would be more than *2000 addresses for every square meter on Earth. Besides providing more addresses, IPv6 offers greater security (for example, mandatory use of IPsec), and it has features that improve real-time applications.

* IEEE Member Kenneth C. Miller wrote a letter to the IEEE Spectrum Editor correcting the original piece to the true numbers:

The value of 2^128 is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 … Dividing that into 2^128 addresses yields approximately 667 by 1021 (667 sextillion) addresses per square meter. So the estimate to which the author referred is short by a factor of roughly 333 quintillion.

In short, we won’t be running out of IPv6 addresses for a long time.

Search for your IP neighbors
A noticeably absent feature is the ability to search for your IP addresses, but TWI indicates the code for that functionality is there: “but disabled right now.” Who are your IP neighbors? That would be neat to see represented graphically on a map like this.

WHOIS map
TWI gets their data from caida.org which publishes an IPv4 WHOIS map that might also be of interest. Their WHOIS data comes from: AFRINIC, APNIC, JPNIC, TWNIC, AUNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC.

My wife came in the office this afternoon and asked me if I wanted to go buy Guitar Hero III and Leopard. Didn’t have to ask me twice, where are the keys?

She went out with a girlfriend tonight so maybe it was some sort of quid pro quo. I’ve been staring at the Leopard box for awhile and am becoming increasingly impressed. Haven’t removed the shrink wrap yet, just looking at it and the faint holographic glow behind the black X.

I started to think about some of the other operating system box art I’ve seen and bought over the years. I remembered the red from Red Hat and the green from SuSE and of course the boring Microsoft Windows boxes through the years. Must admit the box style for Vista is attractive. It isn’t really a box, it’s sort of a cross between a clamshell and container with rounded edges. I like the shape of the Vista box better than the square OS X Leopard box, but that’s where the designers left at Microsoft and the Apple ones got busy.

That purple space looming behind the X — I’m transfixed. Maybe I’ll just leave it up there for the whole work week and keep staring at it. Or is it staring at me? I can’t be the only person who bought Leopard who is so fascinated by the box that they don’t … open … it. This box is the kind you don’t throw away, it’s kind of like the Apple store bags. Apple designers are brilliant. Haven’t even gotten into the OS and I’m visually impressed.

And with that, the pillowgate to dreams beckons. Night.

Being a huge fan of 3D and games, you can only imagine my glee when I stumbled upon this goodie. Kato created some Halo 3D screenshots on his Flickr page.

In the spirit of sharing, Ken created a step-by-step tutorial showing how to make your own 3D images:

The only piece of software needed for this project (other than Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, obviously) is the excellent StereoPhoto Maker. It is a free tool for Windows-based PC’s that will assist us in making and tweaking our final 3D image.

Time to put those red/blue glasses to some good use and make your own neat Halo 3D shots. Thanks Ken!

Looking over the 24 logos below for the 2008 presidential candidates, which logo do you like best? You can vote on the enlarged versions by clicking the logo you like the best at logovoting.com.

I’m attracted to the American flag, so +1 for Gravel, Hillary, Gore, Pataki, Kucinich and Colbert. Unless you’re photogenic, and most political candidates aren’t, don’t put your photo in your logo, score -5 for Gingrich and Thompson. The cartoon drawing of Thompson makes him look like he’s constipated. Quick, somebody send Thompson some Pepto Bismo.

I like the thought behind the sphere with a sun rising in the distance over the flag in Obama’s logo, but the sun should be yellow and the image is too small. Speaking of too small, Mitt Romney, dude. The text beneath Giuliani’s name is also unreadable. C’mon Mitt and Rudy, only the 18-24 demographic is going to be able to read that font size! Don’t forget the seniors and us 30- and 40-somethings with worsening vision.

I’m not sure what McCain, Tancredo, Edwards, Hagel, Biden, Hunter and the internet favorite Ron Paul are doing with those too simplistic logos. Huckabee’s logo looks like he’s running to be a window washer, not President. Richardson and Brownback must have had the same designer. Gilmore’s flag is off and he’s got too much happening there.

Who’s left? The red on white in Thompson’s logo is a bit hard on the eyes. Dodd? Looks like a license plate, not a logo. And why the two stars on each side with 2008 in the middle? Am I missing something here?

Politics completely aside, and going strictly off logo design attractiveness above, my top three favorites? Gore, Hillary and Gravel. Gore’s logo grabs me, unfortunately Gore has not announced he’s running. So since I’m voting for the Presidential candidate with the best logo I’m going with Hillary with Mike Gravel a close second (sorry Mike, the runner-up click doesn’t count). I’m probably most disappointed with Ron Paul’s and John Edwards’ logos, both of whom have many internet friends and should have been able to create something better.

Your vote for the best logo?
Once you click your choice, you’ll see the vote tallies. I won’t give away the leader as of this writing, but I will spoil that it wasn’t my choice. Now what do you think, which Presidential candidate has the best logo? And did you pick #1?