January 03, 2006

retrievr Draw a picture, and it will find flickr photos that look similar. this just ate hours of my day.
  • this is neat-o, thanks. my one complaint is that it starts to retrieve photos immediately, even though i'm still drawing
  • I drewd a picture of a pee-pee.
  • There a lot of cats on flickr, huh?
  • yes, it seems quite busy. you crazy beatniks with your hipster talk.
  • I'm averaging 5.3 cats per pee-pee.
  • seen this one yet?
  • That looks nothing like my pee-pee.
  • If I draw a picture of a cat, how many photos of pee-pees do you think will come up?
  • OK: none.
  • I doodled a banana; got a green pear, a lemon, a lychee (a minuscule christmas tree, actually), a nude barbie doll... It seems to be more accurate with colors and location on the frame than with shapes. Interesting, still. Imagine this in a year, when it's been bought by flickr and works in realtime.
  • Oh! Found via retrievr: Chocolate... FOR MEN! (Russian men, that is). And hey, it's a real product. Check out the TV ads. 4Mb Quicktime files "Protect from women"... ha! Because we need some validation of our tough, rude, brutish chocolate cravings... arrrrghh.
  • Nice way to search flickr, weird results. Me like. That is all.
  • my one complaint is that it starts to retrieve photos immediately, even though i'm still drawing That's what I like about it. (Actually, it's too slow) I think one problem with it is you can't turn off color matching.
  • Freaky coincidence: I barely had time to draw a thick black circle when the first image it gave me was kitfisto's Storm Kitty.
  • "Please note: Automatic search is currently disabled because of the high demand we're currently experiencing. Click "Retrievr Search" once your done sketching! " You guys broke it!
  • William Gibson describes such a device in one of his books (maybe pattern recognition, I can't remember), and I thought it sounded cool. Now we have one. Woo! Oh, and don't forget to buy a T-shirt or painting on your way out now!
  • I'm not sure if it is a relation to retrievr, but imgseek is a program that does the same thing for pictures on your local filesystem. I use it heavily to trawl my rather large image library. You can load an example image and it will find similar images. Or you can draw shapes, like retrievr. It's not perfect, but very handy when you have to find a picture in 300GB of images. It's available on windows and linux. Mac folks might be able to bet it to work via fink, but I don't got a mac to test it with.
  • That's some porn collection, dude...
  • yeah, I wish. no, really.
  • jacbo, you told me you were combing your hair!
  • I actually saw a tv program a few years ago where a guy had designed a printer that would print in 3D. It printed thousands of microscopically thin laser-cut layers of plastic, stacked them, then heated them to create a 3D plastic object. He was describing the visual limitations of search engines, and how we'd one day be able to search by images, not just words. It's cool to see this finally happening. Maybe soon we'll be able to imitate a noise to search for sound. I don't want to think about searching for smells, though.
  • > It printed thousands of microscopically thin laser-cut layers of plastic, stacked them, then heated them to create a 3D plastic object. this is how my teleportation device will work, eventually.
  • William Gibson describes such a device in one of his books (maybe pattern recognition/i> Mmmhh... there's a net-based application that lets you input an image and it tells you what it is and what's used for, in minute deatil, in Idoru I think. And an identity-matching software using the faces of famous actors for comparison to normal people in Virtual Light, but Pattern Recognition is very much gadget-free, aside from real-world, current tech stuff.
  • Aw crap. Html-based dyslexia. Great.
  • That'll teach you to show off...
  • Oh, yeah, rub the salt on the wounds.
  • 3D Printer to Churn Out Copies of Itself. And for around $25,000, you can have your own.