Flickr Mashups
I was somewhat disappointed to find out that most of these Flickrbits can be used only with Flickr. In Thing #7 I chose not to open an account with Flickr since I was given a second option and because I already have my website with family pictures. Therefore, it took me a long time checking all theses kr-tools and find something interesting, useful and of general use. Also, I could not get over the lack of intuitiveness in these names. Names like Gickr, Chasr, FlickrSLiDR don’t say anything, they just don’t stick and nowadays is unnecessary to give names like those. It reminds me the days of DOS with black and white screens (or black and green) and names with maximum of 8 alphanumeric characters and one three-character extension. Almost all of these gadgets do things that you can do at home with pictures from your computer by using some freeware from the internet. In my opinion the flickrbits keep the users entertained with Flickr pictures and forget about the rest of the internet. Also, you will never use any of the picture editing flickrbits if you have Photoshop.I decided to look at Mashups since they are more independent than the kr tools. Of course, many Mashups in Flickr let you use only pictures from Flickr. The idea of a Mashup is to combine information and functionality from two or more sites or sources to create something new. For this reason Mashups by nature are site-independent. A useful and commonly used effect is “slideshow” of pictures. You can use this effect in your home computer as a screensaver or you can “embed” a slideshow html code into your blog site to show pictures to your visitors, one at a time, every few seconds. Most of the popular picture posting web sites let you choose this effect when you are creating your album, but blog sites require you to add it by yourself (update: There is a Gadget here at Blogger.com which allows you to add this effect to your blog without effort - Slideshow). I found a kr which does exactly this: http://www.gickr.com/First I selected family pictures, pictures of flowers etc and transformed them with Photoshop by using mainly one effect, the smudge tool! Truly, I had done this before to make tiny wall pictures for “The Sims”, a game that I used to play when I had time. If you look at these pictures long enough you will see a picture of my family (not smudged up!).
Make your own animation
The next thing I did is something that may be useful for anyone, especially for lifelong learners! You can use this at school with your kids or at home for yourself. I am sure there are similar slideshows out there that do the same thing: Show words with their definitions as a screen saver one at a time.
Make your own animation
To do this I selected the words that I wanted to learn. I used a collection of words from a pack of flashcards that I found in my daughter’s room. You could subscribe to http://www.dictionary.com/ and choose to get the word of the day or get the word of the day for the last 10 – 15 days etc. Then I used an old electronic dictionary that I still use today made by Microsoft (QuickShelf 2000) to find the definitions of the words. After I find the definition I press the key PrtScn present on all regular PC keyboards. PrtScn stands for Print Screen. Pressing this key on a PC is the same as copying the screen with the copy/paste commands of any program. I never remember the key combination for a Mac (it is not as intuitive as PrtScn)… but Dr. Wall told us the other day! I use both Macs and PCs, but I prefer my Vista Desktop Computer. I prefer this one for many reasons, some of the main ones are:
. My Vista desktop PC never crashes. I had this computer for 2 or 3 years and I don’t remember it crashing even once.
. I made it by myself (secret: it is very easy to make a PC) therefore I chose my own monitor (I bought a 32 inches LCD TV at Best Buy), amount of RAM memory, hard drive, motherboard, microprocesor etc.
. I have bought over a hundred programs and I keep buying the newer versions. These programs are always released for PC first and a few months later, if ever, for Macs. Many of my programs have compatibility problems when installed in a Mac.
. There is by far more software out there (free and not free) for PCs than for Macs.
. I like Tablets (Tablet PCs) but Macintosh doesn't make Tablet Macs (Update: They finally do!). I bought my first Tablet Laptop in 2004. Now I own a Slate (a Tablet PC with detachable keyboard)
After I copied the whole screen with PrtScn I opened Paint, a program that always comes with any PC because it is part of the Windows OS, and pasted it there with the regular key combination “Ctrl + V” or click on the “Edit” pull down menu item and then click on “Paste”. Then I selected the area of the screen that I wanted to crop with the “select” tool. Next I did “right click” on the selection and clicked on crop from the popup menu that appears when I “right clicked” on my selection. Finally I clicked "Save As..." from the File pull down menu item and I saved it as a .jpg file choosing JPEG as the “save as type” (click on the right arrow to see all the file types available). After I have saved 10-15 words that I wanted to remember, I created a screensaver slide show. There is no need to use a third party application to make a slide show of selected pictures in PCs (I don’t know in MACs). In vista: Right-Click on the desktop, select “Personalize”, then “Screen Saver” and “Photos” and change the “settings” as pleased. In Windows XP: “Right-Click” on the desktop + “Properties” + “Screen Saver” + “My Pictures Slideshow” + customize settings as pleased. In Windows 98 and older versions is similar to Windows XP. This will give you a “Vocabulary Flashcards Slideshow Screensaver” in your PC. To get it here I just used http://www.gickr.com/.
I liked some other tools, such as retrievr, mappr or colrpickr. Here is one more reason why I didn’t like Flickr – While playing with colrpickr, one picture got my attention. When I tried to see the picture I got this message:
I don’t like control either! Here is a partial snapshot of my screen at this moment (via PrtScn + Paste in Paint + crop + save as).
Can you guess what picture they wouldn’t let me see? (Note: The lady is not naked) I would continue to do things here but it is already Sunday and I have classes to prepare, HW to grade, grades to enter etc! Until the next thing! Ah! My feelings about personal pictures - I think they are clear from this blog! I normally keep family pictures to the family. I don’t post anything that I wouldn’t do or say in public, but for example, my daughters don't like some of the pictures I have posted of them; therefore I would avoid upsetting them by not showing those pictures to everyone who knows them, other than family.
Note: Please email me if you see grammatical and/or orthographical mistakes in these blogs (I know there must be many!). My email address is Ridelto@hotmail.com
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