Polanoidal Shot of the Day

Posted by on Jan 19 2024

So once again, I shot I took almost 15 years made it to the front page of the Polanoid website. I wonder how long Polanoid.net will remain online before it will disappear forever. Today there was a post on hackernews linking to a million ways to die on the web. Based on that, I think the Polanoid will go out with a whimper, perhaps by disclaimer, abandonment (which it already mostly is), or personal issues. I only go to this site when one of my old photos makes the front page. Newer photos have no chance to make due to an outdated algorithm they use.

One day that will happen to this site. I still get the occasional SEO plea for place links on some old posts, and even cheeky offers to buy the domain to be used to spam. That’s just the way the web is evolved to.  I don’t have an audience anymore, but at the same time, I won’t let the domain fall to lowest common denominator of web scum these. It’ll just go away quietly.

Perhaps Polanoid will also away quietly. One day I’ll look at my last few posts and see I haven’t gotten a shot of the day from Polanoid in a year or so. Out nostalgia’s sake, I’ll check the domain and see that its not longer there. Maybe sometime in the future, someone will have recovered their favourites/bookmarks from an old Windows 7 backup. They click to my website, and its no longer up.

That’s just fine with me. Its been a good run.

Polanoid Shot of the Day (from May)

Posted by on Jul 10 2023

I recently checked the pretty much defunct polanoid.net site and realised I won another shot of the day (it was pretty prestigious in internet terms a long time ago). This was was taken at Pakiri Beach, the expired effects are the psychedelic swirls around the drift wood.

UV ID Polaroid expire October 2009 – Shot March 2022

Posted by on Mar 14 2022

I recently found the time to shoot some polaroids again. It was UV ID, expired in October 2009. They have been refrigerated, but unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean they will work. The medium tends to stick together, and it takes delicate and nimble fingers to resuscitate them. Out of a pack a of 10, only 5 came through. The first 5 where stuck together, and it took a pair a tweezers to make sure the paper ‘tabs’ where properly pulled through the ‘ringer’. Rescuing half a pack is a pretty fair deal, I have lost whole packs before. Not all of them turned out the way I wanted too, but that’s life.

Here’s a couple of from pack. I will say that UV-ID is my favourite Polaroid film. Its got a weird and wonderful indigo cast (I believe its the same as 669, but when held up the UV light it shows a polaroid watermark – it was used for badges, ids, and the such).

This is a roadside monument on the South Island of New Zealand. The swirls in the sky are not clouds, rather its the effect of the expired film.

We grew some pumpkins this year, the smallest ones are ornamental, the larger yellow/green striped ones are Styrian (very tasty seeds), the smaller orange ones are ‘Hokkaido’ or ‘Kuri’ pumpkins, which have a rich chestnutty flavour. So why not take a photo of the harvest?

I also found a little half frame camera in my glove box which had about 60 photos on the dial, may be time to bring out the development kit again!

Trypt.am – Psychedelic Clinical Trials Database

Posted by on Feb 28 2022

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020, while in isolation, I decided to pick up programming again. I stopped programming as my daily job about 12 years ago. During isolation, I dabbled in a few new and old languages (Swift, Perl, Rust), but in the end I found that my old stomping grounds in PHP was perfect for the job (PHP had also come a long way during my 10 year sabbatical from programming). The project was for the Entheos Foundation of New Zealand, a research and education charity for psychedelics.

Trypt.am aggregates clinical trial data from the following sources: ClinicalTrials.gov, ClinicalTrialsRegister.eu
Anzctr.org.au, Trialregister.nl, and Pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. The first 2 feeds above are updated automatically, all the others are manual ‘data dumps’ which I have to upload. The site is still in beta, but its functional.

I’ve since resigned from the Entheos, so its unlikely trypt.am will be updated. Still, I’ll keep it up and running, if not just to see see the steady increase in psychedelic clinical trials over the years.

Polaroid shot of the day

Posted by on Nov 04 2021

It was a surprise to receive this email today:

dear parahanga!!!

please have a short look at the cover of polanoid.net [ http://www.polanoid.net/cover ] (http://www.polanoid.net/jump/?to=pictures&uid=13197&pid=385985)

**CONGRATULATION**
you have won the worldfamous ShotOfTheDay award!

not only is your picture on the cover for the next 24 hours, generating endless fame and glory, but also you have won a shining 10 euros coupon for supersensitive shopping at SUPERSENSE! [ http://the.supersense.com/ ]

here is your very own special couponcode worth 10 EUR: sotd_ha-ha-ha
(minimum orderval 50 EUR)

again big congrats and thank you so much for sharing your polaroids and making this site such an unique place.

you rock

the polanoid team

It’s actually one of my favourite polaroids, and it was taken over ten years ago (2009). Reading the message logs I see a lot people surprised that they also won Shot of the Day – it was bloody hard to win 10 years ago! The algorithm for selection seems to favour older photos. This show’s the sad state of polanoid, its essentially been put on to maintenance mode by the founders, just a step above life support. The community is not engaged, and owners have moved on to other projects. Still, notifications like this are nice: its a time capsule that showcases amazing analogue photography.

I still have some polaroid film in my fridge, one day I’ll have a fire in my belly and shoot again.