Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Being a huge fan of Flickr, I am always trying to bring more people to the service.  Because more people = more images and more comments, which, of course, means more fun and inspiration.

One of the most frequent reasons NOT to use Flickr that I’ve heard coming mostly from amateur and professional photographers was that Flickr is only available with white background and only with up to medium-sized images.  That is true.  While Flick is constantly improving their service, some features are still not there.  And maybe they are not coming any time soon.  But.  That doesn’t mean that there is no work around.  After all, the world of technology is blessed with plenty of excellent open source software these days.  So, here is how you can solve the problem of size and color, if you are one of those people who prefers it the other way around.

1. Get yourself a copy of an real web browser - Firefox.
2. Install Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
3. Install Flickr On Black user script for Greasemonkey.

Once you’ve done the above steps, go to Flickr and find a picture that you want to enjoy on black or in a different color.  On the image page, scroll down to the part where you can see “Additional information” on the right side.  Among them, you’ll see a few new links.  “View on black: Regular, Large” will be among them.

Click, and you are done.  The link will take you to another page, which will look something like this.  You can switch between Regular and Large size, as well as between black and white backgrounds right on that page.

P.S.: While you are getting Flickr on Black user script for Greasemonkey, look around.  There are thousands of other scripts to customize anything and everthing from Google search results and GMail to IMDB movie information and Twitter messeging.

P.P.S.: Alternatively, you can take a look at Flickr “Lights Out” or “Flickr in mostly black and orange” user scripts for Greasemonkey.

P.P.P.S: Many Greasemonkey scripts work perfectly in browsers other than Firefox - Opera, Safari, etc.  But I’d still recommend to use Firefox.

Some weeks ago, as part of their 10th anniversary celebration, Google presented Google Circa 2001 (yes, I know, I am doing very old news right now - Slashdot, CyberNet News).  Google Circa 2001 is basically the way Google was in 2001, including the web index of those times.  What’s the big deal?  Well, for those of us who were on the web from back then, it provides for a way to see how things were different.

For example, back in 2001 I was better known as “Leonid Mamtchenkov“, not “Leonid Mamchenkov”.  That was due to another spelling in my Russian passport.  Also, my web site looked pretty different from what it is now.  But it was already a blog, even if in the simplest form.  Surprisingly even, I found a few posts that were not migrated to the current archives, or got lost somehow after a few CMS and back-end script changes.  I’ll restore them for historical purposes later on.

Oh, sweet memories …

Maxim and I went to the see the show of the famous Medrano Circus on Sunday.  It was supposedely the last day of their tour, but gladly they decided to delay their departure and will be staying until Wednesday, October 29th.

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Yesterday I discovered one of those banking paradoxes.  If you have a check and you want to get the money the same day, but I don’t want to turn the whole amount into cash, then you still shouldn’t go for “deposit check” operation.  The thing is that depositing the check to an account takes two to three days, because check needs to be cleared.  However, you can cash the check and then deposit cash to the account.  Both of these operations are imeediate.

Puzzled.

I’ve been ordering stuff from Amazon.co.uk rather frequently.  I never had any problems with any of the products or deliveries.  Until my last order.  For some reason it just didn’t come.  And because it was a DataPost delivery, it couldn’t have been tracked either.

So, when all the dates for estimated delivery passed, I emailed back to Amazon asking them if they have any information about that order.  They told me that they haven’t, but if the order won’t arrive in the next few days (they gave me a specific date), then I should just let them know and they would resend it free of charge.

The date they mentioned came and went but the order still wasn’t here.  So I waited for another couple of days and asked Amazon again.  They emailed me back and said that they will place a replacement order within the same day.  A few minutes later they confirmed that the replacement order has been placed, and just wanted to know if I still want all of the items, since one of the DVDs that I had on the list changed status from “In Stock” to “Usually ships within the next 4-6 business days”.  I said that I don’t mind about more delay and would rather just get all of the things that I ordered.

And that was it.  Two weeks later the re-placement order came in.  And now let me state the obvious: I am a really satisfied happy customer.  My respects and thanks go to Amazon for handling the situation the best way they could.

P.S.: A few days after the replacement order arrived, the original order came too.  Very much delayed, but it came through as well.  Because I am a greedy bastard, and because those DVDs are just so good, and because Christmas is almost upon us, I won’t be sending one of this orders back.  I’ll keep both of them.  But I will for sure order more, a lot more from Amazon.  Thank you, and an early Merry Chrismas.