I like to keep shit interplanetary and ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with the surface photos of Mars. This morning, I find myself apeshit-agog at the largest Mars image repository I have ever seen or heard of that’s publically accessible. 1.7 terabytes—over 1,100 high resolution images and counting, each averaging a gigabyte in size! There’s a nifty gallery viewer, offering up several down-sized versions of images so you can browse to your heart’s content. Each image has it’s own description and relevant information. There’s even an RSS feed to keep you in the loop as new photos are added to the database. Awesome. It’s a great way to kill a few hours, geeking out or looking for that sweet alien desktop wallpaper you know you must have in order to concentrate properly.

Check out this image of what’s thought to be a cavern entrance or sinkhole in an immense lava plain. Fucking unreal. Fucking interplanetary—just the way I like it.

I was doing some reading about EXIF data and came across a quirk that I’ve been having some fun fooling around with.

Most digital cameras embed EXIF data into every image, listing such things as the type of camera, date and time the photo was taken and other details as well as a thumbnail of the image so that the file previews faster.

Most of the time, this information is lost or at least updated when an image is edited. However, sometimes the original EXIF data will carry over. Depending on the editing tool or circumstance, an image file that’s been cropped, re-sized, oriented or otherwise edited will sometimes still carry an embedded thumbnail of it’s original state, fresh off the digital camera.

There’s a few tools out there for pulling he thumbnails out of an image’s EXIF data. I decided to use jhead with my Kubuntu laptop (there are OSX and Windows clients as well, but I’ve never used them). After installing, fire up a terminal and type:

jhead -st 'thumbnail-output-filename' 'desired-image.jpg'

If there is a thumbnail embedded in the image it will be extracted to whatever filename you specify. You can then view it with whichever program you choose.

Now understand that there may not be a thumbnail and nine out of ten photos that do have them will be exact miniatures of their parent files. Still, one out of those ten photos can yield some interesting shit. Just take a minute to think of the various and plentiful reasons why a person or organization may need to edit, obscure or otherwise change an image’s original state and you might get the point of this.

To give an example, I took this image from Wikipedia, (mainly because of it’s not under some restrictive copyright and work safe) and after saving it locally, used jhead to extrat the EXIF thumbnail giving me the image below.

If you compare the thumbnail below to the image linked in the paragraph above, you can clearly see that it has been rotated ninety degrees right with parts of two additional statues and a window being completely cropped out of the image.

Here’s a link to a page where someone uses a script to search the internet, checking for and displaying images with EXIF thumbnails whose dimensions are not perfectly scaled (like the file has been cropped or otherwise changed since it’s creation) and displays them for your amazement/boredom.

So many wacky possibilities. Go spend some time on Flickr, Friendster, or MySpace. Try it on documents that have had sections digitally blacked out for confidential reasons. Go forth and be snoopy.

I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.