October 28, 2009 @ 8:04 pm
I was just introduced to Professor Kobre’s Lightscoop, a clever little attachment for digital SLRs that bounces the light from the on-camera flash upward so that photos you take with the flash don’t look all blown out. [via]
Most on-camera flashes these days are pretty decent and are actually quite powerful if tweaked correctly, and I imagine that this $35 add-on does wonders at a fraction of the price of an actual hot-shoe flash attachment.
Most of the images in the Flickr Lightscoop photo pool are pretty much on par with the quality of images I would expect from a much more expensive flash attachment.
September 20, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
So I came across a weird discovery today via my newly updated version of Cooliris for Firefox. It turns out that Cooliris somehow skirts user’s photo permissions and allows ANYBODY to see an image uploaded to Flickr at full size. Normally, users who set their photo permissions as “© All rights reserved” do not allow people viewing the photo to see the image at different sizes. The “All Sizes” magnifying glass icon above the photo is simply not there.
However, if you have Cooliris installed, you can just open up the image in the Cooliris wall viewer and see the image as large as your monitor resolution goes (this might or might not give you the FULL size of the image, but it’s at least bigger than the preview page on Flickr). I wasn’t sure if at first if it was just simple Flash zooming in on a small image, but upon further inspection, it looks like Cooliris can read the full size of the image and retain image sharpness and quality as you go full-screen with the image.
If you’ve got Cooliris already installed, you can try out what I just explained above on this image, whose current permissions do not allow the viewer to view the photo at any different size — that is, unless you have Cooliris installed.
I wonder if this might cause problems for Cooliris as more and more Flickr users find out that their protected images are simply a screenshot away from being taken.
February 13, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
I know that many of you go to YouTube on a daily basis, and if you actually make use of the ’subscribe’ button on the site, you’ll know that YouTube has a really stupid way of displaying the videos in the Subscriptions section (link only works if you’re logged in to YouTube).
The problem, for those who don’t know, is that YouTube makes every single link to the videos a special javascript link which ultimately prevents you from opening multiple videos at once in browser tabs. If you try to open a video in a new tab from the subscriptions area, you’re simply brought to the subscriptions page yet again in the new tab.
To fix this really stupid problem, just install this Greasemonkey script and start opening those links in new tabs. Of course, to use that script, you have to have the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox installed first.
