mysocalledlifecast.com -- the end.

To take full advantage of Flickr, you should use a JavaScript-enabled browser and
install the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player.

One afternoon this past summer I threw together the code for a project that briefly lived at mysocalledlifecast.com. In one sense it was intended as a light-hearted parody of the phenomenon known as “lifecasting.” But alongside this playfulness I had genuinely thoughtful intentions based on a simple premise: curate a view of the world as seen from my MacBook Pro. My thought was that I spend the majority of my waking hours looking at its monitor while it has an iSight camera looking right back at me, and it might be nice to get a look at all that goes on around me, all that I miss while I’m busy working.

So I wrote a Python script that would snap a photo from the iSight and attached the script to a launchd scheduled task. I bought a Flickr Pro account and tied my script into their API, and every fifteen minutes my Mac took a photo, uploaded it to Flickr, and plugged a database so the image would display on mysocalledlifecast.com.

The first photo was taken on August 8 at 10:45pm, and I decided to stop the script and bring the site down early this morning at 12:45am. Over the course of 78 days my Mac took 6,997 photos. And during that time it caught me making countless embarassing faces; it picked up on my roommate, my coworkers, and random strangers; it saw me naked a few times; it even once caught me in bed with a woman.

But it finally came time to bring the site down today because I treated myself this afternoon to a new Nikon D-90 and wanted to reclaim my Flickr stream for other purposes.

So to commemorate the end of the lifecast I thought I’d run the photos through the MacOSaiX mosaic generator. I configured an 81x81-tile mosaic of 640x480 images to consist of 6,561 of the original 6,997 chosen at random. After my processor ran for two hours at roughly the temperature on the surface of the sun it produced this image. The original was taken in mid-September on a patio on Federal St. in Boston’s financial district (it should come as no surprise that I got caught smoking a cigarette) and this mosaic is composed entirely of lifecast photos, with no duplicates of or alterations to the originals.

Now it’s time for me to get back to a way of life in which I can sit at my computer and, with a clear conscience and no fear of the consequences, gleefully—acrobatically, even, should I so desire—pick my nose.

Comments

jplanaux says:

I enjoyed the photo and the story behind it. Nice project! Thanks for sharing.
Posted 3 weeks ago. ( permalink )

Would you like to comment?

[?]

	matt.langer's photostream
		15 uploads

Additional Information

Taken on October 27, 2008

Viewed 125 times
Replaced on October 27, 2008

Add to your map

Yay location removed

...

(Some formats are OK.)

Or, cancel.

Go to the map

You	Sign in \| Create Your Free Account
Explore	Places \| Last 7 Days \| This Month \| Popular Tags \| The Commons \| Creative Commons \| Search
Help	Community Guidelines \| The Help Forum \| FAQ \| Sitemap \| Help by Email

mysocalledlifecast.com -- the end.

Comments

jplanaux says:

Would you like to comment?

matt.langer's photostream

Tags

Additional Information