Geekblok

All these advanced image-tricks to convert or alter your Flickr-pics are awesome, but good old ASCII-art is still something not to forget about.
To make life easier in creating this kind of rather complex imagery, there is Photo2text.
Let’s take the below logo of Phetch and run it trough the web-interface. The final result can be found here. Take some distance from the screen for a slight improvement of the effect.
Pretty neat, eh?

A Firefox extension is coming, but still resides in the sandbox…

Joffie recently showed me the ESP Game (he’ll probably post about that game someday ). The ESP Game however showed me a link to Phetch.

The game is simple and addictive (yes, now I have warned you!). You describe a picture you see and the others (who you don’t know) will try to find it. The better you describe it, the faster people can find it. Then it’s the seeker’s turn and you’ll have to hunt down the image. Speed is of essence here. Highly addictive and fun!

Last week I finally got a telephone with bluetooth. As my laptop also as a bluetooth dongle in it, I thought I should be able to do some geeky things with it.
My thoughts were correct: my screensaver is now working, based on the proximity of my telephone. As soon as my phone leaves the desk, the screensaver kicks in and locks the screen. When it is back in the proximity of the laptop, the screen magically unlocks.

Though I am very aware that this really is no good from a security point of view, it is just cool.

I’ll describe what I have done to get this to work. My phone is a Nokia 6151 and the laptop is running Ubuntu desktop.

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Due to the Flickr API, we see new initiatives pop up everywhere. Today I’d like to show you a little game called PhotoSoup. The site itself describes the game as:

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

The game is quite simple. Find all the words (tags) that describe the images around the puzzle and select them before you run out of time. Due to some weird tags you can never guess (like “bw”, “joe”, “henry” etc.), you might want to hit the “Show Hints” button. This way, you’ll see the tags you’re expected to find.

Let’s look at a sample game with topic: “geek”

Warning: you may find this game addictive!

Storing data is not a problem anymore. Google gives you a couple of gigabytes email storage for free, Yahoo! gives you “unlimited” email storage, a plethora of sites like YouSendIt and Files4Ever give you plenty of storage, and hooking up your own machine to the online world never has been easier with all the cheap ADSL/Cable connections we have nowadays. All good, but not fun. Therefor, let’s store text in a place people wouldn’t suspect (and probably don’t want).

Like the avalanche of file sharing websites mentioned before, another breed of website seems to be quite popular: the URL shorteners. TinyURL, is.gd, etc. etc. There are many and a lot of them don’t care what you feed them! (I bet you start seeing where I’m going with this post…)

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