Category: goodies

Made myself a new iPhone background. Enjoy.

For the background pattern I used this pattern from Wikimedia commons: Japanese_Wave_Pattern.svg. [wikimedia.org] It’s available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International [creativecommons.org] license. That means this image is also available under the same license so go ahead and do what you want with it.

The daruma was traced from this image also on Wikimedia, under this same license: Daruma_doll,_cut_out_03.jpg [wikimedia.org].

Dimensions are based on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. With parallax turned off the daruma’s sit just above the dock. Your mileage may vary.

I noticed a spike in my Flickr [flickr.com] stats recently:

Most days I have a number of photos in the 3 or 8 views range and maybe one or two photos in the 9 to 15 views range. But on the day in question one photo got a lot of attention:

A little more digging and most of the views originated from Stylem [stylem.com] who sell an iPhone application called “backgrounds” (get it here in iTunes [itunes.apple.com].) The application (which I have on my iPhone) allows one to browse and download various images other have submitted to the iPhone to use as wallpapers. Apparently there are people who like my photo of the Iwo Jima Pirates graffiti in DC.

However, the photo is not very well optimized for the iPhone display. So I took a few minutes and made a version that (I think) is better optimized for the iPhone screen. Here it is:

A blast from the past; images I created for my desktop when I was living in London long ago. Not so amazing when I look at them now but maybe someone will find them interesting. Long ago they were available here on Confusion for download. Now they are back. So, here you go, with the original explanations too… ‘Cause like I said ‘the internet never forgets‘ [confusion.cc].

Remember that everything below is from 2002… exercise extreme caution when trying to wrap your brain around anything I said.

Nebula

This was the first set of backgrounds I made, the “nebula” image is actually a color inverted cutout from a NASA image take by the Hubble Space Telescope. (The original image is here [oposite.stsci.edu]) Personally I think the first background is the best, the puzzle idea is cool, but I could not get it to work the way I wanted…

Dead link. You can find the image of the center of Centaurus A here [hubblesite.org] on the current Hubble site. Specifically, this is the source image [hubblesite.org].

Anomaly

I was just playing around with the “render” filter one day because I was board with the background I had and these three are the results. Kind of based on a “analysis” of deep space anomaly you would see on some computer screen in Star Trek. (The code in the images is some Lisp I wrote for a school project.)

Plasma

This set is fairly simple, using the “render ➔ clouds ➔ solid noise” filter and a little color manipulation. The second image then uses the “distort➔ whirl and pinch” filter, I think it needs a little something more, but it’s nice. The third picture is another “analysis” type idea—a patterned gradient and a little text.

Star Birth

A couple of nice space themed backgrounds, one with “new” stars one without. Ohhh, space, simple and classic.

I’ve been using this as my desktop wall paper for a while. I like the contrast of the orange on the black and white. And the split into three panels gives it a little bit more interest (Besides the original image—from the Auyathya [confusion.cc] photo set was not the right aspect ratio to make a desktop image. Anyway, after several months I decided to stop slacking and put the wallpaper up here. After all; that’s what the ‘goodies’ section is all about.