You may have already seen this video (it's from mid-August) on resizing images in a more content-aware way: called "seam carving". If not, take a look.

I've shown that video to a few people over the last couple of weeks and nearly every one of them asked where they could get software to do that. The package that everyone points to is the GIMP plugin "liquid resize".

The only problem with pointing people over to that plugin is that it's not exactly obvious that it shows up under the "Layer" menu in GIMP. Similarly non-obvious is exactly how to use it to get the best results.

If you just fire away, you don't get the benefits of preserving people's faces, for example. Instead, you get a distorted image that's little better than if you had just resized it and ignored the proportions.

Fortunately, a tutorial for using the liquid resize plugin landed in my RSS reader this morning and I thought I'd share.

Oh, and, for the record, while GIMP is typically run on Linux, you CAN run it on Windows as well. Just make sure you run the GTK installer before the GIMP installer (both on the site).

If you don't like the results that the GIMP plugin gives you, take a look at this other implementation of the idea or wait for Photoshop to integrate it (they hired the guy from the video).

In the last couple of days, I've seen a couple of really good examples of why I really love Creative Commons. People have been using CC-licensed for the exact kinds of things that they should be and in ways I hadn't planned for or couldn't have necessarily expected. Beyond that, the people involved spanned the globe in ways that just wouldn't have happened even a few years ago.

First, on Tuesday, a guy named Matías, from Argentina enjoyed my little humorous look at marriage and datatypes (much more than my wife did, I might add). He enjoyed it so much, he decided to translate it into Spanish and post it on his site. While he asked my permission, he didn't need to because of the license for all of the content on this site (unless otherwise noted, it's CC-BY).

Now, those on the geekier side of life who life life en español can dig the article too.

Second was Roy Blumenthal in South Africa, who, upon getting an art project to make something about "80s", went looking on the Flickr photo finder for a CC-BY image that matched his vision. From that image, he did a sketch and eventually a painting and a lineart version. He released the resulting art under another Creative Commons license (adding the non-commercial clause as he's allowed to do).

I'm finding it funny how Creative Commons is creating enough of an incentive to result in all of this extra expression, despite all of the work being under less restrictive terms than standard copyright. *MORE* stuff is getting created *and* society at large gets more access to it than when it's locked up to wait for someone to decide that it will make enough money to be worth releasing.

If you watch much TV, you've probably been bombarded with the Apple ads where the slacker hipster tries to convince you that without a Mac and iPhoto, you can't possibly create neat photobooks out of your photos. At least not as neat as those.

However, it's not like Apple actually came up with the printer to do these books. Fortunately, the people who *did* come up with the printer and the process also sold it to other folks and you can get the exact same books from your Windows PC or your Mac.

One of those services is Blurb. As you probably know, I'm working on a photobook of Creative Commons photos. As part of that process, Blurb came up on several fronts as the most likely choice for getting that book printed.

Before going too far down the road of committing to using them, I pulled together a prototype book using the first pass of nominated photos. Blurb provides an application to to put your book together. It's pretty much a wizard (I'd like something more freeform), but the included templates aren't bad at all. At any rate, you drop the photos onto pages and type in your text into the slots and your book comes together in quick order.

Note that photos are cropped automatically to fit the photo slots. Unfortunately, you can only either take the auto cropping or shut it off altogether. If you need custom cropping, I'd suggest doing it before you import the photo into the book software.

I pulled a book of about 100 pages together and uploaded it. The upload takes quite a while, but when it's done, the book shows up on their site for ordering. You can either keep it private or make it public for ordering and add your profit margin. My book came in just under $30 for the cost. For the project purposes, the final book will be about this length, with $5 added on (which will all get sent to Creative Commons, the charitable organization).

I ordered the book last week and it arrived today. I have to say I'm impressed. I really like this book and am excited to get the real one put together. Beautiful photos on nice, heavy paper. Hopefully, when the book comes out, you'll buy one too and see just how nice they are.

In the mean time, if the idea of sitting at a table full of paper, specially-shaped scissors and markers, making scrapbooks sounds about as fun as watching paint dry, this is a quick way to turn your vacation photos into something worth sharing and you never have to worry about someone spilling glitter on your carpet.

PS. They also offer a way of having your site compiled into a book, but only support a couple of specific hosting services as the source, which . I actually am thinking of compiling the best stuff from this site into a book, but will probably use Lulu for that, as it's primarily text.

Photo: Peter Morgan

I wanted to keep this under wraps until it was well under way, and that's pretty much the case at this point. I'm heading up a project to put out a photobook of Creative Commons licensed photographs. The idea came a few weeks ago at breakfast with Aaron and over the few days afterward it kept nagging at me until I jumped on it.

The book itself is going to be entitled "Photos From the Commons 2006: Some Rights Reserved". It's broken into 12 sections: one for each month of 2006. In each section are photos taken during that month. The text of the book will talk about Creative Commons, how it works and why it's a good idea. All of the proceeds will be donated to Creative Commons.

I've recruited a team of editors (and there are a couple more I haven't gotten a chance to talk into it yet) who are busily using a set of tools I wrote (derived from this code) to help with the process to select photos for inclusion. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be putting the book together to get it ready for publication.

I've got several goals for this project:

• Raise some money for Creative Commons.
• Show people just how good the Creative Commons licensed stuff can be.
• Encourage people to put their own content under CC licenses.
• Just plain get the word out about Creative Commons.
• Do an annual edition of the photobook.
• Expand the idea into essays, short fiction, etc. as enough content becomes easy to dig through.
• Vanity. Look it's a factor that I want to see my name listed as an editor on a beautiful photobook. I'd be naive to pretend it's not.

For this round, I've kept the team small, but would like to use 2007 to work out models for more widespread contribution while making sure to acknowledge everyone's contribution. Those collaborations are worked out in software, but need to be tweaked to work for this slightly different content.

I bought the domains fromthecommons.com/org with the idea that the expansion can happen with nice URL's for them as well, i.e. photos.fromthecommons.com, essays.fromthecommons.com, etc. The biggest barrier to moving beyond the photos is that, ironically, text under creative commons is harder to dig through. That's because, since photos have nearly *no* searchable data, their metadata gets attention and you end up with really searchable databases of photos like Flickr.

Searching for text content doesn't work nearly as well. For instance, it's plenty easy to find content that *contains* a given keyword, but your typical short story doesn't contain the words "short story". The metadata for license embedding is starting to get a toehold, but since hardly anyone is tagging this content the same way, other anthologies are currently more difficult to do the initial content nomination on.

At any rate, I'm aiming for a fairly aggressive schedule to get this thing out. Since the idea didn't come until late December, this needs to be done quickly in order for a book of 2006 photographs to still be somewhat relevant. I'd really like to have it available for sale by the end of the month.

This morning, I was reading something and got linked to an old posting on the Dilbert blog about the formulas in humor. One of my favorite classes in college was humor writing and "getting" some of these very constructs unlocked a lot of humor and jokes for me.

Anyway, in the midst of a giant pile of comments on the posting, were links to several comic strips. I noted a few of them to check out when I got home. A few were duds, but I think I've got a pretty good evening of laughs ahead of me when I discovered this one.

First of all, it features a wide variety of visual styles. The strip is beautifully drawn and often relies on the visual for the joke. The topics are often disturbing and biting, but very funny. More than one is just plain *wrong*.

They do often take a bit of thought to get, but that's part of what makes them worthwhile. I'm a huge fan of a joke that takes 2-3 leaps before you get the payoff. Basically, if you don't get the joke in the one I'm posting, you probably shouldn't bother.

And, many are not safe for work. You've been warned. However, if you're looking for some non-family-safe humor to make you laugh, give it a shot.