Wouldn't it be cool if ... (updated) Sometimes I am doing something, like browsing my favorite blogs or just doing my work or watching some video and i have one of those little "wouldn't it be cool if"(tm) moments. Like the other day : I was tagging something for my del.icio.u account, while , in another tab reading some feeds through google reader, and in yet another tagging my recently uploaded pictures on flickr. And i though :

"Wouldn't it be cool if there was an app that allowed me to search for my tags both in del.icio.us and in google reader ?". Now if i was better at organizing my time, i would already have whipped up my favorite editor and done some demo, realized that it could work or found a design flaw, and pass to my next great idea. But i am unfortunately not that good, and i have a lot of stuff that i feel i have to do. Like say, implementing a J2ME CLDC 2.0 compliant unTar class, based on com.ice.tar (here). Just because i want a fullscreen java version of this mapview.

So I am going to list my "wouldn't it be cool" moments so that they are not lost while I stall on my current projects. Here goes :
wouldn't it be cool if ...

• I could search through my del.icio.us , flickr , google reader, blog etc ... from the same place, without having to connect to each site individualy.(long time ago there was an app that searched through a lot of search engines and gave you the top 10 entriese from each website) .

• On my mac, when I tag some picture with "add to flickr", something would find that picture, upload it to flickr and then tag it with "on flickr".

• iTunes allowed me to add my divx to my movie library.

• There was a way of visualizing my music library as a city : imagine having the a jazz street, a rock street, a classical street, on the sides of which there would be a cube per album of an artist in the genre, and the cubes would pile up when they are of the same artist. Just like in some ipod/appleTV ads.

• a way to filter for dupes and cross-posting in a feed aggregator : say, you are following the kottke, boingboing, daringfireball, tuaw and make blogs, and one of them post something from the other. Half the time, you don't really want to read twice about the same thing. Or if you are following engadget and gizmodo, they very often post about the same thing, not even counting the dupes within their feeds.

//Update : the whole point of this post is that if you think it's cool, then either you contact me to ask me to do it, or you do it and then tell me that you did. I won't ask royalties or any such crap. It's just application that would be nice to have around. It doesn't matter who really creates them :) .

That's it for now. I guess I'll post more of those moment when they happen.

Nicolas, Out.

This "ad" sounds true in every country, and not just with the "drug problem". Solving society problems without recoursing to Incarserex requires brain power and "shade of gray" thinking. Not popular with voters ? I guess one of the side effects of using incarserex might also be that prisons hosts and guests number are increasing, costing more money. And possibly more votes. Oh wait, people in prison don't vote, do they ? And the prison wardens are paid [logical shortcut] to vote for people who take Incarcerex. Which is in their familly interest too.

1. You have a part of the population which interest is to have tighter law (on drugs).
2. Said part vote for people who take Incarcerex.
3. Tighter laws get passed.
4. Thighter laws are easier to get afool of, so you get to put more people in prison, then you need more prisons and more wardens.
5. Go to point 1, only with more people.
6. Profit ! only not for society.

Warning : above reasonning supposes that people don't think, that drug-user number doesn't increase too much faster than anti-drug-users number.

Above symptoms are common side effect of other very popular pills : securitex/scarex. Affected population is the class of people working for the military-industrial complex. In this particular case, do not forget that politician are subventioned by said parties to take the scarex pill.

Nico, out.

I can't resist posting those two pictures of this bus number 666. Especialy since I registered Niconomicon.net on the 6th of june last year (6/6/6) ;) . This number is so popular nowadays : 97 M records on google.com, and 57 M on yahoo!. Susprisingly, there was only one google ad for this number, for a weird bible site. There was no ads for the 666 french bande dessinée, or any music album.

Nico, out.

They say that a good camera is the camera that you have at hand. And it's true that, however crappy the camera of my phones are, a lot of surprising pictures wouldn't have been taken without it. Plus it allows for discrete taking of pictures without bothering the subject with noisy clicks, bips or whirrr. Here is a sample of pictures that I took on the way, without expecting to come accross a photo subject :

This sleeping kid. Or this very old Ford.Or the latest Lamborghini.Or even those involuntary goatse reminder ( I hope it is unvoluntary). Or this nice ad. This is a random sculpture I took on the way home. Or this bus for hell that i didn't take to go to work.

This pictures where mostly taken on the way to somewhere else, running errands or commuting. Half of the subjects are transient. I took cars waiting at stops or red traffic lights. Or from the bus. This crappy but handy cameraphone allowed me to stop all those instants. And unleash them on the unsuspecting flickr crowd ;)

So thank you very much to the person that added the first a camera to a cell phone. I just hope they make them faster to start and snap.

Nicolas, out.

Crazy what you can do with patience and autostitch ! Both picture here are made of 30 something picture. This are the "max flickr size" version so that flickr can do the thumbnails (max 15000px wide). I uploaded the originals too. They are 19800 and 22800 px wide, but have black thumbnails. Maybe someday I will dislplay them on a lot of screen using displayator.

click here to go to the original circular panorama

click here to get to the original 180° panorama

Bugs met during making of those pictures : I was using the demo of autostitch and had to set the size of the generated panorama to be between 75 and 80% of the original. Otherwise I got some out of memory message. The memory option was set to the max possible(-1.5G) and I have 2G of memory installed.
In flickr, picture with one dimension >= 15000px (or an uncompressed size >250MB) will not get miniaturized. Miniatures will be replaced by black placeholder. It seems to be a longstanding known bug. I found a 18month old thread about that bug on their forum.