I know we’ve slacked a bit on the Linux tips lately, but here’s a pretty cool one I found on Boing Boing this morning; it’s called FlickrFS and like the name implies, it is a filesystem which lets you mount your Flickr account to your Linux desktop so you can upload and download your photographs with ease. When you mount the filesystem, you will see two new folders inside it, tags and sets, which automatically retrieves your photos from your Flickr account. FlickrFS is currently only available for Linux, but considering how GMailFS was quickly ported to Windows and Macs, I could see this coming to other operating systems soon.

While I may have had some problems with WordPress running properly on TipMonkies before, I still love the software because it’s so clean and (mostly) efficient, not to mention free. While reading up on some news this morning, I noticed that WordPress.com, the free blog hosting service from the same folks who created the blogging software, now offers integrated Flickr support. Getting it to work is pretty easy and requires that you enter your Flickr username in the Profile tab of your administration panel. You can find full instructions and information on how it all works right here. This functionality will be available on WordPress 1.6 when it’s available, but you can get it now by signing up for a free WordPress.com account (invite required). If you don’t have an invite, download Flock and you will have the option of signing up for one through them. Pretty cool, and I can’t wait until we can all use this!

When I was younger, my parents loved making calendars out of family photographs. I hated the idea, especially when they gave them out to the rest of the family, but I’m sure many of you like to do this as well. If you have a giant collection of photographs on your Flickr account, you probably want to put some of these to good use, so why not create your own personalized calendar out of them? You can, with a free service called, adequately enough, Calendar. Using it is super easy: simply enter the web address of an image (it doesn’t have to be on Flickr, by the way) and select where you want the image to be placed, click Create Calendar and in a couple seconds, you’ll have your own little personalized calendar. If you want, there’s even an option to upload your calendar back to your Flickr account, or just print it out and start scribbling away.

Do you have a website you’d like to create a banner for but have little or no knowledge of an imaging application like Photoshop? Why not try BannerBreak? This free service lets you select a background, font, and text and generates a banner for you. You can then paste the HTML code given onto any website or forum you want. It’s free, it’s easy, and they host the images for you so you have not much to lose. By the way, the GIMP has a pretty decent feature which lets you create simple buttons and banners as well, though unless you know what you’re doing, it’s not as easy as BannerBreak.

While photophiles are sharing their photograph collections on sites like Flickr and Shutterbook, many camera phone users are trying other options. Most people don’t carry their digital cameras around, but chances are, they do carry their camera phone (I know I do…EVERYWHERE). There’s a pretty cool service called FotoChatter which makes sharing pictures from your phone super easy. FotoChatter runs as either a Java application or WAP site on your phone (depending on what your phone supports). You can then send photos to friends and get comments back via text messaging. The one downside is that all friends must have a FotoChatter account, but if you just want to share some pictures quickly, it’s a fun service.

Ok, so in my last post I wrote about how many Flickr groups I get invited to and don’t join, mainly because I don’t use my Flickr account too much since I don’t have a digital camera (I have a camera on my phone, that’s it), but with all the cool tools available for the service I might start using it (or it’s competitors) more. There’s a pretty cool Firefox extension available which lets you view your Flickr photostream right from the Firefox sidebar called FlickrFox. You must have Firefox 1.0 or later to use it, but it looks pretty cool. You can search streams by tags, check for new photos in the background, and more, though I don’t think it will let you upload your images from the extension. Get it here.

Considering how many invitations I get from people to join their Flickr groups, I know many of you guys are devout Flickr fans (and one day, I’ll actually get around to joining all those groups, I promise). Flickr is great for hosting images, but why not have a little fun with it, too? Here are some real time wasters which use the power of Flickr to provide you with excuses not to finish your latest project.