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aaronpk_tv
#photos
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I just finished downloading my whole Flickr account to a static website. Now browsing around it is much faster than looking at the same photos on Flickr, and it makes me want to get back to actually organizing my photos again! -
The cost of buying a new iPhone every 2 years is the same as the cost of taking 5 pictures a day on 35mm film. Therefore, if you take more than 5 pictures a day with your iPhone, you come out ahead.
This tweet is brought to you by me finding a box full of old negatives. -
ugh I am like 4 months behind on sorting photos out of my SD cards into their permanent home and I really think I need to do that before my next round of trips but it just sounds like a lot of work! š -
The old Fitbit and Fuelband which Aaron Parecki gave me a few years ago (thanks Aaron!) donāt hold a charge anymore. The Fitbit battery is near impossible to replace, and with the Fuelband I decided that as thereās no way of loading custom firmware (which would let me get at data without an internet connection and proprietary apps), it wasnāt worth trying to get replacement batteries. So before throwing the devices away, I took them apart.
I didnāt find out much which I hadnāt already seen in teardowns, but these devices have such strange form factors that it was fascinating to see the engineering up close.
The rubber coating comes off very cleanly. Here you can see some of the funny curved traces used on flexible circuit boards:
The LED array, with āJust Do Itā written on the top of the PCB (invisible to the end user). On the sections of flex between the more solid boards you can see the unbelievably fine traces:
On the back of the LED matrix section, with a part number. To the right you can see the jaggedy bluetooth antenna trace:
The fitbit isnāt so interesting. Removing the cap with a heatgun reveals a tiny circuit board with a tiny battery and vibrating element.
I also opened up the dock, as I noticed that the USB cable was power only, with no possibility of wired data transfer. The third pogo pin must be for the reset switch, which is mounted in the dock. Thereās a little IC in there too, but I was more interested in seeing how the pogo pins were attached to the board. Turns out theyāre just soldered straight on:
Iād love to have been able to flash custom firmware to the Fuelband, itās a lovely bit of hardware, and manufacturing something like that is completely out of the question for a hobbyist. There are so many fun things which could be done with a device equipped with an LED matrix, accelerometers and bluetooth ā a wearable MIDI controller, for example.
That possibility would also have made replacing the batteries worth doing, and in doing so saved the device from the landfill. Free software and open hardware isnāt just political, itās better for the environment.
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Finally rigged up my system for archiving all my iPhone and DSLR photos on Flickr! Through a convoluted path involving Dropbox, a Synology NAS, and Eyefi card, and a lot of code to properly handle time zones and GPS data it's up and running!
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Category:Portland Uber protest, January 2015 - Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org)
A bunch of my photos were uploaded by someone to Wikimedia Commons!
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Why is Flickstagram more successful in non-English languages?
Flickstagram, a service which will export your Instagram photos to Flickr, has had far more users in non-English speaking countries, and has also appeared in more non-English blogs than English ones.continue reading... -
Watching the photos roll in from http://flickstagram.org! 36,000 and climbing! http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/uploaded%3Aby%3Dflickstagram/
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Tire Tracks on Mars
I found these images in the RSS feed of new images from the Curiosity Rover this morning!continue reading...
