JPG Magazine says goodbye

Sad news from the folks at JPG Magazine:

JPG Magazine Says Goodbye

Posted by Laura Brunow Miner on 1 January 2009.

Today is a particularly sad day for all of us at JPG and 8020 Media.

We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success. As a result, jpgmag.com will shut down on Monday, January 5, 2009.

The one thing we’ve been the most proud of: your amazing talent. We feel honored and humbled to have been able to share jpgmag.com with such a dynamic, warm, and wonderful community of nearly 200,000 photographers. The images on the website and in the magazine were adored by many, leaving no doubt that this community created work of the highest caliber. The kindness, generosity, and support shared among members made it a community in the truest sense of the word, and one that we have loved being a part of for these past two years.

We wish we could have found a way to leave the site running for the benefit of the amazing folks who have made JPG what it is, and we have spent sleepless nights trying to figure something out, all to no avail. Some things you may want to do before the site closes:

Download the PDFs of back issues, outtakes, and photo challenge selections. We’ll always have the memories!
Make note of your favorite photographers. You may want to flip through your favorites list and jot down names and URLs of some of the people you’d like to stay in touch with. You may even want to cut and paste your contacts page into a personal record.
Catch up with your fellow members. Our roots are in this humble flickr forum and we recommend going back to find fellow members, discuss the situation, or participate in another great photo community.
Keep in touch. This has always been much more than just a job to each of us, and we’ll miss you guys! We’ll be checking the account jpgletters@gmail.com in our free time going forward. We can’t promise to reply to every email (since we’ll be busy tuning up our resumes) but we’d love to hear from you.
Stay posted. Although the magazine is ceasing publication, we’ll be updating you on what’s happening with your subscription early next week.

We’re soggy-eyed messes, but it is what it is. At that, JPGers, we bid you goodbye, and good luck in 2009 and the future.

Laura Brunow Miner
Editor in Chief

The Conet Project


For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of “Numbers Stations”.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad” is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a superb receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles. Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.

Although no broadcaster or government has acknowledged transmitting the numbers, a 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, “These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”

A sample of these recordings is available at http://www.last.fm/music/The+Conet+Project. More information about the project is available at http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm. Although the project is currently sold out, the sound files are available elsewhere on the net. The location and whereabouts of said files are left as an exercise to the reader.

[via The Conet Project ]

More FM3-derived ambient works

http://www.archive.org/details/okk016mystziel

“Sounds of the Buddha Machine 1.0”

Since FM3 was kind enough to offer the loops from their Buddha Machine 1.0 for free and on a Creative Commons license, Mystified and Zieltogend endeavored to create pieces of music using only these sounds. Unlike the original Buddha Machine, more than one loop is heard at once in these pieces, giving them perhaps a little bit of an unfair advantage. We hope you enjoy the music.

This audio is part of the collection: Okkulth Records

Date: 2008-11-09
Keywords: ambient; FM3; Mystified; Zieltogend

Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0 Netherlands

The intention of Okkulth releases is that they are dubbed onto a cassette. These songs will fit onto one side of a C90 tape. It is recommended that you use the PDF file to print the artwork. In the unlikely event that you want to burn a CDR, you can use either the low-resolution thumbnail file or freely alter the artwork provided in the BMP image.

Mystified is Thomas Park.
More at: http://www.mystifiedmusic.com

Zieltogend is [empty].
More at: http://www.myspace.com/zieltogend

Okkulth can also be found at:
http://www.myspace.com/okkulthrecs

SwitchProxy update – google posterity post

I swear by SwitchProxy for Firefox. I use proxies to test our work environment and route web traffic through a SSH tunnel when I’m on an untrusted wireless network. Unfortunately, SwitchProxy hasn’t been updated for some time – it doesn’t work on newer versions of Firefox.

I read this post which talked about tweaking .xpi files – the files mozilla uses for add-ons. Changing the extension from .xpi to .zip results in a file you can open with Windows Explorer. Open it up and look at the install.rdf file. There’s a line in the file that reads:

<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
                <em:minVersion>0.8</em:minVersion>
                <em:maxVersion>2.0</em:maxVersion>

Change the lines to reflect your current version, update the file, change the name back to .xpi and you’re good to go.

This won’t work with all add-ons, as some of them require specific versions. SwitchProxy seems to work just fine, however.

Special San Francisco PHOTOJOJO shoot this weekend!

I received this email for a photo shoot this weekend. The mural work in the Mission district makes a wonderful subject for shooting, and the PHOTOJOJO people are a lot of fun.

Hi! Your pals at Photojojo (that’s us) are planning a series of really fun photo events in San Francisco and you’re invited!We call ’em Photo Safaris. The first one is this Saturday. We’ll be exploring some of the beautiful street art in the Mission then heading to a local bar, checking out everyone’s photos, and giving out some great prizes.

Hope you can make it! Feel free to bring some pals, and be sure to sign up for updates on future events.

Details
Mission Murals Safari
– Saturday 11/8 @ 3:30pm
– Meet @ Market St & Brady St
– Host: Heather Champ
RSVP

Love,
Photojojo

p.s. Help us spread the word about this weekend’s safari by twittering it or RSVPing on Facebook.

p.p.s. Here’s a video from our last event in NYC. Get excited!!

How to spend quality time on the web?

Here’s an interesting post from Merlin Mann, one of my favorite productivity gurus on how he’s going to improve his approach to the web:

…To be honest, I don’t have a specific agenda for what I want to do all that differently, apart from what I’m already trying to do every day:

  • identify and destroy small-return bullshit;
  • shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful;
  • make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing;
  • avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money);
  • demand personal focus on making good things;
  • put a handful of real people near the center of everything.

All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.

#2 resonated the most with me – continually evaluating return on investment (whether it’s time, money, emotional investment or whathaveyou…) should be a continual process.

Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home

I’ve never been a fan of camera bags that looked too much like a
CAMERA BAG!!!“. Much of my photography is done at dusk, early mornings, and urban street street photography in dodgy neighborhoods. I need to be able to pull my camera out, take a shot quickly and stuff it back quickly, all the while looking innocuous.

My current bag is a cheap $12 messenger bag, and is stealthy as hell. As a day to day bag, it’s WONDERFUL. It holds my laptop, all my computer peripherals, a LOMO LC-A, papers, pens, my lunch, and whatever else i could throw at it.

Unfortunately, there’s no padding and no compartments inside, so lenses, flashes, cameras, film, and whatever else is free to jostle about. One good drop would total a camera.

Enter the 7 Million Dollar Home. From a distance, it looks like a plain old messenger bag, but it’s got stiffeners, padded, reconfigurable dividers, a zipper compartment inside the flap, an expansion pocket on the front of the bag, a pocket that might work for a tripod, an adjustable strap with removable pad, and it looks like it’s built to last.

I’m taking it out tonight for a test-drive, wish me luck!

Product page (Crumpler), Buy a 7 Million Dollar Home (Amazon)

“American Photobooth”, a book review

American Photobooth is a new illustrated history of photobooths, which first made their splash in the 1920s. Photographer Nakki Goranin became obsessed with the technology after creating a series of her own photobooth self-portraits now in the collection of the International Center for Photography in New York. She then spent nearly a decade tracing the history and culture of photobooths and collected thousands of vintage photobooth prints, like those above. The new issue of Smithsonian profiles Goranin and includes an online slideshow of images from the book.

Goranin doesn’t much care for the mall’s machine, which is digital. But, she says, there are only about 250 authentic chemical booths left in the United States…

Before the photobooth first appeared, in the 1920s, most portraits were made in studios. The new, inexpensive process made photography accessible to everyone. “For 25 cents people could go and get some memory of who they were, of a special occasion, of a first date, an anniversary, a graduation,” Goranin says. “For many people, those were the only photos of themselves that they had.”

Because there is no photographer to intimidate, photobooth subjects tend to be much less self-conscious. The result—a young boy embracing his mother or teenagers sneaking a first kiss—is often exceptionally intimate. “It’s like a theater that’s just you and the lens,” Goranin says. “And you can be anyone you want to be.”

Photobooth article (Smithsonian), Buy American Photobooth (Amazon)

[via boingboing.net ]

Mimicking film with digital tricks

Pssst! I’ve got a secret!

Most decent imaging programs have the capability of automating actions. With the right actions applied to a photo, you can easily mimic some of the quirky qualities of your favorite film camera on multiple photos and bundle the actions to share with others.

To Wit, the Holganizer. With it, you can take a rectangular, well exposed digital image and make it look like it was taken with the Holga, a $30 plastic camera. This was taken with a Canon SD110; for the original, see the previous post.

The film banner on the top and bottom are a nice touch, but unfortunately they don’t change when you make another Holganized pic, making the viewer think you’re permanently stuck on exposure # 9.

For a good Holga action, see the previous link. There are tons of LOMO actions for Photoshop and The Gimp, just a google search away.