This post has two goals in mind: first, it lists a few interesting sources, some that offer photographs that are simply beautiful or quirky, while others are pertinent to events or offer cultural insights. The second goal is to challenge the reader to share with others their finds, ranging from the obvious to the under-appreciated.

Before we proceed, a word of caution: while the sites mentioned here are both interesting and artistic, be warned that not all the content on them may be safe for work.

Flickr’s “Last 7 Days Interesting” Set

It would be sacrilege to speak of photography on the internet without mentioning Flickr, and some might contend (though I do not) that the list can even end right here. The above is a screenshot of Flickr’s page of interesting pictures from the last 7 days. The page can be refreshed to display different subsets of photographs that are almost all reliably worthy of viewing.

Alternative ways to explore Flickr include Flickr Groups, or any of a number of Flickr content showcase sites like FlickRiver, an AIR application called DestroyFlickr (don’t let the name scare you, the authors intent is anything but!), RSS feeds from Flourish (Flickr offers its own RSS feeds, of course), or a Flickr widget from WidgetBox.

Other sites, such as Photo-Eye offer sumptuous visual galleries of professional and artistic photography that are well worth your time.

DeviantART

DeviantART is an old (and favourite) name for chronic wallpaper hunters and admirers of digital art. Also available from this “community of artists” are collections of impressive photographs that are categorised into Still Life, Street, Humorous and other sections.

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture

A few times each month the Boston Globe presents in its “The Big Picture” web pages, collections of some of the most amazing photographs that range from natural wonders to political events. The page includes an RSS feed, a comments section, and archives are also available.

Views of the News

Sure you scoffed at “the MSM” (MainStream Media, for the uninitiated) during the US election season, but now that that’s all settled, you can quietly return to their online offerings, since many of their websites offer interesting multimedia, including slideshows that provide a pictographic equivalent of current events and news.

The New York Times multimedia page includes photo slideshows, interactive features, audio slide shows, and a Pictures of the Day section.

The German newspaper Spiegel provides a section called “Picture This” (clever!?) updated daily with interesting pictures, typically from Europe.

Time Magazine’s website includes a Photo Essays section that includes sections similar to other such sites, sorting pictures by day, week and year. Also of interest is their “Graphics” section with, well you might have guessed it, graphics highlighting various bits of data (e.g: 5 Truths About Health Care in America). One recent Photo Essay offers a haunting look at The Remains of Detroit.

The BBC gets in on the act with their In Pictures offering the now familiar temporal categories, as well as Audio Slideshows and user contributed content.

Its brethren, the Times Online (broken down by region and kind) and The Guardian (including this cheerful Flickr set that documents the recession) too offer similar photo galleries.

And then there’s Tumblr and Google Maps Sightings

In the last two years, the micro-blogging (or perhaps more accurately, tumblelog) site Tumblr has attracted photography and picture buffs whose posts include their own snapshots as well as interesting pictures found elsewhere. One contributor you will find infinitely resourceful in teasing out the most intriguing and amusing pictures from the nooks and crannies of the internet as well as the real world is Szymon BÅ‚aszczyk, author of the Inspire me, now! blog:

So… what are you lookin’ at?    What online photo sources feed your fetish?

Now you are that insufferable know-it-all at family gatherings who descends from his Mac OS X Leopard nirvana only to lecture the rest of the brood on their miserable digital lives. In which case, brace yourself for what I am about to say: It’s true – you can make the user experience on your Mac even better!

Back in March, Jackson Chung reminded you of the 10 Essential Mac Apps to Install After a Reformat. Here, in this post, I will endeavour to purloin some of his ideas and add some of my own. If you are a Mac newbie, I hope that the suggested applications are new and useful to you. If you are an old hand, read ahead and correct me with your own better alternatives.

1. Quicksilver

This one’s so obvious that they should just ship the OS with it pre-installed. Instead, Mac OS comes with Spotlight, which is nice – for Grandma. For a slick cat like you, Quicksilver is the rare application that qualifies for that over-used metaphor: a Swiss army knife. With simple keystrokes (default invocation keystroke is Ctrl-Space) it lets you launch applications, look up contact info, navigate your directory tree, send email, and interface with other applications using plugins.

2. VirtualBox

Sure you may have taken the path to enlightenment, but the rest of the world is taking its time getting there, and you do have to communicate with them once in a while. I am speaking here of course of the Microsoft Windows world which imposes itself into your beatific world with that occasional annoying banking site that works only in Internet Explorer. For those cases, there is the free virtualisation tools VirtualBox, which lets you run Windows (a licensed copy of course) on your Mac.

(Image courtesy of virtualbox.org)

And while you are on the job (of making peace with the Windows world), you might as well grab Flip4Mac (Windows Media Components), a tool that will install plug-ins for the QuickTime media player on your Mac, in order to enable playback of Windows Media audio and video files.

3. The Goodies at iSlayer

Choose one or more of the free goodies (donationware) at iSlayer: iStatMenus, iStatPro, iStatNano. They are all applications that will display various useful bits of information about your system.

The first (iStatMenus) sits in your menu bar (see 5 Free Tools to Add to your Mac Menu Bar for this and other useful menu bar add ons) while the other two are Dashboard Widgets. They all display system information such as: the utilisation of your CPU, disk and memory, the top 5 processes that are using your CPU, the status of your laptop battery, and so on.

This is useful, especially for a new user, since such information gives you a clue to those unexpected OS behaviours that even a Mac user encounters, such as slow system response. In the screenshot , you can see that Firefox is using up 20% 15.5% of my CPU even though I am not actively using it (perhaps a misbehaving Firefox extension?). iStatMenu also provides a nice little date and time display in your menu bar and a pull down that brings up a calendar.

4. Jumpcut

A neat solution to a common problem of maintaining and accessing multiple entries in your clipboard i.e., copying multiple bits of text before pasting them. Jumpcut sits in the menu bar and harvests your copy buffer as you work away on the Command-C’s.

When you are ready to paste these bits into an email message or editor, they can be access by clicking on the menubar icon or, even better, using a hotkey (default: Alt-Space) that can be used to rotate through the clipboard.

5. Freeing your Music

Remember that music you bought from the iTunes Store with your hard-earned money that Apple now refuses to give up to you, locking it into their proprietary format or making it inaccessible from your iPod? Two applications that will set that right are FairGame, which will let you convert DRM’ed iTunes Store in your iTunes library to an unprotected format, and iPodDisk, which conversely, helps rescue music stored on your iPod. To this bundle, you can add SimplyBurns which completes the loop by enabling you to burn your media to CD or DVD.

There are other useful tools (here is one example: Open With Manager) for a Mac newbie that we can explore in a later post.