I just found this great set on Flickr, dutifully titled (the) Japanese writing system. It has, obviously, lots of signs and things with Japanese written on them. Most of the photos have notes or commentary explaining the words or grammar in the image.

And, in conjunction with something like John's Background Switcher (Windows only, boo), grabbing photos from Flickr, you get unpredictable Japanese exposure. JBS can be set up to load just specific images from a specific user/set/group/etc. and display them on a set interval.

There's also an option in JBS that lets you go directly to the image on Flickr, so if there are notes or comments explaining the words or grammar, it's pretty easy to check.

Meh, I thought it was neat.

Pretty nice set of images, cool for those who don't live in japan such as myself.

It looks like this might be a good replacement for mac users: http://desklickr.isnot.tv/

thanks for the idea btw~!

atylmo Wrote:And, in conjunction with something like John's Background Switcher (Windows only, boo), grabbing photos from Flickr, you get unpredictable Japanese exposure. JBS can be set up to load just specific images from a specific user/set/group/etc. and display them on a set interval..

Just an FYI, but for those running Windows 7 it has a native ability to cycle through backgrounds in set intervals of time.

Edit: Oh wait I didn't realize JBS could grab them from the internet, but it's useful info for some regardless.

ryuudou Wrote:Just an FYI, but for those running Windows 7 it has a native ability to cycle through backgrounds in set intervals of time.

Edit: Oh wait I didn't realize JBS could grab them from the internet, but it's useful info for some regardless.

Oh yeah, that's true. I totally forgot about that. Thanks

Actually I didn't mention yesterday that if you want to use something offline (or just different), you can use JBS or Windows 7 and cycle through something like the It's a （Japanese) Sign blog. There are downloads available with the pictures in them.

Thanks, this looks cool, I'm trying it out.

awesome, using it now. lots of good stuff to mine, potentially.

Great idea!

Has anyone gotten it to work on a Mac with Desklickr? It seems you can only use Desklickr to cycle through your photos, your favorites or your groups, however the this is a "set" so I can't see how to get it to work. I did find an alternative if you have iPhoto installed though.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?s...1065033938

There aren't as many options as desklickr has so if anyone manages to get that working please let me know how you did it.

EDIT: Another downside to the iPhoto method is it only shows the thumbnails, unless there is some feed I am not seeing that has the images full size.

EDIT2: Ok, I found a bit of a better alternative. I can't see how to get this "set" working properly with desklickr or iphoto. However, I did find other groups that have photos of Japanese stuff. Through Desklickr you can choose only one group though, which sucks a bit, but oh well.

Japanese Typography
Japanese Signs / 日本語の標識

I am currently using Japanese signs.

EDIT3: Displaying images that are tagged with 漢字 via Desklickr is another viable alternative. I'm going to stick with signs for the time being though.