DaVinici's Code

According to Dan Brown, Leonardo DaVinci hid a lot of secret information in his art works. Believe it not, so do you! And you don't need to traipse all over the world to discover it. If your camera saves it's images as JPG files, simply browse to Camera Summary, upload a picture taken by a camera, and this site will ferret out the details of the picture and camera hidden in the JPG format. According to the site, it "provides information like: camera make / model, detailed information about how the picture was taken and even the thumbnail that was embedded in the file." On a sample file I used from our summer vacation, the site provided over 50 pieces of information about the picture. Some of it is useful even for the novice photo-bug, but some of the details are pretty technical. Some of the details could be used for CSI-esque investigation as well...

Be complimentary

When designing websites, or anything else for that matter (scrapbook pages?), it's always more appealing when the colors used are the right ones. Once you have a primary focus for your page, the color scheme, a title or background graphic, etc, head on over to What's Its Color. Tell it where the image is (upload a local file or point it to an image on the web) and it will "evaluate an image and give you the image's primary and complementary dominant colors of an image, how many visually unique colors are in an image, and the top ten visually unique colors in an image."

Granted, this is mostly for web design, so the returned colors are only identified by Hex values, but a quick Google search will return English names for the colors as well.

Local News

Why read the local Observer & Eccentric news when you can see it all mapped out on a Google maps interface? :-)

Give mibazaar your ZIP code and it'll find local news and show you where you live on a map.

Blow it up!

Sometimes a full screen view is just better. Bret Taylor thinks so -- at least when he's trying to navigate Google Maps. So, in the spirit of giving back, and statistical probability, he thought someone else might feel the same way and so he made this full screen Google Maps site available for all of us! Thanks Bret!

Locally famous

Tim Allen is famous for inserting local references into his entertainment projects -- his Home Improvement show, The Santa Clause movies, etc each make reference to his home town of Detroit, or to places around there where he grew up. Moviemappr (ala Flickr, remind me to blog about the naming of web sites later) allows you to find movies filmed in your area. You give it a city/state and it'll list all kinds of movies that spent some time filming in and around the area. Live in Cedar Rapids, IA? Did you know that Incident at Oglala, Miles from Home and, perhaps the most famous of the three - Starman were filmed in the area. Oglala might not be the summer blockbuster of 1992, but the others brought someone some money and had famous people involved...

Check out your city. Might be worth renting a movie or two just to see some local hangouts. The database seems pretty complete with movies ranging from the VERY low budget and audience to the most popular titles on the market.

Map your face -- or anything else!

Google's mapping interface defined the new standard for on-line mapping (draggable panning, dbl-click zoom, annotations, satellite and street-level views, etc), and it continues to get even better! Some people REALLY love the interface. If you're one of those people, you might like MapLib.

The site allows you to create your own maps. Big deal, right? So what! Oh, yeah. Something a little different from all of those other Google Maps Mashups -- This one allows you to use your OWN PICTURES! Not just maps, but anything. You can map your face. You can map a store. You can map Lord of the Rings. All of these maps can take full advantage of the Google Maps API -- the same features you'd see and use on maps.google.com.

Pretty cool!

Take your picture and eat it too!

One last graphic site for tonight. For a very personalized cake topper at your next party, check out Icing Images. Upload one of your images and they'll turn it into an edible image to apply to your cake. Something different and a very personal touch. You supply your own cake. :-)

Size DOES matter!

One more site that helps you get more out of your digital pix, Block Posters, aims to take your pictures out of the album and slap them all over the wall -- in larger than life size! Images in excess of 9'x9' are possible! "Upload, slice, download." That's it. Take a look at the gallery for a LARGE collection of very creative results.

A similar site I've used in the past is available at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator.

Try using some of the sites together. Maybe make a mosaic of an image at Mosaickr and then blow it up really big here. See the graphics label on the side bar for other sites to combine!

More things for, and from, photos

FotoTiller bills itself as "a website covering all things photographic, with a particular focus on the intersection of photography and design." Lots of inspirational ideas here to make more out of your pictures.

More Flickr toys

I've posted about the guys over at BigHugeLabs and their Flickr tool/toy sets before, but here's another tool I came across today: Mosaickr. Using pictures selected from Flickr based on tagging, you create your own PhotoMosaic (a big picture made up of many smaller pictures). The samples they exhibit include an image of jumping dolphins made up of pictures tagged with ocean. Quite impressive and cool... Somethign different to do with your pictures.

Got another cool Flickr tool/toy? Do share!

Help yourself, help others

As the bustling holiday season encroaches on our laziness that attempts to settle in as we cover ourselves with more and more covers to hide from teh cold, take a step back and remember what the season is all about -- giving. I hope that whatever your means, whatever your budget, you will take a few moments this year to provide some comfort to someone else in need. That comfort can come in the form of a monetary donation to a national charity, a local church, a toy or food collection organization, time with a shut-in or elderly person in need, or however else you can contribute. Make sure you know who you're donating to in order to make sure that the gift being given is getting to those in need and not those in want.

Another way to assist those in need, while helping yourself is via the Free Rice site. Basically, you work on increasing your vocabulary, while earning grains of rice for someone else. It's a fun little diversion when you need a little brain stimulation, and you get the glow of giving deep down in your heart at the same time!

This one is stuck in my head too...

My wife thinks I like this song because Colbie Caillat is cute (I don't disagree, kind of an old-school Jennifer Aniston look to her, but not as beautiful as my wife! Love ya honey!), but it's really the haunting melody that is suck in my head for some reason.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a while ago about how Colbie's label tried to falsely pass her off as this "out-of-the-blue" up-and-comer, but I don't care. I like her earthy song style.

Birds do the wave

Interesting how nature imitates nature...

Traveling Salesman Problem

Salesmen have existed for thousands of years. In the early years, they traveled from cave to cave selling sticks and stones and tried their hand at up selling their clientele on "fire." The plight of the traveling salesman has not changed that much in the past millennia though. They still travel door to door trying to sell us products and services (thought a lot of perennial d-t-d sales have moved to the Web). As they travel door-to-door, they must do so in a way that conserves their time (the more potential clients they can see, the more fruitful their labors), and increasingly, their gas.

Though the price of gas wasn't at issue hundreds of years ago, efficiency still was. From that quest came the Traveling Salesman Problem. According to Wikipedia, the problem can be summarized as: "Given a number of cities and the costs [mileage] of traveling from any city to any other city, what is the least-cost round-trip route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city?"

For a small collection of cities, it's relatively easy and can be done by hand. As the number of cities increase, the computational power increases to compensate for all of the new permutations. Hundreds of people much smarter than I have battled the problem for ages trying to come up with the optimal (read: least cost) path.

All that aside, there are two things I wanted to get out there in this article. First, a Google Maps implementation or the TSP available for your personal travels this holiday season. As the Nuclear Family has exploded and we have so many more holiday family gatherings to attend, this site could help you get it all done in one day -- efficiently!

For a little more (geeky) fun, try your hand at some simple TSP games for yourself.

Happy travels...