You may know that Flickr is one of the largest repositories of freely
usable public domain and Creative Commons photos in the world, hosting
collections contributed by libraries, national archives, foundations,
museums, galleries, and individual users (I've uploaded more
than 10,000 CC-BY-SA images of my own). However, with its latest
redesign, Flickr has made is very difficult to copy the images it has
been entrusted with, and nearly impossible to correctly attribute them
in accord with their license terms.

Stephen sez, "Masterful gadget-maker Roger Wood poses alongside some of his whimsical clock creations at his Hamilton-based workshop and steampunk emporium, Klockwerks.
When he came out in his goggles and steampunk kit, I told him, 'You look so much like an inventor.'
He answered, 'I AM an inventor.'"

Roger was my neighbour for a decade, and his workshop was always a wonderland. I haven't been to his new place in Hamilton, but if this picture is any indication, it's every bit as wonderful.

Matthew sez, "I just finished making this bento box featuring laser cut nori and thought you might care for it. The bento box features a scene from Princess Jellyfish (Kuragehime) as well as some good old fashioned tempura shrimp, shu mai, grilled octopus, and tamagoyaki."

MrBrickLabel has a Flickr set of absolutely gorgeous vintage Chinese firecracker labels.

I have been collecting firecracker and firework labels since I was 5 years old (1968). I appraise, buy, sell and trade firecracker labels. Everything you see here could possibly be for trade. I will try to post everything eventually. Hopefully more collectors can do the same and we can use this as a trading and sharing tool...

Eger posted many of these on the anniversaries of their source's original publications: "The original Cloned Photos from my 365 Days of Clones were created, taken and edited on the same date as the original photograph or on the birthday of the photographer or artist who created the image. There were; however, many images that I missed, didn't have the time to create or hadn't thought about that I have now begun to go back and create in my new series."

An excellent long-read about Flickr and Yahoo by Mat Honan at Gizmodo today. Anyone who has loved and been let down by the once-great photo-sharing site now caught in the purple zombie's death spiral will nod in agreement throughout. The opening graf:

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

Avi sez, "AFOL Shannon Sproule built this charming Raygun entirely from LEGO parts." Shannon calls it the Russian Tokarev TT-34 Atomiser and notes, "Every mechanonaut was issued with a Tokarev laser pistol. They were small, lightweight and proved very reliable on the lunar battlefield." As this implies, there's a whole contrafactual mythology that this belongs to, called Battle for the Moon.

Further to Mark's bizarre old Valentines post from yesterday: Flickr user Page of Bats has assembled a marvellous and often inexplicable collection of tasteless, gross and weird vintage V-day cards. I can't figure out of some of these were from the likes of MAD magazine, or if they were all created in earnest by clueless card companies.

Mynonymouse sez, "The Library of Congress just posted a Flickr set of lovely WPA posters. There are awesome ones about keeping your teeth clean, science and one that seems to be about drunk driving but also might warn of a previously unknown deadly reactive incompatibility between gas and whiskey."

These are awesome designs, but it's a disappointment that the LoC posted them at such crummy low-resolutions. The nation's treasures deserve better than that.

Update: See the comments for lots of places where you can get higher rez ones.

This 1957 ad for "Chubettes," a line of clothes for "plump" youngsters, betrays an ad agency where the person who thought up the product names was vastly outclassed by the illustrator. I mean, seriously: was there ever an overweight kid who greeted the news that Mom was buying her some "Chubettes" with delight?

Fiona Romeo, who has worked with Greenwich Observatory on some successful "citizen science" initiatives, gave a presentation called "The near future of citizen science," explaining what she's learned and what she thinks the future will hold:

It’s my contention that the near future of science is all about honing the division of labour between professionals, amateurs and bots...

Selecting Flickr as our platform for the competition immediately got us to ask, what would be the space equivalent of geotagging? Astrotagging, obviously. If astrophotographers were to accurately describe what their photo depicts, and where in space that is, we could create a user-generated map of the night sky. But – as you might have already been thinking – working out where you are in space is much trickier than putting a pin on a map because there are the added dimensions of depth and movement. In addition to the space equivalents of longitude and latitude (RA and Dec), we required pixel scale and orientation.

Would anyone really go to the trouble of figuring out and tagging all of that information? Probably not. We were going to need a bot.

Fortunately Flickr isn’t just ‘a great place to be a photo’, the API also allows you to develop bots that act autonomously for a user or a group. Early bots in use on Flickr include Hipbot and HAL. Hipbot, for example, automates some of the moderation tasks in the well-defined squared circle Group, automatically removing photos that are not square, or are too small.

Carl Jara writes, "Calavera del Toro: Gold Medal sand sculpture by Carl Jara, depicts Occupy Wall Street in a Day of the Dead satire. Created last weekend at Sand Castle Days in South Padre Island, Texas. A banker and a politician sit comfortably toasting their overflowing champagne flutes to the skull of their recently slain Wall Street bull, draped in a Golden Parachute."

Niagara Falls, Ontario's Nightmares Fear Factory has a Flickr feed full of visitors being terrorized in its environs. I grew up with the spookhouses of Niagara Falls, and they can be incredibly scary, even the basic Lundy's Lane spookhouse, which is often just a dark maze populated by bored locals with night-vision scopes who whisper menacingly in your ear or touch you unexpectedly. I've never tried Nightmares, but it has a reputation for being seriously terrifying.

Esther Dyson snapped this vertiginous shot of a glass floor at the Digital Moscow event. I have a mild fear of heights, but this kind of thing goes straight into my spine and my digestive-tract's pucker-reflex without consulting my brain.

Sam Gellman's tourist photos from North Korea's Mass Games are wonderful and weird studies in repetition at scale, where all sorts of pomp and spectacle are performed with thousands of identically dressed performers in close-order drill, which echoes the enormous housing blocks and all the other mass-scale motifs of Stalinist bureaucracy.