SinSurf, CNC-milled Corian panel, produced from STL files generated with Processing.

I just got an email with images from Lenny at HyperWerk, turns out my first foray into the world of CNC milling is done. And it looks better than I had ever expected, which is great news for me since I can now use it for my upcoming ElectroPlastiques solo show in Akron, Ohio next week.

The radial milling paths really make the piece come alive, of course it doesn’t hurt that Corian is such a beautiful material to begin with. I’ll definitely have to explore CNC more as a possible output medium, it provides some of the fine detail of rapid prototyping while allowing for much larger pieces. And the organic quality provided by the milling paths is very appealing, especially considering the digital origin of the form.

See my Flickr stream for more images. My thanks to Andreas and Lenny for their help with milling and photos!

We’re making good progress at the HyperWerk digital fabrication workshop, see the new Fabbing @ HyperWerk Flickr group for details.

Since Flickr is just about my favorite web service and I use it a lot, it should come as no surprise that I also like to complain about it. Well, not so much about the service itself, just the lack of a few features and some of the more inexplicable things they’ve done. Some of my previous gripes (like black thumbnails) have actually been fixed. Others, like the stupefyingly bad SafeSearch feature are alive and well.

So here’s my current list of annoyances about my favorite web service:

• Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is a very buggy piece of software. In fact, it’s so bad it probably should never have been released. In particular, it should not have been released just before a big holiday when development teams would not be on hand to fix it. I’ve downgraded to Uploadr 2.5. It might be clunky, but at least it uploads your pictures.
• There is still no way to hide non-public images from yourself so that you could navigate the photostream the way other people see it. About 3000 pictures in my account are private, being either high-res backups or of a personal nature (not that personal, though…) Wading through them often becomes a chore, since I typically upload batches of 30-100 images for backup at a time. I’m almost considering opening a separate Flickr account just for backups, but that would become frustrating quite quickly.
• When you add photos to an existing set using the Organizr, the sets are listed in the order you’ve arranged them in for viewers. When you have 50 sets, it gets annoying to find one that might be number 20 on the list. The option to switch to alphabetical listing would have been very useful.
• The SafeSearch / NIPSA issue is still around, although Flickr seems less aggressive about enforcing it at the moment

On a more positive note, the new Flickr stats work just fine. I’ve been able to observe some interesting trends in how my photos are being viewed, including a better idea of what constitutes my “greatest hits” on Flickr. Great work indeed.

Flickr now has statistics. See original size for a detailed view.

Flickr has introduced statistics as part of the feature set for Pro account holders. Like many bloggers, I suffer from obsessive-compulsive tendencies regarding stats, so this is probably the feature I missed the most on Flickr. Well, no longer will I pine for a detailed breakdown of my Flickr views.

Interestingly Flickr Stats looks and feels a bit like Google Analytics. The good side of that is that the analysis goes deep, as in breakdowns of referrers etc. which is probably more information than most people want to know. Still, it helps to explain why some of your pictures suddenly get a gazillion hits because they got Dugg or Stumbled.

Along with stats, Flickr has also released Uploadr 3.0, which adds some welcome new features such as being able to add new batches while you’re already uploading. Unfortunately, the new Uploadr seems to have quite a few bugs, so unless you’re desperate you might find it wiser to stick with the old 2.5 version until they’ve ironed out the kinks.

The idea of storing data online is sexy. It means easy sharing of files, pseudo-backup and access-everywhere all rolled into one. I’ve been using Box.net for a year now, with mostly good experiences. It’s got a well-designed dynamic interface, it makes sharing extremely easy and the service is very stable. I do have a few complaints though:

• The space you get is small. 5 GB for $5/month is not a lot. They have a bigger plan at 15 GB at $15/month (== $180/year), which hardly seems like a bargain.
• The interface looks great, but is sometimes a little tricky for complex file operations such as moving lots of files around. It’s got a great search function though.
• Most importantly: Uploading can sometimes be painful, requiring the use of either a popup applet or a built-in Flash tool. Navigating the file structure from these tools seems like it’s harder than it should be, with slow GUI response times.

Essentially, I’ve been wanting a file browser-like interface for uploading, with immediate folder navigation. Box.net has promised for a long time that they would release an uploading app that works outside the web browser, but has not delivered so far. I like their service and I’m not looking to switch, but I just wish it’d be easier to use…

To the rescue: Fire Uploader, a Firefox extension that supports FTP-style uploading to Box.net, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube. Browsing my Box.net account, creating a new folder and uploading a bunch of images was a snap. It supports downloading as well, but unfortunately not moving files.

It remains to be seen how stable Fire Uploader is in dealing with huge files and broken uploads, but so far it’s looking really good. Upcoming versions might add site-specific functions such as setting permissions, as well as new services to upload to. If it supported moving files it could almost be a complete Box.net GUI replacement.

For Flickr uploading, Fireflix is useful, but a little clunky. For FTP transfers, I like FireFTP, another great Firefox extension. It allowed me to finally do away with clunky FTP software, and do it all inside the browser. I love that that the browser becomes an environment for getting things done.

The recently discovered awkwardness regarding Flickr's new SafeSearch feature seems to be getting even worse. Now Flickr has disabled SafeSearch options for users based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea. Those affected by the change will find SafeSearch permanently set to maximum, and will not be able to search for “unsafe” images - including screenshots or computer-generated images.

It would seem this move is related to local standards for obscenity and censorship of information, but honestly it still makes no sense. The censorship aspect is far worse than the simple blocking of non-photographic images, striking at the core of the service as a community. Sascha Pohflepp has a capsule review of the situation, for more detail see the new Against Censorship Flickr group.

For now, the best policy for Flickr users whose accounts have been reviewed as safe would be to leave all images marked as photography. Anything else will put your images in the middle of this controversy.

By accident I happened to notice a new detail on my Flickr account page last night, a sentence just below the top title: “Your account has been reviewed as safe by Flickr staff.” A link to a Flickr FAQ provides more information (more on FlickrBlog.) It turns out the reviewing is related to the NIPSA system and the system of “Safesearch” and content filtering Flickr has implemented to replace it. The stated intention of this system is to make sure images on Flickr are “suitable for a global, public audience”.

Now, being “reviewed as safe” sounds like good a good thing, so I thought I’d go one step further and mark all my non-photographic images as such. Flickr calls this “moderating your photostream”. One of the side effects seems to be that all my non-photographic images are no longer available in public searches. You can observe it by searching for the title "Randbox". It won’t show any results, meaning that my RandBox images are now NIPSA’ed. They can still be found via my photostream, but not through searching. Any non-photo images that were in Flickr's Explore are no longer there.

For artists and designers using Flickr to document and share their work, this development means that their non-photographic images are now second-class citizens. If Flickr goes any further in censoring non-photographic images, it would make Flickr unattractive for sharing anything beyond holiday snaps. I honestly don’t understand what they are hoping to gain by this strategy, as non-photographic images don’t present any problems unless there is a copyright violation. Nor do I understand why screenshots or CGI images would be unsuitable for a public audience.

If you have a Flickr account, you can see your review status for yourself. Individual users can set their “SafeSearch” setting to include non-photographic images, but by default it is set to exclude them. The setting is so obscure that I doubt any non-experts will ever see it.

I just did some new live visuals for a performance with Alexander Rishaug. Alexander’s music tends towards the ambient, with rich textures and large soundscapes that develop slowly in time. Check out his Myspace for sound samples and bio. Alexander was the producer of the Generator.x concert tour for Rikskonsertene and was also responsible for hooking me up with Phonophani, so we have some good history together.

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Flickr: Digital fabrication group

I just created a new Flickr group called Digital fabrication. It’s intended for images and discussion related to digital fabrication techniques (rapid prototyping, stereolithography, laser cutting etc). There are already about 50 pictures, so far Sascha Pohflepp has added some interesting examples from the Royal College of Art, Timo Arnall has added some RP-produced characters and Realfakewatches have some interesting uses of laser cutting.

Feel free to join and add your own!

As great as I think Flickr is, I still wish they would fix or add two things:

1. Black thumbnails: Whenever I upload an image bigger than maybe 4000 x 4000 pixels Flickr is unable to generate a thumbnail, and the picture appears as a black square except when viewed in its original size (see this example.) It’s in the Flickr FAQ, so it’s a well-known issue.

I realize that Flickr is primarily a photo site and that most users will be uploading images in the 5-10 megapixel range, but I really wish they would fix this.

2. Toggle private photos in photostream: I wish there was an option to not show my non-public photos when I browse my own photostream. I regularly upload images that I want to have easy access to but which are not intended for public viewing. Often these are batches of up to 30-50 images. After uploading a private batch I have to click through pages of private images to get to the public ones.

I know I can just sign out to see my photostream as other users would see it. But that seems kind of, well, stupid. A simple option to filter by privacy setting would be a great help to any Flickr power user.

Always save some sugar for last: Flickr recently introduced a nice new feature called Collections, which tackles the issue of having a lot of sets. Collections allow users to organize their photo sets so that related sets can be grouped together. Have a look at my Collections for an example.

Collections get a mosaic of images as icons, which can be randomly generated or painstakingly hand-selected. There is also a new option to choose the layout for your photostream to display collections rather than sets in the right-hand column. This is the first time users get any say in the layout of their Flickr “home pages”, it would be interesting to see if more customization features get added in the future.

I only wish there was an option to simply have single images as collection icons. The new photo mosaics give a decent impression of the contents of a collection, but they can look a bit messy and not as attractive as a single good image.