Benji’s owner Petr Hlabovic, 35, said: “I’m very relieved to have him back. I’ve got no idea what he thought he was up to – he certainly didn’t pick up the habit from me.”

There is no mention of whether the unmentionables were returned to their rightful owners. Link -via Arbroath

The design of the label is simple and clear, clear as the morning sky over the Charles Bridge on sunny summer morning. We carefully collect the air from the most popular places in the city.

Air Contains:
20% - air from Wenceslas Square
20% - air from Charles Bridge
25% - air from Old Town Square
15% - air from Prague Castle
10% - air from Lesser Town
10% - air from Zlata Street.

Link - via inspire me now

According to an article published in the Pražský deník newspaper in March 2009, the system was no longer in active use but current owners Telefonica O2 were continuing to maintain it and considering some sort of further use for it.

I hope they will be able to preserve the 55-kilometer system for posterity. Link -Thanks, Jeff!

You know how we occasionally hear of a stolen garden gnome or some other toy taking a trip around the world, with photographic evidence? There’s also the Flat Stanley project that sends a foldable character on long trips. Now here’s a travel agency that will do all the work for you! At least in Prague. A Czech travel agency will take your toy around the city and record the tour in photographs. You’ll also get travel updates and a surprise. Link -via Arbroath

I’ve been a big fan of the panorama photos of Jeffrey Martin of 360Cities for a while now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that he has just taken what could be the world’s largest spherical panorama, an 18-gigapixel shot of Prague.

Here’s how he did it:

I used a Canon 5d mark 2 and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a robotic device which turned the camera in tiny, precise increments, in every direction. All together, 40 gigabytes of images were shot. These images were then stitched together using PTGui. The resulting panorama was adjusted for color, contrast, sharpness, etc. in Photoshop. Afterwards, the image was cut into lots of “tiles” and uploaded to our server. When you view the image online, you only load a few of these “tiles” at one time.

How long did you spend stitching this panorama?

Between loading the initial raw files into the computer, and having the panorama stitched, it took about a week. It took 3 additional weeks to fine-tune the image.

What kind of computer did you use?

I used a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM. After a week of frustration, I also bought an SSD, which helped to speed up some tasks a bit. If I will make this image again, I will buy a new computer.
What is dimension of this panorama, and size it takes on disk?

The final image exists as a 120 gigabyte photoshop large (PSB) file. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints. The panorama online exists as a few hundred thousand small tiles (in JPEG format), and they take up about 1 gigabyte of disk space.

Jeffrey was kind enough to invite all of us on a treasure hunt: in a couple of days, he’ll release a set of clues for you to find 30 things in the photo. The first person who got it right will win $1000.

Links: The Panorama | The Treasure hunt – Thanks Jeffrey!

There was a problem in the segregated Jewish ghetto of 15th century Prague: there were more people dying than there was land to bury them.

The solution? They were buried on top of one another. Here’s the unique story of the layered burial of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, Czech Republic:

Over the centuries, there has been close to 12 layers of people buried within the confines of the Old Jewish cemetery. It has been estimated that there are approximately 12,000 tombstones presently visible and there may be as many as 100,000 burials in all.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

Polish Czech artist EPOS257 created this street art exhibition in Prague featuring the Orghoi khorkhoi, or the Mongolian Death Worm.

For those of you who are blessedly unaware, the Mongolian death worm is the fiercest creature ever to come out of the Gobi Desert. And just how fierce is the worm? Well, let’s put it like this: it kills by spewing forth sulfuric acid and discharging electricity. (Graboids, anyone?)

Link – via Wooster Collective

As if we needed further proof of the vast reaches of the internet, and the frightening reality that what people put on the net stays on the net, comes the story of the Smith family of St. Louis.

Danielle Smith had taken a photo of her family last year and sent it to friends, as well as posted it on social networking sites.  The photo shows her and her husband holding two kids.

About 10 days ago, one of Smith’s college friends was driving through Prague when he spotted their huge smiling faces in the window of a store specializing in European food. He snapped a few pictures and sent them to a flabbergasted Smith.

“It’s a life-size picture in a grocery store window in Prague — my Christmas card photo!” said Smith, 36, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon.

Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, said the photo was from the Internet. Details were sparse, but he said he thought it was computer-generated. When told it was a real photo — of a real family — he said he started taking steps to remove it.

“We’ll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology,” said Bertuccio, who said he would send the Smiths a bottle of good wine if they lived in his eastern European country.

The Smiths and photographer Gina Kelly hadn’t authorized anyone to use the pictures. Kelly said she has asked a professional photographers’ organization to help figure out how her image wound up in Prague.

Link | The ad in question

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

Panoramic photographer Jeffrey Martin of 360 Cities took this 2 gigapixel panorama stitched together from "a few hundreds shots" taken with a camera with a 70 mm zoom lens, handheld from the windows of the Petrin Tower in Prague.

To get a full appreciation of the panorama, first zoom out by pressing CTRL on your keyboard, then zoom back in by pressing SHIFT – Thanks Jeffrey!

From the distance, this looks just like your average missing dog poster, but take a closer look …

- via OneCelledCreature [Flickr]

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jake.