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I played with Photoshop a bit tonight while watching the Olympics and turned some of my favorite photos into iPhone wallpapers. (It’s certainly not hard to do — just resize any image to 320×480.) Here are 11 that I think look pretty good.

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I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

One of the cool new features of the updated iPhone software is the ability to take a screen shot. If you hold the home button and then press the power button, the system will save a screen capture to your “camera roll” library. You can then email it or save it to your computer when you next synch, just as if it was a photo taken with the camera. I’m sure this will come in very handy for developers and debuggers.

And, of course, it gives us all a cool way to show everyone what we have on our iPhone home screens. Here’s mine. Nifty, eh?

Ryan has finally posted a gallery of photos of the painfully cute Madeline Tober.

I played Porter Valley Country Club with Kelly on Sunday. I shot a 55 on the front nine and a 54 on the back nine for a 109, tied for my best round ever. As usual it took me nine or ten holes to get to the point where I could put all the pieces of my swing together and really feel like I was hitting the ball well. (Kelly promises that will only last for about ten or eleven years.) We played the back nine with a nice couple, Dennis and Linda. (Dennis does “flutter testing” for a living, which means he takes airplanes on test flights to make sure the wings stay attached.) Next weekend I’m going to play in a “night golf” tournament at PVCC, so I’ll have to bring my camera and let you know how that goes …

Heartland USA (Magazine of the American Outdoor Lifestyle), has an article about the Coast Guard in its “Lifestyles” section. The tagline is, “In the state with the smallest stretch of coastline, the U.S. Coast Guard’s motto — Semper Paratus, “Always Ready” — routinely gets tested in big ways.”

That’s my little brother cruising the (very tiny) coast of New Hampshire! Go Mike!

Great flickr photoset: Understanding art for geeks
<hat tip to Jim>

Tonight I found a pretty cool Photoshop Tutorial and used it to edit one of my favorite photos of the J.R. Bean Saloon on Thames Street in Bristol, RI. I’ve never actually been inside the place, but every time I’m in town I find myself taking shots of that wall. The one on the left is my original. The one on the right is my modified version. Click either one for more detail.

   

A map of online communities and related points of interest

I uploaded some gnarly photos — of the sudden, random eye infection I got this morning — to my Flickr page. I’m fine now, thanks.

If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.

Making fun of “homeland security” still makes me giggle. I remember when I first saw these hysterical warnings just after 9/11. They made me laugh until I cried. A half a decade later I still smile when I see them.

Every now and again I’ll see one of these in someone’s forum signature or a blog post and I’m reminded of how great it felt to just laugh back then. It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than five years since that day. It seems like only yesterday.

My mom and dad both love taking photos with their cell phones and then texting them to me. As much as I enjoy receiving them, I hate the way they take for-freaking-ever to display on my phone. I also hate having photos on my cell phone. (You can’t do anything with them there!) Today I had an idea. “I wonder if you can send camera photos via email instead of only via SMS?” I gave it a shot and it works! I don’t know about all carriers, but if you have Cingular, you can text a cell phone photo to an email address instead of to someone else’s cell phone. That is extra cool.

Click “Store”, then “Send in Message”. Instead of selecting a name from your address book, just enter an email address. It’s that simple. Now I can save all these pictures of my dad golfing and my mom’s cats on my computer. I can Photoshop them and crop them and send them to my friends and archive them and treat them just like … well … real digital photos. All I have to do is convince them to do this …

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Talk about cool! At photostamps.com you can upload a photo and they’ll create authentic USPS stamps for you to use. They’re a bit expensive — a sheet of twenty $.39 stamps runs $17.99 — but I can definitely see doing this for wedding invitations or some other important event.

Note: Until March 15th, 2007 you can enter promo code “2007″ and get free shipping. They sell NFL and college stamps, too, so now you can celebrate the Florida Gators National Championship by affixing a UF stamp to every letter you send!

A few weeks ago I saw an image on Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified that I just loved. He had taken a photo of something — I can’t remember what it was — and made it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid. “What a great idea!” I thought. Surely I can figure out how to do that in Photoshop. And I did. So now I’ll share.

How to Create a Polaroid Using Photoshop in 10 Simple Steps

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