notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

iPhone, video, colour profiles

I use a lightly modified version of FlickrTouchr.py to back up my photos from Flickr, and also to push them to the iPhone (in case I get terminally bored on the Tube and fancy paging through my favourites). Unfortunately, there are two issues with it.

Firstly, until I made a patch this evening, videos were downloaded with a .jpg extension. I fixed that (note the ‘&extras=media’ argument I add to the URL when fetching photos) and then deleted the old “pictures” manually. (I suppose I could have checked for a matching ID, but… exercise for the reader, sorry.) Sadly, iTunes won’t sync videos mixed with photos: if I want them on my phone, I’d have to add them explicitly as video, and I really can’t be bothered. Still, at least they now don’t cause errors, and I can look at them on my hard drive.

Secondly, and more mysteriously, some of my favourites won’t sync. The ones I’ve checked have a ColorSync profile embedded in them, for a “LaCie 321”, which I assume is a specific (fancy) monitor. Quite why iTunes won’t just ship them over and sod the colour matching, I have no idea, but I wondered if anyone else had come across this or knew why it was enforced?

People on Flickr, gender and politics

It’s now a couple of weeks since Flickr launched their People in Photos feature, which allows users to add people to photos. Of course, you’ve always been able to add unstructured metadata to do this, but now it’s both easier (there’s a trademark slick UI) and structured (the person’s photos are linked to their account and visible in their profile).

Unlike Facebook (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the feature has drawn comparison with), you’re able to opt out of the feature entirely, meaning that previously tagged photos of you are no longer so marked, and that you can’t be added to new photos. The point of this post is that, of the people who I know have done this, all of them are women.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. A woman’s appearance, and the depictions of it, still carries far more importance in society than the way a man looks. If you doubt that, just take a look at Tanya Gold’s opinion piece on Liz Truss:

Why do we tolerate and even encourage the physical objectification of female politicians? Does anyone know or care about Truss’s politics or what she has to offer? Has it oozed out into the popular consciousness yet? Will it ever? We know that she owns a gold satin jacket, and that she once slept with Mark Field MP. Gold. Jacket. Nice.

There is no one enemy in this; it is a national sickness. This, from a (female) columnist in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph: “She [Liz Truss] is OK-looking, if a bit dodgy in terms of dress sense.” Well, thank you for that. Award yourself an over-reaching-insight-of-the-week gong; then explain to your daughters why politics is dangerous for women. “Naughty Tory Candidate,” said the Sunday Times, as if possessed by the spirit of Readers’ Wives.

(Just don’t read the comments.)

I don’t really have a conclusion here (it’s always the hardest thing for me to write), except perhaps to congratulate Flickr for the opt-out option while wishing people didn’t feel the pressure to use it.

On noticings

I’ve been posting photos to Flickr for about five years now. In all that time, the biggest change to the way I post photos has come about in the past month.

I’d thought that getting an iPhone would change things. After all, it’s the first time I’ve had a camera phone that actually came with an internet connection that didn’t carry the threat of horrific monthly bills, and GPS to boot. However, it turns out that it wasn’t enough; of all the apps and methods I tried I never found anything quite smooth enough. The responsible party was actually noticings, “the game of noticing the world around you”. Every day, at 3pm GMT, it finds photos on Flickr from the previous day that are tagged “noticings”, and scores them.

That “every day” is the key point. Previously, I’d take days to take photos off my camera, and weeks to sift through them and choose which to upload. In fact, that’s still the case for photos from my “proper” cameras, or photos which don’t have the urgency of noticings. However, I seem to be spotting enough that I now post a few photos every day.

I’ve always taken pictures of street furniture, signs, adverts, shop fronts, and other such trivia. I always felt a bit strange about posting them, but noticings seems to thrive on such things. I worry a little that I’ve annoyed people who liked irregular, but “better”, photographs, but hopefully there’s value in noticings, too.

noticings is still a work in progress, with the ruleset still in flux, but it now has nice machine tag extras (so that noticings are mentioned on the Flickr photo page). Of all the location-based games around at the moment*, it’s by far the most interesting to me, and while I might well stop being quite so obsessive about playing it when I’m not on holiday, it’s still helping me to look around.

* If you’re curious: Gowalla seems to be tediously centred on picking up bananas, or something. Foursquare is equally bad: its London launch found the utility of finding out who was at which pub being swamped with pointscoring check-ins to Tube stations and, even worse, people’s houses. Meanwhile, the app itself is barely usable; today, it still thought I was in Walthamstow when I was outside the Serpentine. Anyway, I don’t go out. Both are too focussed on right there, right then; noticings has a lot more slack, the way a message in Twitter did (back when people used it to meet up), which feels to me more pleasantly human.