Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com

Just had a thought. I want Riya to import and monitor the photos I upload to Flickr, as an alternative to leaving their little agent running on my local computer.

The benefits:

• I upload to Flickr from several computers, not all of them Windows-based. Getting my photos from Flickr wouldn’t limit me to just my home XP system.
• I’ve already decided about privacy on the photos I upload to Flickr. For Riya, I have it set to monitor and upload from the My Pictures folder, but I’ve got the privacy set to Private instead of Public, until I can review the photos and make sure I want the world to see them.
• All the Flickr uploader tools and hacks should work to get photos into Riya
• I don’t have to go to the hassle, however small, of uploading my photos to two different services, and having them stored in two places online.

I’m sure there are downsides, and obstacles to make this happen (analysis would use Riya’s CPU cycles, instead of my computer’s), but it sure would be cool to see these two photo services talk to each other.

Now that I think about it, I want to be able to export the recognized faces from Riya back to my Flickr photos as “notes” - the little mouseover outlines. Now THAT would be cool.

Perhaps, as I gaze into my crystal ball, Yahoo should just buy Riya, and integrate their service into Flickr?

(Note: I know nothing. Idle speculation. All disclaimers apply.)

After realizing last night that running the Riya uploader on a laptop is not the best idea, I installed it on my main computer at home, with all of my digital photos, and told it to start uploading. More than 6000 photos, and 24 hours later, it’s about 70% done.

But of the hundreds of faces it’s already isolated, I’ve been playing around with the identification training, telling Riya who the faces are, and I have to say, this is some pretty freaking cool stuff.

You can do a search within your photos, your Friends’ photos, and all public photos for a particular person’s face. You get an RSS feed to subscribe to for those search results - do a search for yourself, subscribe to the RSS feed, and now you’ll know whenever someone posts a photo of you to Riya. Pretty mindblowing.

You can also search for photos containing text, but I’m not sure if you can search for particular text. I’ll have to play with it some more.

I’ve done about a dozen rounds of the manual training - you’re presented a grid of your photos, and then can tab through an AJAX-y autocomplete interface to very quickly and easily tell it who each face is. When you’re done with a round of this (Riya recommends doing this at least 5x, but it’s addictive, and fun! :-)), it searches through your photos with the new names you just gave it, and shows you some proposed matches. You tell Riya which of the guesses are NOT the right person. It’s pretty dead on most of the time.

At any rate, I’ve got a lot more playing with this to do, but I can’t wait to have a way to search for all of my photos based on who is in them. If you’re like me, and don’t rename your photos after they come out of the camera, this is like a magic app that will parse through and tag your photos, kind of like what Musicbrainz does for MP3 files and filling in ID3 tags.

They’re just so out of character for this site! I’m not half so irritated by the lost ad revenue (paltry) as I am by the fact that they’re just so alien to this site, and my lifestyle!

I’ve got an open support ticket with Chitika, which shows a status of “on hold” in their ticketing system. I added a note, asking when it would be addressed.

Untill then, I guess I’ll just have to compulsively post about geeky stuff that has nothing to do with you-know-what, to try to chase them away by sheer nerd volume.

So Riya, the fancy face recognition that everyone who has seen a demo has been drooling over, finally went public beta last night. I signed up, and just installed their little uploader app (had to wait until I was at home, because it didn’t work at all behind the proxy at work).

I’m uploading a small sampling of photos right now. Impressions so far? Well, I don’t know. I’ve been waiting for the last 20 minutes for it to analyze, process, and upload the 40 or so photos I told it to upload.

It appears that the little Riya tray application is written in Java, because right now, while it’s doing it’s thing, I can see a javaw.exe child process in Process Explorer. It’s pegging my CPU utilization at 100%, making my X41 tablet very hot, and draining my battery. And it’s only on photo 15 of 47. Great…

It says somewhere on the Riya site to let the uploader run overnight, and boy, they weren’t kidding…

Several video games I’ve been waiting for are coming out this week: Tetris DS, Me and My Katamari, and Metroid Prime: Hunters. I find that I’ve been doing the majority of my gaming on a portable system, like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, because it’s so easy to play for a short time, in between waiting for other stuff, etc. It also keeps me social at home - I can play while I’m sitting on the couch watching TV with Rachel, etc.

I also find that I’ve been playing puzzle/innovative-type games almost exclusively. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been a gamer since I was 4, and I’ve played my fill of first person shooters and racing games, but I’m drawn to games that are a little more “unusual”. Lumines on the PSP is a great example. Nintendogs. Animal Crossing:Wild World, etc.

I’ve been wanting to play a Katamary Damacy game, but with no PS2, I’ve had to wait for the PSP version. Tetris is in my blood, and with all of the cool classic Nintendo themed levels and WiFi internet multiplayer, Tetris DS is a no brainer. And while Metroid Prime: Hunters is a more traditional FPS, the promise of WiFi internet multiplayer, plus the quality we’ve come to expect from a Metroid Prime game combine to add it to my list.

Don’t know if I’ll pick them up all at once, or when, but these are the only games on the horizon that I’ve been excited about, and they all come out this week. Whee!