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Flickr adds 3,000,000,000th image

Matthew Sparkes — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:30:28 +0000

The three billionth image has just been uploaded to Flickr – that’s an astonishing nine zeroes.

I’ve helped to contribute several hundred of those myself, although only the most recent 200 are shown, as I’m too tight to pay for a professional account. I wonder how many of those 3 billion images can actually be viewed?

Luckily, the 3 billionth image is rather tasteful; a moody, monochrome snap of a doorway. The 2 billionth image, uploaded almost a year ago to the day, is also rather artistic; a gnarled tree stump shot from below against a startling blue sky. I’m not suggesting that foul play is afoot, although it is quite lucky, isn’t it?

As if to prove that nothing is being manipulated, I can’t find any reference to the one billionth image. One presumes it’s horribly pornographic, violent or, even worse – among the Flickr community at least – poorly shot. Perhaps the subject of the image is just too horrible for Flickr to have promoted, such as this one.

A plea: abandon Excel 2003 graphs

Tim Danton — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:31:39 +0000

I’m writing this from the Budapest World Congress Centre, at Acer’s grandiose and beautifully presented Global Press Conference 2008. It’s a chance for the company to set out its strategy to over 200 journalists, to essentially show off.

So it’s perhaps surprising that it’s still using what I wholly believe to be the world’s worst graphing tool: Excel 2003.

Above is one of the slides they’ve just shown us, and as you can see it’s all good news for Acer.

But it looks rubbish. Now I’m not claiming to be an Excel genius or indeed a presentation expert, but this is what I knocked up in Excel 2007 based on its far superior new chart templates.

This may seem a minor point – it is a minor point – but any company that uses Excel 2003 to produce its graphs needs to think about what those shoddy-looking images do to their company image too.

1,000,000 keys and a celebratory holiday

Matthew Sparkes — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:23:29 +0000

You may remember that a while ago I reviewed a Logitech keyboard that tracked key presses. Well, I’ve been using it at my desk since then, and I’ve just passed into seven figures. It’s still going strong despite a few coffee-related mishaps, although I’m still not using any of the more esoteric features.

Considering that I only use it in the morning – I tend to migrate to the PC Pro laboratory in the afternoons, like a goose heading South for the winter – that’s a whole lot of typing.

To reward myself I’m going to take two weeks off work and go on my first holiday since time immemorial. Bye.