Headed to San Mateo for Make: Magazine’s “Maker Faire” (could strangle them for plopping an “e” on the end of the name) – a confab for hackers and geeks who like to… make stuff. Busting with energy and ideas. Robots of all stripes (of course), flame throwers, Segway hacks, cardboard fabs, neon tube bending, wooden bikes, drive actuator music box, earth-magnet LED tossing, live-circuit graffiti, BBQ grill pool heater, steam-bots, mechanical theremin, painting bots, The Woz playing Segway polo, collaborative sound jams… an incredible day, and Miles didn’t want to leave.
Since my fave image publishing app Image Rodeo seems to have ceased development, decided to try a couple of experiments.
First whack at using Apple’s iWeb to extract sets directly to a non-.Mac gallery. Overall, pretty cool for 1.0, but iWeb doesn’t preserve iPhoto comments as captions (how lame is that?) and forces you to use the big popup slideshow viewer rather than putting each image onto its own page. It also does some URLs-with-spaces stuff that I hated, and had to modify after the fact. Limiting overall, but the built-in template collection is slick.
Next tried Frasier Spiers’ excellent Flickr Export plugin to poot directly from iPhoto to Flickr. Correctly extracts caption data, and gives you all that rich, chocolatey tagging goodness, but without the fancy templates, of course. I’m OK with that. Flickr’s got it all figured out, and as long as there’s a strong bridge from local metadata to remote, I’m buzzing.
Been buzzing with “make” energy all day.
Technorati Tags: makerfaire2006
FlickrExport is nice, the only feature I wish it had was letting you upload new photos to existing sets. As it stands, you can either create a new set, or use no set at all…
I also wish there was an option that let you set iPhoto metadata if you, say, set the images description in FlickrExport.. When I moved from Gallery to Flickr a few weeks ago I had to move tons of metadata, some of which wasn’t so easy to move. I realized after I was just about done that I should have also added that metadata to iPhoto so if I had to move away from Flickr at some point it wouldn’t be as painful.
Actually, a iPhoto/Flickr sync application would be dreamy.
The Maker Faire was fun! We were there for a couple hours yesterday afternoon and had a blast testing out the custom bikes. Clara was a bit tired though so it was a short day. :( Our tiny photoset here:
http://flickr.com/photos/31855341@N00/
Look us up next time you’re in San Mateo!
I’m jealous — we had tix to the faire, but sickness in the house forced us to cancel our visit, along with our annual trip to Cal Day.
Miles looks very cute.
Sean – I agree on uploading to existing sets. I hit that limit first time out of the gate. Actually what triggered it was that I surpassed the 20MB limit for a free acct, so some of the photos didn’t go through. On the 2nd attempt I found that I couldn’t add images to the existing set (had to go direct to Flickr to do that later). But that segues into my other complaint, which is that it didn’t attempt to calculate in advance that I would exceed my bandwidth – the problem could have been avoided with advance notice.
Dylan, wish we had bumped into you! (and yes, we should have remmbered that you’re in San Mateo, yikes).
Tim, Miles is even cuter than seen in those shots! More here (boy, did you set me up – I’m like a housewife with a wallet full of pics of her kids she can’t resist showing at every possible opportunity :) .
Do you have any more info on the “Eccentric Genius”? Looks like he is creating musical instruments from junk parts. Maybe you can email back (or reply here) with more info and photos.
Thanks!
Sorry Aaron – I don’t know anything more about him than that I took a picture of him. If you learn more, post it here!
The funny thing is that I’ve been reading your blog long enough that I remember some of the photos — Miles stuck in cat door, for instance.
He is way cute.