Confessions of a Wallpaper Junkie

I like changing my desktop wallpaper constantly, almost everyday, so I thought I would pass along some of my favorite sites to find new stuff. It is so easy to change your wallpaper I can't belive how many computers with stock Windows wallpaper I see. Click HERE and HERE to learn how to change your computer's wallpaper and make your computer more personal. These sites are all free of course. You can also use any picture you see on a website if it is large enough (has a high resolution).

Interfacelift
Interfacelife.com is an a great place to start looking for new wallpaper. It has tons to offer, with a lot of different resolutions for each pic, regardless of your screen's resolution. It is updated constantly, so keep checking the site.


WinCustomize
If your thing is more digital wallpaper, check out WinCustomize. It has over 7000 wallpapers, as well as a ton of other things to customize your desktop like screensavers and icons.

Oneodddude
Oneodddude.net is a small but great site with both photos and textures to use as wallpaper. To use a texture as wallpaper, select it to be tiled on the desktop. You can make your monitor look like it is covered with moss, concrete, or wood
paneling, etc.


Texture Archive
This site is by Ben Cloward has has a collection of textures that you can use as wallpaper. Everything from brick to bark to leaves. Some are large enough to use as strait wallpaper, others are tiles as mentioned in the site above.

Flickr
Photo sharing site Flickr.com has TONS of pictures that you can view in different sizes by clicking on the little button above most pictures labled "All Sizes" and choose a size to fit your screen. It also has a group called the Wallpaper Exchange/Pool that is great for wallpaper junkies. If you go to the Flickr homepage it lets you search for photos you want and in seconds you will find something you like.

deviantart
deviantart.com is a site with almost 19 million works of art, which they call deviations. They have everything from wallpaper to clipart to poetry. You can browse through the categories by subject making it easy to find something you are looking for. Lots of digital art and photoshopped photos.

MyDeskCity
This site is a new one to me but offers some great wallpaper with one small drawback: the site is not in English. It is easy to browse through the pics by clicking on the page numbers above and below the thumbnails and are offered in very high quailty. If you jump through the pages you will find they offer everything from natural landscapes, digital art, and cars. Even using an online translator it was still difficult to search for just what I was looking for, but just clicking on one of the hundreds of pages of photos will let you find something new you like pretty quickly, and many of them seem to come from the Webshots site shown below.

Webshots
Webshots.com is a site that does require you to sign up to download full resolution pictures, so that is a small drawback. It does offer some top quality wallpaper though and it is free to sign up. It also offers a small program you download that helps you manage your wallpaper, and even lets you automate wallpaper changing. It is very easy to use, but is just one more process for your computer to be running all the time.

Fun Free Picture Editors

I have been looking at a lot of photo stuff lately and thought I would pass on some of the better stuff, pretty much all free.
PictureCloud
By using a picture cloud you can turn still photos into images that spin 360° by uploading images you take around an object with your digital camera.
It's kind of like those VR quicktime pictures, but instead of a camera spinning around in place, you can fly around. And it is free and can be put into a site.
PictureCloud Homepage. Click here for an example --> House Show
Microsoft Group Shot
I saw this in this post --> Downloadsquad.com
Microsoft Research has release a little app called Group Shot which "helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos." It basically allows you to take the best parts of several successive photos of a group and easily stitch them into one "perfect" shot. Helps you fix the blinkers in the crowd.
Microsoft Group Shot -download
Click HERE for more info and screenshots
AutoStitch
Autostitch is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical). It has a free demo. AutoStitch Homepage
<--click for full view Mosaic Creator
Mosaic Creator is a program for creating image montages (photomosaic, mixed mosaics, random mosaics), that are images which consist of a small pictures called cell images. When viewed from a distance, you see source image. You can easily change the size of the thumbnails that make up the pic.
Mosaic Creator homepage.
<--click for full view Below is one of the things I am giving my wife for val. day in a nice frame. It is made up of all the pics from our wedding (this was my 1st go at it, tons of options I still need to play with):
fd's Flickr Toys
And here is a cool site that lets you do things with pictures on Flickr. The site is free if you want to post your own pics, and you can log in with a Yahoo.com account if you have one. The Captioner is pretty cool (lets you make your pics look like they are from a comic book), as well as the Calendar, Movie Poster, and Framer. Flicker Toys Homepage.
The Rasterbator
The last one is The Rasterbator. The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size. It uses a pic from your computer or anywhere on the net to blow up and print out your pic on a home printer. It sends you the thing in a pdf file.
The Rasterbator Homepage.
Check out the Full Gallery, it has tons of user submited stuff to give you ideas. Click on the link to "Only Cool Images" to see some of the best.
Here are just a couple of good ones.(Click for a larger view)

If you have any other programs you like, feel free to pass them along too!

Saw this on a post on Treehugger about Valentine's Day ideas. They are rings made out of wood, and look amazing! From a company called Touch Wood Rings. All kinds of designs and woods aviable. They even use mostly wood scraps from other processes like funiture making!
Downside is they come at a price. About $150 for a basic ring. I'm still considering though......

Cut Your Gas Consumption in Half in One Day

I just read this post over at Treehugger.com about how you can Cut Your Gas Consumption in Half in One Day. I am definatly going with a tankless water heater if I ever get my own house, even if I don't have gas.

Still playing around

This is me on a rafting trip during Kim and I's honeymoon.
It is one of the few shots of me in the wild.

Happy Birthday!

According to published records, I was born 29 years ago this hour.
I have the GREY HAIR to prove it!!!

Testing Testing

Hey, is this thing on? How about now?

Welcome Welcome