One incentive for myself to write here more often, is that in the RSS reader that Coalesce.me draws upon to create the daily cutup, is a subscription to this very blog. I’ve idly thought about writing a script to go through and pull out random images from my personal photo collection and collage them together in some way. If I put some images into this post, there is a chance they will be selected for the daily cutup.
But how to select a random image? Well, are large portion of the photos I have taken, mainly w/ my Canon EOS M10, are in my ~/Pictures folder. So a quick google around for “linux filesytem pick random file” I found a suitable command mentioned here:
The actual recommended way did not work for me, but further down in the comments someone suggested using “shuf” which is a command I used in the cutup script also.
john@xianzai:~$ find Pictures/ -type f | shuf -n1
Pictures/2017/08/24/IMG_6352.JPG
Yielded the photo I took from the inside of the National Museum of China a few years ago.
It gives me a way to explore my photos directory and potentially insert them into the collage maker. It’s a slim chance but you can’t win if you don’t play. Unless it’s the lotto, in which case I agree with Fran Lebowitz on your chances there. Out of the 400 images generated each day, I usually only look at about 40 or 50 to insert into the daily cutup. But on some days like today, I’ll look at a few more. The ones that didn’t make it, like this one.
I should probably do something more productive with my time. But I don’t have much of it, time that it is, on this sunny and warm spring day. Above is image #1 generated today. Works for me as a basic digital collage. Here is #400, the last in the batch:
Welp, that is all the time I have for day. Someone just opened my door and said, “It’s a Norwegian Blue”. Time to go.
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