If you use Twitter you’ll probably be familiar with the various link shortening sites used to crunch those long URLs down to something you can squeeze in a Twitter post. This is the same for images. Attach an image to a post and the image is saved on a server and a replaced with a short URL. Twitpic, Yfrog and Twitgoo are all good examples. I noticed that the links it returned had random charters at the end, like so…

http://twitpic.com/wdsey

So, as usual, this got me thinking. Could I just type any characters after the URL and still get an image? Like so:

http://twitpic.com/dino

Was any image ever given a rude word? Has anyone even noticed? Turns out the answer was yes to all of the above.

Not quite figured out what a ‘good’ one is yet but it’s maybe “the word you type in represents image itself” or the super rare, your name is the text AND you are in the image too. Not sure if it has a name yet either, so I’m notionally calling it Linkwhacking after the GoogleWhacking phenomenon from back in 2001. Seems appropriate.

Anyways, here’s are some I’ve found…

http://twitpic.com/dino Little does she know who she’s linked to	http://twitpic.com/drugs Jamba Juice seems pretty addictive
http://twitpic.com/3gs iPhone 3Gs? Nope, it a Nokia	http://twitpic.com/sn0w Bit of a cheat but sn0w has snow in the pic. Nearly!
http://twitpic.com/cute Hmmm, a Ducati 848 in red… cute!	http://twitpic.com/life Sad when you can get it all in one box
http://twitpic.com/win What’s not to like? Win!	http://twitpic.com/fail Caption reads “French EU Presidency: Facing an Environmental Emergency.” Fail!
http://twitpic.com/iraq Ironic how Iraq is the quintessential American scene	http://twitpic.com/osama Seems innocuous until you realise it’s a team called The Bombers. Doh!
http://twitpic.com/pc Suitably digital	http://twitpic.com/spunk Just wrong in so many ways

Having visited a fair few of the pages, many of the comments left with the images are from fellow ‘linkwhackers’, so it’s clearly being noticed already.

So now the hunt is on for more. It works equally well on other image sharing servers, so go find some my friends. Would be interested to hear what you find.

No real reason to this post other than I recently had to use a circuit board in a design and couldn’t find a high res example anywhere on the interwebs. I ended up scanning one I had to hand so thought I’d share. Download the large JPEG here (3114×3763 pixels @ 1.84mb). Hope it helps.

Wow, I’ve just discovered Applescript… after 15 years!

If you have a Mac and you’re even remotely drawn towards programming or fiddling, you’ve got to have a fiddle with Applescript. Never really though about it but had one of those nagging “I wish I could just…” issues with resizing images to send via email or post to blogs.

All I wanted was a simple drag-and-drop utility to resize my images ready for posting. After a few searches, I found a thread about using Applescript to do it and some sample script. I looked in my Applications folder and there it was, the Applescript editor. A copy-paste later, a bit of editing and saving the code as an application later… I had a desktop app to resize my images! Yay!

I do have plans to make one app that asks you what size you want before starting the batch, but I haven’t found the time to fiddle some more. In the meantime, I thought I’d share the ‘drop-apps’ I created from the script mentioned above. I’ve got these on my desktop and I just drag an image on to resize it. The app will save the new image in the same location but prefix the filename with the new size.

There is an app for each of the sizes I regularly require. If you need a different size, just drag the app onto your Applescript editor and change the “set the target_width to 640″ to whatever you need.

Here are the ones I use:

Resize to 240 pixels

Resize to 320 pixels

Resize to 640 pixels

Resize to 800 pixels

I also experimented with an app that converted PC remote VPN filepaths from our work server and opened the file on your desktop. All very cool. You’ll be surprised just how powerful it is so give it a go!

Hope it comes in handy!