A Thousand and Oneth Post! - The British Library Makes Millions of Graphic Gifts.

Yesterday was Phil Are GO!'s A Thousandth post, which is an arbitrary milestone based on the way humans count things, which is probably based on the number of fingers we have. Hooray I guess! That makes this one here our Thousand and Oneth post, which we are using to commemorate this largely meaningless achievement.

To mark this seemingly significant occasion, the staff will have the day off, taking some time to reflect on humans' desire to get excited over things because the number is nice and round. A Thousand is a nice and very round number, I think you'll agree. So, we'll let the rest of The Internet spew some content into your eye-holes today.

The British Library dumps over a million images onto Flickr and the Public Domain. Last December, The British Library teamed up with Microsoft to scan an undisclosed number of books from the 17th to 19th centuries, which  means they're out of copyright. The images from those digitized books were programmatically dumped onto a Flickr page, meaning it was a huge process done by computers, so nobody has cataloged - or maybe even looked at - all the pictures. There are gobs of images, and the British Library is encouraging everybody to use them however they like, and help them organize the whole mess by adding tags to the images in Flickr.

To find (and rude-finger-save) a high resolution version of any image in there, look for the three dots icon to the right of an image. This will spawn a menu with DOWNLOAD / ALL SIZES in it. In the subsequent screen, you can choose to view the image at original size. From there, you can do a normal RIGHT-CLICK-SAVE IMAGE.

Here are some gems we found. Be careful. It's a fascinating time sink, and you can lose hours this way.

Now Improved with the Double Strength of Two Fancy Men!