Larry, Trow and I did some F-Spot hacking this week, and built a super-cool quick preview feature. Hold down ALT as you move over the photos and a little preview window appears. This is great for me, because I can never tell if a picture is any good from the tiny thumbnails, but big thumbnails mean you get fewer pictures on the screen and double-clicking the image to switch into single-image mode takes too much time.

"Get it out! Get it out!"

I wrote a systray applet that uses XRANDR to change your screen resolution.

And of course Joe and Robert's netapplet is a god-send for laptop users like myself. Two clicks to switch between ethernet and wireless, or to change wireless networks.

And in other hacking news, today I spent some time on my activity-tracking tool, timeline. People laughed at me for writing it in shell originally, so I redid it all in C# and built a systray applet that displays how long you've been running the current application, and can show you a pie chart of your application use patterns. Trow wrote the PieChart widget.

This week I held most of my meetings using Skype and VNC.

In January I spent a couple of weeks in Rio, as part of my first vacation in almost two years. I have this whole CDC-be-damned attitude when it comes to prohibitions on using third-world icecubes, drinking third-world water, or eating third-world street food, which usually makes me a daring stud, but in January it made me violently ill and that illness lingered for months after I got home.

The physical drama of Rio is pretty unique: you turn a street corner downtown and three blocks ahead a steep mountainside rises out of the urban maze, lush jungle green against the grey-beige city. The beaches are crowded, and little islands dot the shoreline along the coast. And as you've probably heard, people walk around with no clothes on. Not just the beautiful people; I watched a mass of skin and rippling fat spill out of a bus wearing only a speedo, and thought: where does he keep his money? or his keys?

Copacabana

My friend Costin says that northern Brazil is "America Squared." He's got a point: the store shelves are piled high with Red Bull and bleach-front jeans. Energy drinks seemed especially appropriate there, but I couldn't find a sedative stronger than chamomile in the whole city. Save, of course, the Caipirinha.

I only spent 12 days in Brazil, so though I may have impressions, I can't claim any real understanding or deep insight. And mainly I was just convalescing and admiring what an incredible city Brazil has. But I did do one interesting thing while I was there.

Built up on the hillsides that surround the city are intricate and crowded slums called favelas. The best-known favela in Rio is Cidade de Deus, made famous by that fabulous movie of the same name.

In our hostel, there was a guy who took small groups into Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio, with about 250,000 inhabitants. You ride a motorcycle taxi up to the top of the hill and then walk back down through the favela's twisty, shoulder-width streets. My friends and I had serious reservations about going — it seemed exploitative to tour someone's neighborhood, especially if that someone has much less money than you, notably not a feeling I have about walking around the wealthy neighborhoods in Boston or taking the 9-mile drive in Monterrey — but curiosity eventually got the better of us and we went.

From the top of Rocinha.

And whether or not we were exploiting them, people were very friendly, and little kids ran out of their houses excited to see us. I let them use my camera, and showed them pictures of themselves on the LCD, and they'd laugh and call their friends over.

As we're nearing the bottom of the hill and starting to head home, I was thinking about how much the kids enjoyed using my camera, and wouldn't it be interesting to see what they photographed on their own, if they had their own cameras.

And so The Plan was formed.

A few of us from the hostel spent the next several hours buying out the disposable camera inventory of every street-side camera store we could find. Prices varied widely, though film and developing were very expensive in Rio, so there was much talk of "volume discounts" and we had to buy a few underwater cameras that would never be used underwater because stores were closing and our mission was Urgent.

The hand-off.