I took hundreds of pictures today so that I could play with photosynth.

Whilst it has been over two years since I last had a windows laptop today I took hundreds of pictures to play with Photosynth, a photo combining piece of software that runs on your machine before being uploaded to the web.

The idea is a simple one. Take as many pictures as you can be bothered and have at least three pictures overlap the same detail. I tried this in three different locations. The first one was a shopping center. I set the n95 to photograph every ten seconds as I walked but soon realised that this was too slow. That’s when I went to burst mode and photographed the main hall where the elevators were, then the view from the parking lot, and finally in a field where the hay was ready for storage.

In each case I took a sequence of 30-150 images at once. I then sorted the pictures out by sequence before letting photosynth do all the crunching. After a while th result came out and I had a 3D environment in which to click from picture to picture to picture.

The link from image to image is usually quite good although make sure not to leave too big a gap between two images as they will be isolated. Time for you to try it out, to have some fun.

Hay

Architecture

Jaiku is moving to the Google App engine

Jaiku is about as old as twitter but rather than expand and get two million users it was bought by google some months ago. This weekend the service has been unavailable and the reason for this is that they’re moving from the old finnish server to the google App engine.

Pat pointed me to this blog post. Now all is clear. The question is how soon will it be until Jaiku is opened up for the masses to start using it? Will it be when Android comes out? Time will show us.