Screenshot: The latest creations in the Flickr Amazing Circles group

But now there are 1 002 members in the Amazing Circles Flickr group, and member number 1 000 is JJjunki from Tsukuba, Japan. Welcome! Here’s a circle JJjunki made.

The group now approcahes 10 000 Amazing Circles, with the most active members close to 200 circles each.

Also, a big applause for Nadano Kamome, who started this with the picture “How to edit Reversing world” in October 2005. I almost met Kamome in April 2006, when I visited Japan with my family. Almost, because we couldn’t find a spot and time where we both could be at the same time. I think we even passed each other on different trains between Kyoto and Kobe at some point! Next time, Kamome, I promise! I’m definitely going back to Japan, which was just brilliant. Remind me finishing my Japan series that I started (brilliantdays.com – tag “Japan”), but never finished.

If you do a Google search for “Amazing Circles”, you’ll get over 37 000 hits. That’s a quite a bit for a name I “invented” only 15 months ago. According to Trendmapper (Amazing Circles chart), it has been as high as about 95 000 hits back in May 2006. And when Digg caused a stampede in February 2006, the site went down. Heh.

Some people have gone bananas with pictures of themselves. So if you want to make some really scary new year’s cards…

…a “power ring” that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower.

Great. So for 2007 I decide that you all start behaving. Ok? No more hitting each other in the head or taking things from each other. And start sharing stuff, ok?

You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 70% Superman 65% The Flash 65% Iron Man 65% Hulk 60% Supergirl 56% Robin 55% Spider-Man 50% Catwoman 45% Wonder Woman 41% Batman 30%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Update I’m in the “Green Lantern Club” with Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble (who really doesn’t like memes like this – I think that’s what he’s trying to say).

Then I realized that I had recently installed the WP-mobile plugin written by Alex King (although I hadn’t yet had the chance to test it out on my Treo using Blazer.) So, I whipped out my phone, hit scottburkett.com with my phone’s browser, and voila, the theme was switched to the default theme. It turns out that I had not properly followed the instructions provided by Alex in the plugin archive.

The WordPress Mobile Edition plugin detects if your site is viewed on a mobile device, and delivers a lighter and friendlier site for small screens. But I made the same mistake as Scott Burkett; not reading the install text:

== Installation ==

1. Drop the wp-mobile.php file in your wp-content/plugins directory
1. Drop the wp-mobile directory in your wp-content/themes directory
2. Click the ‘Activate’ link for WordPress Mobile Edition on your Plugins page (in the WordPress admin interface)

Ah. So dropping the whole WP-mobile folder into the plug-ins folder was not the right way to do it. We’ll see if brilliantdays.com stays “nice” the next 24 hours. The last four days it has changed back to the default theme a dozen times.

And if you have a mobile phone or other handhelp device with a browser, go to brilliantdays.com and see if the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin does it’s job ok.

Twice the last 24 hours it has changed back to the default theme. Very strange. So if brilliantdays.com looks like it just has been set up, now you know why.

(googling “switching back to default theme by itself”…)

Update: This is getting ridiculous. I thought it would help to delete the standard theme. But then WordPress just changes the theme to the empty theme, making the whole site go totally blank for the whole night. Aaaargh. If you have any idea what this is caused by, please leave a comment here.

Update: Problem solved (I hope).

Update BoingBoing reports that there has been some strange things going on with their feeds. As of today (updated 28.12.2006), they have “only” 506,067 readers…

USA

Bert P. Krages has posted an article about your rights when taking pictures in the USA. There’s also a pdf file to print and put with your camera.

Also see Jim McGee’s article at Vividlight.com, with advice on what to do.

And Kantor.com, with a “…synopsis of where you’re allowed to shoot and when you’re allowed to publish what you take.”

Not about photography, but being pulled over, searched or arrested – see this 45 minutes long video on Google on how to behave when in contact with the police.

The first segment is about being pulled over for speeding, but teaches some good principles.

Then at about 22 minutes, about how to behave if the police just stop you on the street. Probably the most useful part for photographers.

The last part deals with house searches etc.

If you just want the conclusion, fast forward to 42:20 and learn the “three most important lines you may ever have to deliver in your entire life”. Heh…

UK

Linda Macpherson at Heriot Watt University has posted a similar one for UK at Sirimo.co.uk.

Australia

Andrew Nemeth has a long article about Australian laws at 4020.net. He also has links to some other countries’ laws, and cases where photographers were taken to court.

Your country?

If you have link to the laws in your country, feel free to use the comments below and I’ll update this article.

Books on photography and law

The Wellness System is made up of hardware, software, and cutting-edge technologies linked to exercise equipment. It enables health and fitness facilities to deliver a rich wellness experience to their members. A comprehensive, modular network, the Wellness System works with exercise equipment.

Using a special TGS key, you “log on” to the equipment you use at the gym. The Wellness System then keeps track of what you do, burned calories, how much you run, how much you lift or pull, and your progress. You can also check your progress online.

Only halfway there

As far as I know the first time you can see your progress in hard numbers, and not just what you think your progress is (and DO people fool themselves? Yes, they do.)

There are however some shortcomings:

It can store “only” 365 workout sessions. I guess that means several years of workouts for most of us, but for athletes it will soon be too little.

Is there a way to measure your pulse? I couldn’t find that on the Technogym site.

You can’t take your data with you. And you can’t use the data from the gym with the data from outside the gym. Let me explain: You run, bicycle and lift in the gym. And your data is stored in the Wellness System. Then you run and bicycle outdoors, and maybe you store your data on a Garmin Forerunner.

How do you combine the data? You can’t. There aren’t any standards. And most of the people busy making new cool standards for the online world are so busy using their computers that they wouldn’t care less if you can’t take your Wellness System data, your Forerunner data and mix them at home. Or online.

We need EMIL

A year ago, I wrote “Running and training online”:

I’m always frustrated with the lack of open standards in the computer world. So to keep up competition, we make a standard for the data that the training machines collect when we train. I call it EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language. It sounds like “e mill” (electronic mill) when you say it. And it’s my little homage to Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful character Emil.

So how about it, Marc? Phil? (who had supercool “/run” but still makes cool stuff at “Make:”. Or Robert?: Your boss seem to understand that we need microformats. We need a format for training! Get people out of their chairs! Hightech training for everyone!

And finally: The view

The next version of Windows is called “Vista”:

vista

1) A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through some opening
2) A site offering such a view

(from Wiktionary)

I want something to look at when running the mill. Ok, at SATS where I workout, they have placed the step machines right in front of the running mills. But everywhere else. I would like to bicycle through Italian wineyards or downtown Sydney. I want to run the streets of Tokyo or the hills around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Or the landscapes in Halo.

How?

Make a system that takes data from the bicycle or the mill, feed it into my Xbox (or a PS3) and give me the view. Track how fast I go, my pulse, put it online. Let me race my friends all over the world. Give me EMIL support in all chat clients: “Status: Oyvind is bicycling – race him now”. Click and your system give you the same track I see, real time and online. And it works whether I’m at the gym or at the spinning bike at home.

How cool would that be!

Summary

There are three pieces missing:

Data collection
Technogym has started to adress this, by taking data from all machines in gyms, and saving them to a personal profile. Garmin also does it with their Forerunner line, where you store both pulse, elevation, speed, GPS data etc. on the Forerunner.

There are several other areas where this could be done:

• A very light device to put on your arm while playing tennis
• A device for golfers that takes GPS data, how you swing etc. (I would guess this exists already? Anyone?)
• A device for skiers, both Nordic and Alpine. A GPS with customized software would cover most of what you need. I think lots of people would like to see their speed in the slopes, which could be done with GPS. Not too accurate, I guess but good enough. If there was a standard, the Alpine devices could talk to systems in the slopes, feeding them other metadata about the slopes (green, blue, red, black etc.)
• Swimming. Are there heart rate monitors that are waterproof?

Can you think of other useful areas?

A standard for the data
There should be an easy way to move data between devices and systems. It’s lame that my Polar heart rate monitor store it’s data in a different format than Garmin’s heart rate monitors. They should be compatible with each other.

There should be a way to put all the data from Technogym’s Wellness System on a USB stick.

Someone should sit down and define all the data possible to connect: GPS positions, heart rate, how much you lift or push, how far you run/bicycle/ski and so on. And then define a data format for it. Like MIDI for training machines and monitoring.

Using data to control other devices
And finally: When the data is in a format that all kinds of machines and gadgets can understand, it should be possible to use it to control other devices. Example: When I run on a mill, that data should be possible to send to any PC/Mac/Xbox/PS to control things. Anything. It should be built right into the OS. Yes, OS X and Windows Vista should have supoort for this. So that if I want to “disconnect” the return key on my keyboard, and the only way to get a “return” is to hit a punching ball next to my display, I should be able to do it.

And when I’m running on a tread mill, in a gym or at home, I should be able to control any game I have. Or much better: The game developers should make special versions of the games, with “only” the landscapes and buildings, letting users run or bicycle them.

Update
There is a device for alpine, showing vertical speed etc.

Update
I’ve written Training microformat after Apple and Nike presented iPod+Nike in May 2006.

Now, I won’t write anything about this until member number 1 000…